Asteroid mining without engineer

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?

Solution 1:

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.