[Bonus Plugin] Mobile Mining / Mineral Collection Software

[Incubi]

This is a minor bug, but worth mentioning. Pilots being made in argon space are getting teladi names, and pilots being made in teladi space are getting Argon names. So far this only happens with this command and attack asteroid command. Other than that I am loving how much easier my nvidium operations are now
I am using busters for attack asteroid commands. for one simple reason. names are
Nvidium Buster, Ore Buster, and Silicon Buster

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consider letting a mineral gatheror loose in Home of Light. a couple type 0 silicon rock clusters there and lots of local places buying it.

[jlehtone]

In both cases he should get paid per unit delivered

Minor exploit? I do watch my in sector mining operation, and since those TS take a long time to fill up, I have manually cleared their hold to prevent excessive losses to the enemy actions. Does this mean that they do not get paid, as they hardly ever deliver to TL?

[Bunny]

Hmm, yeap that is an exploit. But the hassle of having to keep micromanaging the miners probably is balanced by the savings made .

[LV]

I must admit here that i've not had goog results here, in one test with a mining caimen (poss DDRS) it naffed off way off position to where no roids where when using break up

then collect rocks seemed to not collect anything, this must be on my part but i don't know why

[jlehtone]

"no roids" as in "no small rock fragments that do not show on the map anyway"? If the "Break asteroids" does not see anything to break in (sat) scanner range, it does "wander off" to look for some more.

"collect rocks" or "collect minerals"? Former is a stock command (ie not smart), the latter from Bunny.

[kotekzot]

it would be great if ships without a homebase could use trader mode. otherwise, great script, thanks a lot.

[jlehtone]

it would be great if ships without a homebase could use trader mode. otherwise, great script, thanks a lot.

Ships without homebase are in Trader mode, AFAIK.

[kotekzot]

it would be great if ships without a homebase could use trader mode. otherwise, great script, thanks a lot.

:? Ships without homebase are in Trader mode, AFAIK.

oh lol. thanks, for some reason i thought you needed to assign a homebase for that command to work.

[jlehtone]

If the homebase is set, then they are either in supply mode or in trade mode, depending ...
1. Home has stock for mineral, then supply
2. Home is a TL, then supply
3. else trade

[jlehtone]

Some collection rate observations.

First, a strictly in sector operation, no SETA at all. Some notes about it are in my previous comments and more extensive tale here. 53,776 units of Nividium in 36.5 hours. At no point there were more than 15 collecting ships, so the overall collection rate was at least 98 units per ship per hour. The asteroids in are do not have particularly high yields.

Twice during that time one (unarmed) Falcon Hauler BMS collector had full hold and was far away from others, and did sent "Hold nearly full, waiting" message, even though the mothership TL had plenty of room.


The rest of observations are from OOS collection and SETA has been used for travel, ie in short bursts.

BAR-Buster: Buster (L), ie 4 PAC, full tunings, on Attack Rocks.
BMS-Cai-M: Caiman Miner (L), ie 4 BIRE, full tunings, MDS added to turret, Collect Minerals.

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Kingdom End

* Start BAR-Buster-Nividium, BAR-Buster-Ore, and BAR-Buster-Silicon on the sector.
* A bit later start three similarly dedicated BMS-Cai-M, homed to TL.
* Count collected units every hour.
* BMS-Cai-M-Nividium collected total of 1012 units, 74.7 units per hour.
* BMS-Cai-M-Ore collected 77 units per hour.
* BMS-Cai-M-Silicon collected 95 units per hour.

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Queen's Space

* Start two BAR-Buster-Nividium on the sector.
* A bit later start two BMS-Cai-M-Nividium, homed to TL.
* Total collected units: 1113 units in 7:16, ie 75.7 units per hour per ship.

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Seizewell

* Start one BAR-Buster-Nividium on the sector.
* A bit later start one BMS-Cai-M-Nividium, homed to TL.
* Total collected units: 499 units in 5:18, ie 94 units per hour per ship.
Note: The sector already had a BMS-Cai-M on trade mode (ought not to touch Nividium), and the BAR-Buster moved first to the position of Beacon-Ore.

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Scale Plate Green

* Personally observed yield 25 cluster.
* Distributed 9 AdvSat on and around the site (all within 10 km from center).
* Start two BAR-Centaur (equipped with 4 MDS, one in each turret including front, and yes I know they are not all used).
* A bit later start one BMS-Cai-M-Nividium, homed to TL.
* After 11 hours, Cai-M had 986 units, ie 89.5 units per hour.
* Removed Cai-M

* Started 6 unarmed Falcon Haulers on BMS.
* After 6 hours, the 6 Haulers had collected 3,573 units, ie 100 units per hour per ship.

* Added three more BMS-F.Haulers, and three BAR-Falcons and two BAR-Busters.
* The 9 Falcon Haulers collected 10,712 units in 12:16. That makes average of 98.7 units per ship per hour. But for the first 9 hours the rate was 100 units per ship per hour, and declined in the end.

That makes total of 15,271 units from one Nividium cluster, and 9 ships can collect simultaneously without slowing each other.


But I'm still more impressed about the collection rate in sector, as one would expect all that collision avoidance to show somewhere.


Standard scale S Forge consumes 150 units of Ore per hour. It seems that two BMS ships can keep it supplied.
Standard scale M Silicon consumer station needs 2*900/24 = 75 units per hour. One BMS ship may be just enough.

[jlehtone]

Baffling addendum.

Unleashed the above-mentioned 9 Falcon Haulers in

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Elena's Fortune: 3 * type 4 Nividium?

and got 1,774 units. Best 'units/type 4 cluster' so far in my game.
But it took 5.5 hours, ie 35 units per ship per hour. Worst OOS rate so far.

Tired of keeping track, and with desire to clean that sector, I started launching large Dolphin SF's. First pair of Ore and Silicon, then another pair, then ... all in supply mode. By the time Dolphin No 11 started (no mineral preference, but supplies a selfsufficient complex) the first pair was in odd condition:

The first Ore collecting Dolphin SF was about to unload to TL. Over 1,700 collected Ore. Its flight time says less than 5 hours, which is probably true. Now that would mean about 400 units of Ore per ship per hour. Amazing, or should I say very fishy? And its buddy seems to have found about 150 units of Silicon per hour.

This could be:
* yet another trick by the Almighty Random Number Generator
* a real motherload out there
* Dolphins do it ...
* sneaky Miners work regularly only under constant supervision

[JMCorp]

i have a ship collecting nividium homebased to my HQ. i give him the order to mine nividium and he just wanders around doing nothing. moving between sats and i do see the collect minerals order pop up from time to time, but it flashes off immediately and he moves to position at another sat again.

any other homebase works fine, it's only the HQ. if i take the nividium out of the name he starts collecting ore and silicon without issues for the HQ. any ideas?

[g.koster]

for some reason I can't get the remote mining option to work. I have a bought mining caiman in cloud base south west, which has a normal satelite. there are plenty of smal rock to mine but it won't start it first did fly around dropping now and then a satelite and then it went to one point and just kept dropping satelite and picking it back up again and again.
when blowing up manually some rocks to takeble bids I could get the collect rock commant to work. (blowing up rock with a buster so no real asteroids)

also the same thing is true for a mercury in rolks drift can get collect rock to work but does want to get the remote mining to get to work. even it there are smal broken up rocks.

I have send out a M5 to break up rocks but that one only wanteted to get to work after I installed fighter command mk2 witch should ditroy and not break up rocks.

so my conclusion is that it does want to break up rocks. can some one tell me what I'm doing wrong.

[g.koster]

got the caiman to work by putting in a mining laser and fither command mk1. the mercury has fither command mk1 and an other laser but doesn't work.

[perkint]

Hi,

Just a (hopefully) simply question for clarification. The instructions say an advanced sat will be used if it is deployed, but do not state whether you can use either nav or adv sats to stock the ships for themselves to deploy.

And also, do they drop their sat & then recollect? Or is there benfit to loading them up with multiple sats?

Cheers.

Tim

[Whuppee]

(edit: nevermind)

[Afterburnerz]

If a delivery to the home base fails to empty the cargo bay to less than 90% full the ship will wait in the home sector for 10-20 mins before attempting to deliver to the home base again.

This often happens in my current game, so I was hoping that there would be an easy way to turn off the incessant barrage of messages. A toggle switch would be much appreciated.

There are 3 TLs in different sectors which fill quickly, so over 90% of all my messages are from my full ships.

Congratulations on another great script!

[Bunny]

Hi,

Just a (hopefully) simply question for clarification. The instructions say an advanced sat will be used if it is deployed, but do not state whether you can use either nav or adv sats to stock the ships for themselves to deploy.

And also, do they drop their sat & then recollect? Or is there benfit to loading them up with multiple sats?

Cheers.

Tim

The script does the following:

1. Look if the system contains standard/advanced satellites.

2. If it does then select one and see if there are any within range of its scanner. If not then check using another satellite until all satellites in the system have been used. If suitable rocks still have not been found then perform random sweeps and use the ship scanner to locate rocks.

3. If a satellite has rocks in range then fly to the indicated position (with a random position offset is used applied - 33% of ship scanner range iirc)

4. The ship will drop a navigation beacon to mark the spot and will mine in that area until all suitable rocks within range of the nav beacon have been exhausted. The ship may need to make several trips to exhaust the area. When no more rocks are available then the ship will pack up the nav beacon and consult the satellites to locate more rocks.

The following should points should be kept in mind
1. The more satellites in the system the better. This will keep ships spread out and prevent them from bunching up and chasing the same rocks. However, this is dependent on how rocks are broken down.

2. The mineral name on the navigation beacon indicates the mineral the ship is collecting.

3. Navigation beacons do not need to be purchased.

4. A ship will deploy an advanced/standard satellite it is carrying if it find rocks in region of space, not covered by an existing satellite, after a random search. This satellite will be permanently deployed...................
So you could throw a ship into a new system and it would eventually drop satellites it carries to cover all the rocks in the system - however this would take a bit of time and you would in the meantime get a fair bit of spam mail telling you the ship is running random searches.

P.S. I think name overriding was included on the official script - putting a mineral name in the ship/satellite/station name would restrict the minerals the ship collected to a specific type.

Anyway that was my 50 cents on how it runs

[GCU Grey Area]

Been experimenting with this script recently & while for the most part it's been working fine, 1 thing has been puzzling me.
Every time I give the 'Collect minerals...' order it resets all turret commands to 'None'.
Not a huge problem - doesn't take long to redo the turret commands, just wondering if this is supposed to happen, is unavoidable or if there's a way to stop it happening.
Otherwise think this is a fantastic script & much more interesting to watch than mines.
By the way, using Ospreys to do the mining.

[jlehtone]

A known issue of Attack Rocks, the sister-script of this:

- Turret commands can stop the ship firing. Keep them off while running this script.

The (Mobile Collector) ship may use any one turret for breaking rocks. Thus, it cannot let any other script tamper with turret, and stops other turret tasks at start. The possible side-effects of restarting the other turret tasks manually are unknown.