New Mining idea - RaptorCalculus/mars-endeavour GitHub Wiki

I figure that the tubes probably aren't really big enough to put decent sized buildings into. so we'd have to mine them out to put anything sizeable into them. I was thinking about doing something voxely, but that won't look very good. So I was thinking that if we have the mining rover near a wall and get it to start mining, we could replace that section of the wall with a different mesh that would be like the section mined out a short distance, and then backfill it with rock meshes, and remove them as we mine into it, so it'll have the illusion of organically mining away from the wall.

The tricky part of this would be in the 3d modeling. We would need a set of tesselating cave components that can represent any configuration of caves. An example would be the cave parts used in the Construction set of teh Elder Scrolls games. The second part would be replacing a cave piece with a mineable one once a mining rover begins to mine out a wall. I imagine the rover would enter a section of the cave, and start mining one of the walls. At this point, the model for the section it is in would be replaced with one that opens in the direction of the wall to be mined, and a new cave section (with end cap) would be attached into the new hole. Then, the new small section of cave would be backfilled with boulders. Once the robot starts actually mining, these boulders would be removed, slowly mining out the section. if two adjecent sections are copletely mined out, they would be connected, or maybe a small pillar at the corner would be left to support the roof?

Here's a diagram to illustrate it:

Another, simpler way to handle this (which might be a good intermediate) is to handle mining like dwarf fortress. In that, instead of opening a new sector and backfilling it with mineable debris, you just take some time to mine out the whole section. so you'd kind of go directly from (1) to (5), with the rover taking some time to mine the section out. This could also tie into the minerals system - instead of mining boulders in the caves, you mine out a sector, and just get whatever ore was in it.

In any case, if we want to build new buildings, they need to be underground.