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Ice Hog

I recently published several ships that consume a great quantity of hydrogen to fly, and I thought, "How would I refuel these ships from a planetary installation?" For a solution I present the Ice Hog.

Fully mobile, Ice Hog is a vanilla build that uses no pistons or rotors to do its mining. Rather, the 25 drills engage an ice lake by having the operator reduce the suspension strength of the 20 wheels in the design (using the cockpit controls). Doing so allows the drills to strip mine an approximately 65-meter wide by 2-meter thick slab of ice from the lake surface. The Ice Hog is operated at a forward speed of 1 km/hr and, although that speed is very slow, the quantity of ice harvested is very large. Access to the Ice Hog is accomplished by a ladder at the vehicle's rear; no jetpack is required.

Ice is stored in 20 large cargo containers, and processed in 84 O2/H2 generators, then stored in 75 hydrogen tanks. Off-loading occurs via any of the four top connectors. Status of the ice harvesting and hydrogen gas generation process is displayed on two LCD screens that are easily read from the cockpit. (Thanks to Mmaster for his wonderful Automatic LCDs 2 script!)

Stats: 1,829 blocks, 17,513 PCUs.

This build uses an industrial cockpit from the new DLC, but could easily be adapted to use a non-DLC cockpit if desired.