Automines on Asteroids and Comets?

[CaiusIuliusCaesar (OP)]

Dear community,

I am new to Aurora 4x and it really got my attention due to EnterElysium's current videos, to be perfectly honest.  I've got a question regarding asteroids which are marked as colonies.  Can automines be used on them or do I need to build ships with special mining modules? For some reason, my freighters brought the mass driver without issue, but they refused to carry over the automines. . .

Thanks a lot in advance!

[TheTalkingMeowth]

Dear community,

I am new to Aurora 4x and it really got my attention due to EnterElysium's current videos, to be perfectly honest.  I've got a question regarding asteroids which are marked as colonies.  Can automines be used on them or do I need to build ships with special mining modules? For some reason, my freighters brought the mass driver without issue, but they refused to carry over the automines. . .

Thanks a lot in advance!

Yes, you can use automines on anything. The special mining modules ONLY work on small bodies (asteroids, comets, some moons), and are cheaper than automines, but if you have automines you should be able to drop them on the body.

[liveware]

Note that the morning modules can be much more effective than automines as the modules can be built into ships/space stations which can in turn be built at commercial shipyards which can churn out shops vastly faster than construction factories.

[Droll]

morning modules

How effective would you say the evening modules are?

Edit: I saw you delete that post 

[liveware]

morning modules

I messed something up with the quote.

What I said was:

Probably not quite as effective as MINIING modules but almost as effective after sundown.

How effective would you say the evening modules are?

Edit: I saw you delete that post 

Huh it happened again

[serger]

For some reason, my freighters brought the mass driver without issue, but they refused to carry over the automines. . .

Try to use freighters with large cargo holds.

[kilo]

That is most likely the problem. A standard cargo hold can carry 25k tons. This means they can carry ONE mine or mass driver per freighter per ship. A large cargo hold can carry five times that number and you will need to transport quite some tonnage to be honest. The smallest mining outpost that I dump is 39 automated mines + 1 mass driver (1 million tons in total).
When it comes to automated mines vs asteroid mining base I make it dependent on the resources available. My mining bases carry 200 mining modules on a 500k tons station. I will not tug it to a body that will be mined within a year.


PS: I looked at EE's freighters. I would say, they are pretty expensive per ton of freight delivered, both in build points and fuel consumed. 

[Zap0]

Both a mine and an automine take just one cargo holds worth of space, that doesn't make a difference.

[CaiusIuliusCaesar (OP)]

Thanks a lot, guys! I'll give it another try and see if I somehow messed up the comnands or something. 

[Jorgen_CAB]

For orbital mining stations I usually have two sizes... one with 25 modules and one with 200 modules. The smaller ones are deployed to asteroids and other bodies with a smaller amount of resources. The large ones are deployed to bodies that have large quantities of resources.

I like for my mineral extraction to be as consistent as possible rather than strip mining everything in sight as that tend to provide to bad mineral deficiencies as it is harder to balance your overall economy.

I also tend to send Automines to all mineral rich bodies that I find to some extension and then I adjust the amount on them based on my need to balance my economy.

I tend to do the same with populated colonies... I spread them out in as many places as possible and then I ship in local factories so they become self sufficient, at least I want one good production colony in each system. Moving resources are far simpler than moving facilities. I want my freighters to be moving Auto Mines rather than installations I can build locally. 100 ground factories seem like a good tipping point for most colonies to become self sufficient in terms of factory output.

But.. Auto-mines are generally for bodies that you can't use orbital miners to mine, such as Venusian worlds or other high colony cost worlds. Once a world is terraformed to a low cost colony you can have population come in and mine the world with regular mines and the Auto-mines can be moved elsewhere.