I have an issue with an asteroid in KSP, I am properly klawed on it, the drill is well connected to its surface and when I turn it on it does the mining animation continuously, however there is no ore output whatsoever. I tried reloading reklawing with no change. Exactly this vessel on a previous asteroid has worked just fine, but I removed my engineer from it for this mission. Would ferrying one to the asteroid help?
Best Answer
You definitely can mine asteroids without an engineer, it's just slower.
Looking really closely at your screenshot, however, it looks like your Large Holding Tank is disabled. (There's a red "no" sign on the right-hand side of the right click popup window, where there normally should be a green triangle.)
The drill won't extract any ore if it has no place to put it. AFAIK, that's still true even if you have ISRU running at the same time; you still need an available holding tank for temporary ore storage.
To fix this, simply click on the "no" sign in the popup window (after right-clicking on the ore tank to open it, if you don't have it open already), which should turn it into a green triangle and enable the tank.