[Bonus Plugin] Mobile Mining / Mineral Collection Software

[jlehtone]

Baffling addendum.

Unleashed the above-mentioned 9 Falcon Haulers in

Spoiler

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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.

[GCU Grey Area]

Thanks for the info - when I watch them in-sector my Ospreys are using their main guns to break rocks, so for now think I'll leave them with active turrets & see what happens, but if any wierd side-effects start happening I'll know to switch them off. Cheers

[Buck_Rogers]

Hi Bunny.

1st congrats on getting the mining script signed! Its taken me until now to realise I was running bonus pack 3.1.06 instead of .07 or whatever

Anywayz. I have a problem which I think relates to this script and was hoping for some help

OK. I have since tried to install the most recent bonus pack with your scripts in. however I completely forgot I had BMS 3.21 installed in the Plugin Manager also. So now when I go to the combat section of my Caimans console I have: Readtext2010-361as the very bottom command. Which when selected, runs the break rocks command. Also in the Special section of the command console at the bottom of the list is: Readtext2010-561. Which when selected, runs the collect minerals command.

Both of these commands ARE correctly displayed in the command console a little further up in the combat and special section, but now obviously it looks like I have them twice now.

I have tried removing the script from the PM and running the game, to get the uninstall script to run, but without success Both Readtext errors are still present.

Can you help?

[Bunny]

Look in the script folder and see if setup.BAR and setup.BMS (or something with a similar name) are there.

If they are then move them out of the folder and see if the readtext entires are removed.

[Buck_Rogers]

OK i have the following in my scrips folder:

!setup.plugin.bar
!setup.plugin.bms
setup.plugin.bar.pck
setup.plugin.bar
setup.plugin.bms.pck

Thats all I can see that resemble what you said Bunny. What should I move? Also I have a miner running in game. Should I stop him mining before I do this?

[Buck_Rogers]

I tried removing the 3 scripts without the explanation marks at the start of their names. It did not get rid of the read-text errors

Anything else I should try?

[eladan]

The bonus pack scripts will have pck extension. I'd assume the ones you list which don't show their extension are xml. Get rid of the non pck versions (reinstall the bonus pack if you've already removed the pck ones.)

[Buck_Rogers]

YES!!

Another read-text error bites the dust!

I removed everything from the scripts folder with either "bms" or bar" in the name. I then re-installed the bonus pack and hey-presto! No more read-text errors. YAY!

thank you Bunny and Eladan!

[jlehtone]

Just for record:

* Elena's Fortune
* 110+ large Dolphin SF on BMS collect
* ~70 BAR Buster
* couple dozen Mammoths
* CLS, 4 CAG
* some complexes as storage
* major blunders in logistics, massive traffic jam in Silicon Mine (PE), etc

Still, about one game week and now Elena.Count(debrii clusters)==0

[Starhaus]

I am using X3 ver. 2.5 with the latest bonus pack installed. When I purchased a Demeter Miner, it showed a mineral scanner and ore collector as part of the purchase package. Also when these preinstalled mining extensions are examined with the trade details panel at an Equipment Dock, both the ore collector and mineral scanner are shown as installed (and therefore not purchasable again). I also have most other software extensions installed for trade, navigation and special commands.

With a mineral scanner installed in any ship (I know this from using it in other ships), opening the special commands panel gives the option to "scan asteroids". However, in the newly purchased Demeter Miner, the option to "scan asteroids" is absent. Moreover, because the mineral scanner is not functionally present, the option to "collect minerals" also is absent. I can only "collect rocks" with the ore collector. (note: the listed in-game prereq for mineral collecting also cites a "mineral collector", however a review of the X3 literature only refers to the already-installed ore collector).

I can not find a workaround because Equipment Docks selling the mineral scanner claim the scanner is already installed (and can not be repurchased or sold). This is a critical issue.

Also, with the mobile drilling gun installed I noticed, although it works, it has an incredibly slow refire rate, approx. one shot every 5-10 seconds or so. Is that normal?

[jlehtone]

Miner variants do have the Mineral Scanner builtin, but the Mobile Mining (BMS) script should cope with that. I definitely do have Caiman, Demeter, and Vulture Miners in operational BMS-duty.

Special Commands Software installed? And you not in the ship? (Command is not available in personal ship.) Just checking the obvious.

Besides, this is a specific question about specific script, and therefore the most useful place to ask it would have been the BMS thread in S&M. (But please do not repost there, rather see if a kind moderator [ie not me] can move this.)


And yes, the rate of fire of the Mobile Drill is low. But that does not matter if you are not in the sector, and with BMS there is no need to be in the sector.