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Blue Crab Hydro Miner

Spiff's Practical Engineered Solutions, a division of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, presents the Blue Crab Hydro Miner. The Blue Crab Hydro 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 mining or tunneling ascent or 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.

The Blue Crab Miner is vanilla (modless) and uses NO DLC.

With only 375 blocks and 4,327 PCUs, this build is my favorite planetary-based miner for survival mode where atmospheric thrusters are disabled. Although this design includes three small reactors, they are optional and have no effect on the miner's performance. Using hydrogen thrusters instead of atmospheric thrusters significantly increases battery life, so the small reactors are essentially superfluous.

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. Fore and aft hydrogen thrusters are used to provide precise thrust control for downward descents into a mining region and especially for upward ascents back out of the mine when loaded with ore.

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 overload 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).

Because this blueprint uses rotor subgrids, this version is for pasting into a game using creative mode. For the version that can be built using a projector in survival mode, go to https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2034466066