ThymineC wrote:I'd prefer if by 'beacons' you mean 'waypoints' so I can constantly interact and control them if I wish.
Yah, I said "virtual beacons" so no physical objects.
It's less ambiguous when talking about waypoints for ships.
I'd also still like mining beams to be involved, but as a top-down variant since that's how we're interpreting my graphic now.
It could be... a deep scan mode.
Basically a mining beam with rather low yield which penetrates deeply but has little to no impact on surrounding deposits.
A mining scalpel.
And it tells you what is being mined so you get an idea of what's far beneath the surface.
You mine a very small area but depending on the quality of your beam or it's focus setting, it can penetrate several layers at once and mine them all at the same time.
It's what you might use if you find a dense cluster of high value ores... that are so close together that your chip brains would trash half of it.
Since it is part of the "scanner", you can't outfit a ship with 12 mining beams for 100% yield. That prevents it from becoming the de-facto standard for mining yet again. =)
I imagine that the deeper / more focussed you set it, the longer it's spin-up time before it's "through" to the last layer.
If you turn your ship, the beam loses focus again.
Should give a better feeling of "drilling down".
Quethas wrote: I think the real problem with a mining laser is that most people envision a beam of light that doesn't actually do anything.
My mining laser is actually a laser mass spectrometer. Mostly sort of. =P
There is no "I" in Tea. That would be gross
.