I've been thinking that a magic laser mining an asteroid is a bit far fetched, even in a far distant future. the idea comes from the technical abilities of a laser...it heats things up. how does that equal mining?
so i was trying to find a solution by imagining how we might mine an asteroid currently, or in the near future. that brought me to the idea of a colony on an asteroid. the same type of colony we would see on a planet. we could setup our own colony to mine asteroids, or we could simply purchase the ore from an existing colony, basic trades would work too. they gotta eat and drink and need fuel. so they would have a limited economy.

what do you all think of this?

It's not a laser, it's a transfer beam. Picks up formations and molecules you need and sucks them up, leaving the stuff you don't need behind. LT is not a hard sci-fi, we have wormholes, warp lanes, planets hanging in the air... I don't think there's a lot of problems with the plausibility of matter teleportation at this point.

On the other hand, a building stuck to an asteroid, sucking up ores and selling/transporting them? Sign me up! A stable mining colony spells fun and variety to me, not invalidating ship based lazormining, but complementing it. There were words about hangars anyway, so colonies and mining bases are not too far from that I think.

I think something like this was already planned.

there is already a Relevant thread

Please, for the love of God, don't do it the way ED did it who are probably one of the first to make space mining the most tedious activity ever and then called it feature complete.

light487 wrote:Please, for the love of God, don't do it the way ED did it who are probably one of the first to make space mining the most tedious activity ever and then called it feature complete.

If I may inquire, how minning was implemented there?

Etsu wrote: If I may inquire, how minning was implemented there?

you scan the rock for the ores it contains (which is iirc a simple one click process)

then you fire your mining laser at the asteroid.

small chunks of pure or mixed minerals then break off.

then you scoop up the chunks with your cargo scoop.

the minerals then get sorted into "hoppers" aboard your on board refinery.

one hopper can only hold one type of mineral, and needs multiple chunks to be filled to create one container of the mineral.

if you scoop up a chunk with multiple minerals in it and dont have enough (free) hoppers to store all the different kinds of minerals, the surplus ones get dumped and are lost.

Thanks for the answer. I didn't understand it completly (maybe I should watch a video) but it seams that LT will be much more rich in that area. After all, you have to find the ore you are looking for first with minning probes, which seems fun for itself.

Etsu wrote:Thanks for the answer. I didn't understand it completly (maybe I should watch a video) but it seams that LT will be much more rich in that area. After all, you have to find the ore you are looking for first with minning probes, which seems fun for itself.

my video of choice

You can scan the rocks? Can't remember having seen that in the video's...
It was even more boring in Evochron. You just had to go to an asteroids, activate your mining been and wait several minutes until your cargo was filled.

To be clearer, the main reason I find it tedious is the collection of the fragments by flying around in your ship to collect them one at a time. Secondly I found the whole "refinery module" idea to be yet another time-sink as you waited for the fragments to be refined on your own ship.

What I am wanting is something closer to EVE Online where you bring the material back to a station (or in LT a station or factory ship) and refine it there, which is then enabled to be manufactured into something else. I don't mind the idea of bits being broken off as such.. but it would be a very early game thing before you get transfer beams. However, ED doesn't have any plans for mining upgrades.. it is the entire mining system done and dusted already.

+1 for the magic mining beam (it it's a consolation to you, in EVE the thing is a mixture of a laser and a tractor beam. The first one cuts, the second one sucks the ore chunks into your cargo hold).

First of all, manual mining should be a steady and reliable income source, especially early in the game and in the early stages of a manufacturing career. It doesn't have to be brilliantly involving or incredibly innovative, it just has to be tolerable and slightly more dignified than the fustercluck that is E:D.

("Who's a good spaceship? Who's a good space ship? Yeeeaah, you are...! Now fetch, boy! Fetch that little splinter! And do that again about 150 times to get a cargo hold full of low-value crap! Yeeees, that's a good boy...". That's not immersion. That's simply annoying, even the original '84 Elite didn't make you jump through that many hoops to get a bit of money out of an asteroid. Frontiers even had a remote mining rig you could dump on an asteroid or planet and pick up later when it's full.)

The system as presented by Josh a while ago gets the job done, keeps the player at the keyboard while doing so, and nets tangible results in a short amount of gametime. That's the way I like it.

-Hardenberg

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Etsu wrote: If I may inquire, how minning was implemented there?

you scan the rock for the ores it contains (which is iirc a simple one click process)

then you fire your mining laser at the asteroid.

small chunks of pure or mixed minerals then break off.

then you scoop up the chunks with your cargo scoop.

the minerals then get sorted into "hoppers" aboard your on board refinery.

one hopper can only hold one type of mineral, and needs multiple chunks to be filled to create one container of the mineral.

if you scoop up a chunk with multiple minerals in it and dont have enough (free) hoppers to store all the different kinds of minerals, the surplus ones get dumped and are lost.

That has got to be the dumbest implementation of mining in any game I have ever heard of.

AbhChallenger wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Etsu wrote: If I may inquire, how minning was implemented there?

you scan the rock for the ores it contains (which is iirc a simple one click process)

then you fire your mining laser at the asteroid.

small chunks of pure or mixed minerals then break off.

then you scoop up the chunks with your cargo scoop.

the minerals then get sorted into "hoppers" aboard your on board refinery.

one hopper can only hold one type of mineral, and needs multiple chunks to be filled to create one container of the mineral.

if you scoop up a chunk with multiple minerals in it and dont have enough (free) hoppers to store all the different kinds of minerals, the surplus ones get dumped and are lost.

That has got to be the dumbest implementation of mining in any game I have ever heard of.

EVE, where you click "mine" and then continue with work?

Keon wrote:

AbhChallenger wrote:That has got to be the dumbest implementation of mining in any game I have ever heard of.

EVE, where you click "mine" and then continue with work?

That was my experience in EVE as well.

Only I had nothing else to do.

After two years of logging in to raise my skill levels.

Admittedly, I was playing EVE wrong -- I wasn't spending all my time in a corp. (As in "none.") But still.