asteroid mining and automatization.

[Jorgen_CAB]

There is no command to automatically move stations around, but in many cases it can take years to mine an entire Asteroid so it's not like you will have to do this that often unless you for some reason put all orbital miners in one place to strip mine it and then move on to the next one.

It mostly is better to just move a single station with about 50 modules and put one on each asteroid to be mined.

You also have to understand that this is not a commercial product and it is in constant development as a hobby project by ONE person. There are likely to be incremental improvement of automation over time. Steve tend to add stuff as he himself see something as being burdensome when he himself plays the game.

Personally I don't find this to be super burdensome from a micromanagement perspective but I might appreciate some better automation for logistics at some point overall. There certainly could be improvements.

[skoormit]

It mostly is better to just move a single station with about 50 modules and put one on each asteroid to be mined.

Very much true.
Because mining ships/stations are big and heavy, it takes a long time to move them to a new location.
And when they are moving, they aren't mining. The more often you move them, the less value they provide.
So, you want to move them as infrequently as possible.

I try to keep each mining fleet small enough so that it will not deplete the source in less than 10 years.
Each year, as part of my annual checklist, I look at each mining fleet and see if I need to move some ships.

[Jorgen_CAB]

It mostly is better to just move a single station with about 50 modules and put one on each asteroid to be mined.

Very much true.
Because mining ships/stations are big and heavy, it takes a long time to move them to a new location.
And when they are moving, they aren't mining. The more often you move them, the less value they provide.
So, you want to move them as infrequently as possible.

I try to keep each mining fleet small enough so that it will not deplete the source in less than 10 years.
Each year, as part of my annual checklist, I look at each mining fleet and see if I need to move some ships.

That is one of the reasons why I like to keep them spread out as much as possible. Sure... if you have a comet with allot of minerals on them or a small moon perhaps then stationing a small fleet of them makes total sense.

You can apply the same argument with auto-mines to regular colonies as well to some extent. If you are moving a mine it is not producing anything. If you move something a very long way, trips can sometimes take half a year or even longer depending on technology, you loose production.

This is why you need to make sure to have a steady stream of mined resources coming in because if you lack a specific resource you might be forced to move mines from one location to the next and that means lost production and spent fuel for simply put bad planning... 

[sneer]

what is needed is mass driver module for asteroid miners
will be far easier to operate

[TheTalkingMeowth]

You can just put a mass driver installation on the colony; in fact, you should definitely do this.

[Elvin]

You can just put a mass driver installation on the colony; in fact, you should definitely do this.

Yes, but that means having to have cargo holds get to that planet, one way or the other, which carry a mass driver. I believe sneer's suggestion is that the mass driver could be a ship-board module, so that simply having the mining station in orbit would count as having a mass driver present.

[sneer]

indeed I thought about ship based mass driver module ( adding 25kt mass driver module instead standard cargohold to carry one would smooth this a lot )
to be honest in "Heavy Times " in '91 by C. J. Cherryh asteroid mining was done this way
I strongly recommend this book series for everybody interested in Sci Fi based in early exploration universe
 

[Jorgen_CAB]

There might be some cases where using a mass-driver is useful but sometimes running freighters there once in a while probably is more efficient.

In many areas you will have freighters running other missions and often freighters run empty half of their travels. A small detour to pick up some minerals while empty can be a valued task for otherwise empty freighters.

If you need to carry the mass driver there anyway that is at least worth around 12500t worth of minerals hauled by freighter. So if the rock have less minerals than around 12000 it is always better to send a small mineral hauler with a smaller cargo hold to pick it up once in a while.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

Mass drivers are great on remote comet mines; I don't want to be running a freighter 20 billion km round trip every couple years if I can just do a one and done with a mass driver. It's debatable from an efficiency standpoint I suspect, but worth it from a sanity perspective.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Mass drivers are great on remote comet mines; I don't want to be running a freighter 20 billion km round trip every couple years if I can just do a one and done with a mass driver. It's debatable from an efficiency standpoint I suspect, but worth it from a sanity perspective.

It they are travelling towards you then you could just wait 10 years when the comet is closer and collect the minerals then...  ...it depends on how important the minerals from that particular comet is.

To be honest I don't tend to mine comet that are too far away, I simply wait until they get closer to mine them then.

But of course you are right and I also believe I said so above, in some cases it is not really worth it. It will depend on the type of micromanagement you are doing and how good you are at setting up automated routes. I usually take the time to calculate routes with my mineral haulers so they stay as busy as possible all the time, I then adjust them once in a while.

I usually keep my mineral haulers rather small for this purpose at around 5000t cargo holds, it tend to give them old engines too as speed is rarely an issue for them. As I upgrade other freighters with higher speed who transport more time sensitive equipment I reuse the engines for the haulers that carry minerals, components and Infrastructure.

[Lurker (OP)]

I have successfully mined minerals.
now i try transport it to home world by a ship.
But I have no command as "Load All Minerals" on my colonys. (but have it on home world)
I must build something in colony for transport minerals?

Can i transport mass driver by 5 times move 5k cargo? Or i must build 25k cargo ship?

[Black]

Do you have Cargo Shuttle Bays on your cargo ships? Your homeworld has spaceport so you don't need them there. But if colony does not have spaceport or Cargo Shuttle Station. You need the shuttles on the ship itself to transfer cargo from surface.

You can transport mass driver in 5k cargo holds it will be divided into 5 parts for it.