Katorone wrote:I'm a bit concerned to how this type of mining scales though.
The goal of this post is to provide some ideas about the progression of mining, not so much about making mining fun.
Suppose you can build a new ship with the haul of a single ship, then you get very fast progression (which is plausible with matter compression).
Suppose you need 10 hauls to build a new ship, then you'll want to speed the process up with more miners, or another solution provided by vertical mining progression.
More miners, means the game needs more CPU to calculate all these ships flying around. Seeing how fast you can mine out a single asteroid, that's going to be a huge amount of ships flying around.
And that's only with the mining laser itself.
Placing a mining station on an asteroid doesn't seem to be worth it, since they're mined out so quickly. Perhaps drones that mine for you can offer a solution. They'd mine for you, somebody will have to empty out their storage. So you'll do nothing but fly between all these miners. You could hire NPC to do this for you, but if you extrapolate this to the construction of a huge base or ship (10,000 hauls), then this system would need a lot of NPC and drones... And this only for a single construction, what about the rest of the universe?
To combat this scale difference I'd like to propose the following:
- Different classes of asteroids:
- Small: These have a very low yield and can be mined with a mining beam. These asteroids 'regrow' their resources over time.
- Medium: This are asteroids with a crust that the mining beam can't penetrate. You can use explosives to create multiple small asteroids.
- Large: These are asteroids that even the drones can't handle. The mass of these asteroids makes them very resistant to explosives, but they can still be broken up in smaller pieces with enough firepower. These asteroids will also regrow their resources over (a long) time.
- Planetoids: Same as large, except that these asteroids never run out of resources, can't be broken up and can only be mined using a permanent mining station.
- Planets: Planets can host multiple mining outposts, depending on how habited the planets are and the acceptable level of pollution.
- Different technologies:
- Mining beam: can only be used on small asteroids effectively.
- Mining drones: can be used on small or medium asteroids.
- Mobile mining station: A ship that sets down on a large asteroid and drills into the surface. It can move to a new asteroid, leaving behind a network of tunnels. The materials used for these tunnels is a cost that comes with the use of this ship.
- Permanent mining station: On a planetoid they also act as a normal station. With docking, trade, storage and manufacturing.
- Mining outpost: These are constructions on a planet that let you extract resources. They cause a bunch of pollution, which can be helpful for terraforming but unhelpful otherwise.
You could think of each kind of asteroid having a thicker crust that the previous level of technology can't penetrate. It should still be possible to be very lucky and find an exposed ore vein on a planetoid, which you can then mine with your beam, practically never running out of resources. But putting a station down on it would prove a lot more efficient.
Prospecting would pretty much stay the same as it is now. With you shooting probes/drones that send waves into the mass of the asteroid, to detect what they're made of. These probes never crack the surface, so there's no real need to change them. The bigger the object is you want to mine, the more probes you'll need. Or perhaps bigger ships can fire some sort of cluster probe to facilitate this.