Is there any point to constructing mining ships? When I started playing last week my idea was to construct the Nostromo, an absolutely huge mining ship, and send it out into space to haul rocks. Since then I've discovered that the world of Alien is slightly different to Aurora, because such a ship wouldn't be able to actually haul the stuff it mined, and you can't have people go into cryogenic sleep in order to complete their operations.
But I still planned to construct a huge mining ship nonetheless - only now, I've run up to the limitations, namely that in order to build a 440,000 ton ship with 90xmining modules, it would take me 3 years to first expand my space port, but in that same time I can construct enough automated mines, and ship them to a colony, and have them produce more per year than the ship.
So my question is, why do asteroid miners exist in the game? They're nowhere near being cost effective - even if you had a 3m ton monster (which would take 30 years to expand a shipyard to fit), with a captain with 100% mining bonus, it would produce less than the same automated mines you could produce, and so on. If the civvie industries built them, then perhaps due to scale they would actually become favourable and useful.