Remote Mining

[DirkHowitzer]

What configuration do you guys use for remote mining? I built several frigate sized ships for a remote mining operation only to discover that the cost of maintanence was more that I was gaining from their mining operations! What do you recomend?

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He's dead, Jim.-- Leonard "Bones" McCoy

[Puke]

theres some other threads on this, basically it comes down to one of three things:

1 - remote mining is sucky and lame, so if you want it to be usefull you need to make some sort of mod for it.

2 - remote mining is OK if spend time researching sats to LARGE, but then you can only mine with one sat at a time and its hard making it pay off for the effort it takes. (keeping in mind sats have 0 maintnance)

3 - if you build a ship using minerals and mine for organics, the maintnance cost will get you, but its sort of like cheap resource conVersion.

I think those are all the major points or options on the topic. that i can think of now anyway.

[thorfrog]

Any chance this is a bug or flaw in the game. Malfador should adjust this so that is becomes profitable. Also, to counter the increase in profit you could increase the potiential for danger.

[Jubala]

Just ran a test of remote mining. I cut the mineral cost for mining components in half and then I built some different size ships and went mining. Even with costs cut in half there's no point in building a mining ship until you can squeeze in at leat two mining components and that means destroyers. Still aint much use as it will run out of supply pretty quickly.

Here's where I noted something weird. No matter the size of the ship the depletion thing would still happen. Test: A frigate with one mineral miner and a baseship with 14 mineral miners. Result: No matter which ships mines the belt the concentration drops one notch. Makes no sense in my book.

FYI:
Belt mineral concentration: 127%
1 mining component frigate upkeep: 1302
1 mining component frigate income: 1016
14 mining component baseship upkeep: 4480
14 mining component baseship income: 14224

That's with the cost (and thus the upkeep) of the mining components cut in half.

[DirkHowitzer]

Interesting. So in other words, remote mining simply isn't economically feasible nor does it even make sense in relation to the game as you would be hurting yourself or at least gaining nothing from the excersise thereof. Perhaps this is something which could be addressed in a mod/patch?

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He's dead, Jim.-- Leonard "Bones" McCoy

[This message has been edited by DirkHowitzer (edited 06 January 2001).]

[Tenryu]

Here's some stuff you might add to your data files that might make remote mining easier. Right now I'd also set the resource depletion field in Setting.txt for remote mining to false.