Hi Rechnerhand, these were average speculative numbers, my understanding (if someone here is familiar with mining operations he could enlighten us) is that miners extract ore, stack it up, and then transport it in bulks at regular intervals, sometimes one week-on and one week-off, other times 1 month-on and 1 month-off, some miners do it even seasonaly (6 months-on, 6 months-off, especially in canada where winter seasons are icy and too cold to do any extraction-transportation of the ore) IMO only big mining operations extract and transport ore on a daily 7/7 24hours basis.
So probably in a realistic scenario a 4km round trip distance between Mahefedok and Lohorano could be traveled in just 40 minutes (20 minutes * 2), if that is the case then a 12 hours continuous work day for the truck would allow 18 loads or 18*30 = 540 tons, then only 23 days per month are necessary to feed the mine, basically 5 days and a half workload per week and a 1day and a half per week weekend/vacation/maintenance for the truck.
I agree that is still a high workload for a truck but I suspect nothing extraordinary in the mining world, probably they still have the truck from stratmin days to help, and luckily trucks do not have installed the latest supercomputer general AI algorithms allowing the truck to be self conscious and inistiate a strike asking for another weekend day like us humans would do. One day, I am sure we will be talking about robots human rights, for now lets continue exploiting these poor machines ! they are our slaves and have no consiousness or feelings...
