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Blue Crab Miner

The vanilla (modless) Blue Crab Miner is a pressurized, small-grid mining vehicle with articulated drilling arms that enable precise control over the tunneling and/or drilling operation. By adjusting the drill-arm angle, the operator can control the rate of descent and, once in an ore pocket, adjust the drill-arms so that it's mining level. An LCD screen displays drill-arm angle above and below horizontal. The relatively short, but wide wheelbase allows for a relatively tight-radius turn for mining in cramped tunnels.

Stone is sorted and dumped from two large connectors on the rear of the drill-arms. These large connectors dump stone at a much higher rate than small-grid ejectors, so stone never gets passed into either of the two large cargo containers. Due to the fragility of small-grid drills, fore and aft atmospheric thrusters are necessary to provide precise thrust control thereby minimizing the potential for damaging or destroying the drills.

When tunneling (select drills and right-click the mouse), setting the drill-arm angle to 10° will result in a shallow descending tunnel. Adjust the drill-arms up or down for fine-tuning the machine's levelness during mining operations. Setting the drill-arm angle to a high value will allow the player to scrape-mine a ceiling.

NOTE: If you fill the cargo containers to capacity and start filling the drills, it's possible to over load them to the point where the drill rotors will no longer function, i.e., tilt the drills up or down; they will just drop to the ground and you'll be stuck. You must either unload the drills or increase the torque capacity of the rotors (or both).