The Exploration Continues: Retrofitting The Friz, Searching for Fuel, Black Gold

Now that the ship is named and some of its systems shut down to conserve energy, it's time to deal with our first obstacle: finding and harvesting uranium for use as fuel. To this end, and thanks once again to the good people over at the Space Engineers subreddit (a link to which is at the right), I already had a plan for easy collection.

Ore collection scoop and spherical gravity generator.

Before I started this blog, the last time I had played Space Engineers was about five months ago. At the time, my best idea for successfully mining was to park a ship with a massive funnel underneath the patch of surface ore I had planned to break into. The funnel led down to a collector, which in turn fed into either an on-board refinery or a set of cargo containers. Because I preferred to mine with my hand drill rather than with a small mining ship, this meant that nearly all of the ore I chipped away would be pulled into this funnel by a gravity generator inside the ship.

The problem with this tactic was that chunks of ore would sometimes rebound along the rim of the funnel and spill out over the side, and the gravity generator would then launch them out into space. Trying to combat this involved trying to create a sort of seal between the funnel and the surface of the asteroid itself, which often led to warped or broken sections of the funnel or endless time lost checking and double-checking the ship's placement. And some areas simply weren't large enough to fit my entire ship right up against.

During my time away from the game, I would occasionally visit the Space Engineers subreddit, mostly to look at the different pictures people had posted of their ship designs. One such design struck me as ingenious, and I felt simple for not having thought of it myself. Basically, a spherical gravity generator would draw the ore directly in toward itself, where it would bunch up against a set of inward-facing collectors. Having never tried it before, I only had the say-so of the ship's designer as proof that it worked beautifully. As you can see in the image above, this was the idea that I decided to bring to bear against my fuel problems.

Technically, I'm already in a space suit, so it's all right.

Now came the actual search for uranium. I knew from past experience that uranium ore is a sort of oily black color, which contrasts noticeably against the other ores that an asteroid could be made up of. I took Ms. Frizzle over to the nearest of the map's large asteroids, hopped out and began scouring it for dark patches. After checking its composition with my hand drill both inside and out, I moved on to the smaller rocks hanging meters away from its surface. I was about to get back into my ship to continue my search elsewhere when I caught sight of a single small field of untapped uranium hiding in the shadow of one of the smaller asteroids.

I had decided to stick to using first-person mode while piloting ships whenever possible. To this effect, I had torn away some of the front armor of Ms. Frizzle, replacing it with the unfinished latticework of glass windows. With a much more open view at front, and together with the camera I had installed on top of the collector, I carefully moved into position. Turning the generator to 0.20g, I got to work.

Let me tell you, the spherical collection method worked absolutely perfectly. Given that I have only the one collector, sometimes ore gets stuck on the wrong side of the generator, but that isn't such a problem. I also have to make sure I check all the nooks and crannies around the hull to make sure I don't have a fragment of ore lodged somewhere before I move the ship, as loose items have a way with tearing through an unprotected hull.

But for now, I've got some sweet, sweet uranium to dig up.