The Ore Detector exists for large and small grid and requires 1x1x2 blocks of space. It will attach to other blocks on all faces of its cube-shaped base. The cylindrical half of the detector does not attach to blocks.
space engineers long range ore detector
As per title, currently the Hand Drill has the same Ore detecting range as a small grid Ore Detector, which is a bit silly really when you think about it. Small and Large grid Ore Detectors need a buff- say 50% more range to make them more useful in space when surveying large asteroids, or when looking for deep ore veins on planets when driving around in a rover or skimming the surface in an aircraft.
I'd say allow them to stack if built on the same grid and/or next to each other, as an ore detector array. Each additional ore detector in the array adds 50% of the last ore detector's contribution (eg 1st = 100%, 2nd +50%, 3rd +25% etc). Add a max array size, for example 9 for 199.609375% range (rounded up to 200%).
It would be nice if the small ship detectors range was increased to the same as the current large ship version, and the large ship version was increased by a factor of 10 (e.g. 3km). It's a large ship/station detector you should be able to scan an asteroid for resources from at least 1km away.
A difficulty slider for Ore rarity will allow people to decide how hard they have to look, and greater Ore detector range will make it less of a pain to find deep deposits, both on planets and in large asteroids. Like I've said, nothing OP, no need to make it stupid-easy, just give people some options and make the game a little less of a grind if they want to.
The main point is that it is silly that the hand drill and the small grid ore detector have the same range. I think the ore detector could use a buff, but if you feel the game is too easy, nerf the hand drill. It's ridiculous to put all the resources into building an ore detector and a ship capable of hauling it around, when the efficiency is actually much worse, because no craft is as nimble or fast as flying around with your drill.
Small and large grid ore detectors could have the same range. Small and large grid antennas have very different sizes and resource requirements, but they both have the same range and the same power usage.
I think everybody can agree that finding and mining ore on planets is a joke. what would be nice is some sort of heavy block ore detector for space use. kind of like the ion thrusters make it heavy as hell so it's not practical on planets. I have a mining drill set up capable of getting 3-4 million iron a day on planets. it's just finding/getting the space ores that are a problem..by that I mean uranium and the ore for ion thrusters. I like the idea that mabee it would be a multi block set up were you have to figure the alignment out. or multiple ships to triangulate signals to boost the range?. I'm curiouse what you guys think.
Let me put it that way... I've scanned enough deposits of ore to know which types I should expect to be found together. I've had a number of instances where I found one or two types, but simply could not locate the other type I was expecting. I know it's there, but it's deep enough underground that the detector simply can't find it. This has been a repeat occurrence which can easily be fixed by slightly increasing the range on detector as suggested by the original poster.
At the end of the day, every voxel needs to be scanned somehow. Maybe it would be better to take an approach where some specific number of voxels are scanned every ore scanner update; this would not only make the algorithm be closer to constant time than cubic time, but also give a reason to use a less-than-max range setting on the scanner itself. As an example, the vanilla large ore detector has a range of 150m; this is a volume of about 14,137,000 cubic meters. If only 1,000,000 cubic meters are scanned a second (for instance), it would take just over 14 seconds to scan the whole area. But, if one configures a range of 100m, the volume of about 4,189,000 cubic meters can instead be scanned in just over 4 seconds.
Ore detectors constantly scan for ore voxels within their radius and already burn PCU. Their current range is 300 m IIRC. If you want, for example, a 3000 m radius, are you prepared to have it take up 1000x more computational resources?
Directional Ore detectors are definitely the way to go- more range without being a resource hog- all you gotta do is point the detector at where you want to scan. A small increase in the normal range wouldn't hurt too much, especially when it comes to hand drill vs small grid detector.
While it's true that the hand drill will frequently detect ores farther away than the small grid ore detector, drill upgrades in vanilla don't increase their detection range. If you aren't sure, find an ore patch with your hand drill and move just out of range. Switch back and forth between the basic and elite drill while moving in and out of range and you will see that they pick up and drop detection at the same distance.
Echoing my support for this. Random ore generation can be painful sometimes, but the relatively short ranges of both large and grid detectors just make it worse. Simply doubling their respective current ranges would be a major improvement; if players want longer detection ranges (with greater performance impact) then there are a variety of mods to do that. But at present, I shouldn't have to almost drag my ship across the surface of an asteroid to find something buried deep within. 2ff7e9595c
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