Reluctant Lunar Jetman seeks SRV advice..

Coolts

C
..even though i swore i'd never play Lunar Jetman again here i am 33 years later on a moons surface with a damaged dune buggy looking for space gubbins. I've watched several YouTube vids on the wave-scanner and am familiar with eddb and the "bodies" search to find specific elements and had an hour tooling about last night and got about 80 units of....stuff...but.....

...driving about for hours shooting the odd rock that vomits out 3 or 4 small rocks witch give you 3 amounts of whatever.

Really?

I'l admit the SRV is pretty cool and there's a certain desolate ambience to the emptiness on these moons but.....

What can i do to make it quicker? Do you just fix on a signal and bomb off at full speed then do another? Should i be looking at 1 drop every 5 mins, etc before deciding to try elsewhere? Whats a good rate of rock hoovering? I'm sure i'll enjoy it more when there's some actual content down there other than pewpewrockpewpew. Atmospherics, animal life, etc. (*cough*cough*nomanssky*cough*cough*).

For now, i just need 300 units of base minerals for Felicity because, you know, in the future, when you can buy resonating separators and micro weave cooling hoses from any station, you couldn't possibly pick up carbon or sulphur :)
 
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Coolts

C
Nardypants said:
I disagree. Strongly. I've never been able to suck up as much material from mining as I get from surface prospecting, even from high material content asteroids.
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I spent a good while getting the hang of the buggy and scanner and AGES trekking to get meta-alloys then back the other way to Deciat. I don't want to refit my ship for space mining if i dont have to. Never done it mind.

Its just that if i'm going to spend time surface prospecting, i want to do it as efficiently as possible.
 

Conch

Conch
Nardypants said:
I disagree. Strongly. I've never been able to suck up as much material from mining as I get from surface prospecting, even from high material content asteroids.
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It could be im doing it in a conda with 11 active limpets and 4 mining lasers.

and i kinda bad with the wave scanner after the last update..
 

Limoncello Lizard

Limoncello Lizard
Conch said:
if you just need basic mats, go mining, it goes way faster.

and if you dont care for profit, i think rocky rings yield more mats than metallic ones.
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I agree, though I hate using the SRV so I'm biased.

Rocky and Metal Rich rings are both now the best for materials. They have a slightly different mix of the less common ones.

If all you want are the common materials, don't take a refinery but take plenty of limpets. Take a prospector and only mine medium and high roids, it desn't matter what the ore is. Your collectors will ignore any ore fragments, without a refinery, so it doesn't take long at all to fill up on the common mats (C, Fe, Ni, P, S).

If you want the less common materials, just be selective with the collector limpets, so you spend one limpet per fragment. You can get reasonable amounts of Cr, Ge, Hg, Mo, Mn, Nb, Se, Sn, V, W, Zn & Zr doing this. It's even possible to get As & Cd, but they take a while to find now. You will probably have to mine in all four of the ring types to get them all.

The ones you can't get at all via mining are: Po, Ru, Sb, Tc, Te & Y
 
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Alderius

Alderius
I had the same experience in my SRV on a couple of different planets. Lots of driving with a little bit of shooting/scooping. I think it took me a few hours to find the arsenic I needed for an upgrade. Make sure you look at the makeup of the planet and it's material %, you'll be a long time looking for something if it's only 1% of what you want....find a planet that has 20+%. I did find some reference to past volcanic regions being better locations for some materials, and did find that if I landed near some (non-active) mountainous regions did product better results, but that's just an opinion of mine, I might just have been lucky. I stopped surface mining after that, to me it's very boring. Although for some reason I don't mind ring mining, go figure!
 

Coolts

C
I'm just on Felicities planet, Deciat 6a (iron 19%, sulphur 18%, carbon 15%, nickel 14% phosphorus 10%). it just seems so pointless driving about chasing scanner echoes. did an hour last night followed by the irritating "levelling up" procedure with the engineer. got to level 4 with LOTS of g1 upgrades before i lost my will to live and quit.

I've not done mining before. back in the old days (original Elite), you needed mining lasers. Apart from a refinery module & limpets, what else do i need? are mining lasers still a thing?
 

Deleted member 38366

D
IMHO Location is all that matters.

- get a good list of Planets that have optimal yields for what you specifically need

Plain flat Terrain : mostly Bronzite Chondrite, occasional Outcrop or Mesosiderite, rarely Metallic Meteorite
Rougher Terrain (10-25deg inclination parts) : Outcrops, more frequent Mesosiderite and higher chance of Metallic Outcrops/Meteorites
Crater Walls or near a center Mountain of Crater (long 10-25deg or steeper inclination stretches) : highest chance of Metallic Outcrops/Meteorites, fairly frequent Mesosiderite
Mountains (frequent steep terrain) : also high chance of Metallic Meteorites but generally very difficult terrain to operate in, thus not very effective to gather Materials

When on the right Planet and at a suitable location, I've always gotten far more Target Materials when compared to Mining. Plus, alot of Materials aren't available from Mining or don't exist in useful quantity.
 
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Coolts

C
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