A Solution to Unwanted Ores

[Landar]

(Cross-posted from reddit)

I see a lot of people posting suggestions for ways to dispose of unwanted ores, but they primarily fall into a couple categories:

• Add a filter to the ore collector to just ignore those ores when collecting.
• Add a mass deletion option to the inventory.
• Add an ejection device for throwing unwanted items overboard.

While all these suggestions do have their own share of advantages and drawbacks, I'd like to pose an alternative solution.

Introducing: the Incinerator, a device meant for the automated mass deletion of items in an intuitive and diegetic manner.
The Incinerator would feature an internal inventory that deletes items placed inside over a short period of time. The device would also cost power to maintain, as well as generate extra heat similar to how generators currently do. Players would be able to either blacklist or whitelist which ores/items can enter the incinerator via a device field. There will also be a device field for whether or not the incinerator should automatically draw applicable items from the ship inventory to the internal inventory. And finally, of course, the device would need to be connected to the inventory network via piping to draw items into itself.

Pros:

• Makes sense in-universe, no magic deletion of items, no magic ore collector ignoring only certain ores.
• No clutter associated with ejection chute solutions.
• Brings more nuance to the design of mining ships beyond simply stacking as many crates as possible.
• Has clear benefits over current systems (automated mass deletion of items), as well as clear drawbacks (power consumption and heat generation)

Cons:

• Might require mechanics like Inventory 2.0 to be implemented for more control over the ship inventory systems.
• People might dislike having to overhaul previous mining ship designs to account for a new device.
• Power and heat requirements might seem too harsh for what could be a simple mass deletion option.

Anyway, as always, I'd appreciate your feedback and criticisms as to what could be changed about this idea to make it a reality.

Cheers,
- Lan

 

[anton_stezhkin]

"no magic ore collector ignoring only certain ores " - There is no magic. There ARE such devices in real life. They are called "filters" or "seaparators". If there is a scanner, it means that a device can define one ore from another. If it can tell what is trying to come through, it can direct the material to the inventory or to some kind of exhaust tube. See, no magic here! Just some extra power for the scanner and the separator. I think a set of blocks (filter + separator + exaust port) between the crates and the collector will do fine and look in-univerce.

- There is no sence in wasting energy on buring unwanted ore if you don't want to take in it the fist place! When you buy a box of sweets you want to take in sweets but you don't want to take in the box. What natural evolution came to is you separate the sweet from the box and eat them. What YOU suggest is to eat the sweets AND the box, and then waste extra power and produce extra heat to remove the unwanted paperboard and plastic from your ... inventory.

P.S. I used to be a biologist. So my example may seem rood to non-biologists. I mean nothing bad. Just trying to explain the unefficiency of such a solution on a vivid example.

 

[anton_stezhkin]

filter + separator + exaust port
- filter does exactly the same thing as the point scanner. But can scan only one material at a time. So, 2 YOLOL fields for the device "Active" 0-1 and Material - the current material
- seaprator Directs the chunk to one tube or the other So, 1 YOLOL field "tube" 0-1. The script reads the "Material" field from the filter and sets the "Tube" field to 0 or 1 depending on presence of the material in the whitelist or blacklist memory-chip. 0.2 seconds for each chunk? Too long. ... That's up to players how to solve the problem. Ither make some buffer crates or many parallel filters.

 

[Womble]

Space refinery Gud.

Just to emphasise: you don't, IRL, even need a sensor to separate out the components of a collection of minerals, mostly a selection from a few physical processes based around density will get your ackcheral ore separated from the bearing strata. And the game doesn't even bother dealing with the extraction of the relevant elemental metal from its ore, that's entirely abstracted in the creation of items "out of stacks of raw ore". Just hoover up all the little rocks, run 'em through a centrifuge and you'll have separation.

 

[anton_stezhkin]

I hope the ore refining will come sooner or lateer and we'll see hudge ore-refining factories. At least the devs mentioned the word "alloys".

 

[Landar]

"no magic ore collector ignoring only certain ores " - There is no magic. There ARE such devices in real life. They are called "filters" or "seaparators". If there is a scanner, it means that a device can define one ore from another. If it can tell what is trying to come through, it can direct the material to the inventory or to some kind of exhaust tube. See, no magic here! Just some extra power for the scanner and the separator. I think a set of blocks (filter + separator + exaust port) between the crates and the collector will do fine and look in-univerce.

- There is no sence in wasting energy on buring unwanted ore if you don't want to take in it the fist place! When you buy a box of sweets you want to take in sweets but you don't want to take in the box. What natural evolution came to is you separate the sweet from the box and eat them. What YOU suggest is to eat the sweets AND the box, and then waste extra power and produce extra heat to remove the unwanted paperboard and plastic from your ... inventory.

P.S. I used to be a biologist. So my example may seem rood to non-biologists. I mean nothing bad. Just trying to explain the unefficiency of such a solution on a vivid example.

I should probably mention that my point about the ore collector was more about people suggesting that the ore collector just straight-up not attract whatever materials have been specified in a device field or some such, which wouldn't make much sense since the ore collector seems to operate on some sort of attractor field or magnetism-based mechanism. Considering that apparently, every material is magnetic in the starbase universe to at least some degree since our magboots can stick to everything, the attractor-based theory holds more water in that regard. Thus, while it might be possible code-wise to have the collector ignore certain ores, it doesn't make any sense when you consider it in-universe. What you're talking about it filtering *after* the ore has already been collected, which is where the problem lies.

Since it's pretty much near-impossible to not get at least a little bit of unwanted ore when performing large-scale mining with lasers and collectors, your other point about not taking it in the first place does have a bit of a flaw. If you don't want any waste material, the only real way to do that is to mine manually with a pickaxe, which would take forever on larger asteroids. Therefore, your options for getting rid of waste material are either ejection or deletion, both of which I've made my case about already.