Author Topic: Asteroid & Comet Mining  (Read 2619 times)

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Offline Tor Cha (OP)

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Asteroid & Comet Mining
« on: February 28, 2016, 08:39:12 PM »
Can the Same type of Ship Mine Both Asteroid and Comets?
 

Offline Haji

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #1 on: February 28, 2016, 09:31:20 PM »
Yes. The Asteroid Mining Module currently works only on comets and asteroids. Size etc. does not matter. The module does not work on anything else, so even if you see ridiculously small moon, you can't mine it.
 

Offline Tor Cha (OP)

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #2 on: February 28, 2016, 10:02:54 PM »
Real Silly Remark
WHY Not??
 

Offline Felixg

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #3 on: February 28, 2016, 10:45:14 PM »
Balance reasons I imagine.
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #4 on: February 28, 2016, 10:50:50 PM »
yeah, mining modules only cost as much as regular mines; auto mines normally cost twice as much. Of course, there is a premium for the rest of the ship...
 

Offline db48x

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #5 on: February 28, 2016, 10:54:41 PM »
Wasn't there a discussion recently about changing it to be based on the gravity of the body? I believe the current implementation was simply the easiest way to go, and the rules for generating system bodies have changed to make larger asteroids and smaller moons possible. He also keeps updating the Sol system; gotta have every named moon, even if we can't have every single asteroid/comet. :)
 

Offline Felixg

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #6 on: February 28, 2016, 10:56:06 PM »
You can kind of do something similar for planets and moons by plopping standard mines on airless bodies and parking habitation modules in orbit.
 

Offline Sheb

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #7 on: February 29, 2016, 03:54:35 AM »
yeah, mining modules only cost as much as regular mines; auto mines normally cost twice as much. Of course, there is a premium for the rest of the ship...

True, but then they take uo shipyard capacity... I think it's mostly an RP reason: it's hard to imagine the ship landing on a planete or something, it probably break up chunks of asteroids for processing. It would make more sense to make it dependent on gravity (maybe with a sliding scale, so that the ships would become less efficients as heavier bodies makes it harder to break chunks and brink them to the processing modules?
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #8 on: February 29, 2016, 05:36:16 AM »
Quote
True, but then they take uo shipyard capacity...
Capacity's a wash.  Regular mines take up Construction Factories, after all. And you can build asteroid-miners with CFs, if the asteroid miner has an orbital habitat.

 

Offline Haji

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Re: Asteroid & Comet Mining
« Reply #9 on: February 29, 2016, 06:59:18 AM »
Real Silly Remark
WHY Not??

As far as I know when Steve made the modules he simply didn't realize the issue was there. Recently there has been some talk about changing it from an asteroid module to one that can mine on everything with gravity below certain point, but it is currently unknown if it will be implemented and if it will it will happen with the next patch.

You can kind of do something similar for planets and moons by plopping standard mines on airless bodies and parking habitation modules in orbit.

In the future this will be an option. At the moment the cost of orbital habitats is just flat out ridiculous. I love the concept of orbital habitats and tried to incorporate them within my games, but even when role-playing they are so stupidly expensive it makes no sense. In normal games, where you do not role-play, there is even less reason to use them. Automated mines are far superior to normal ones supported by habitats.

True, but then they take up shipyard capacity...

As TheDeadlyShoe said normal mines take up construction factories and if you want to mine asteroids, you need automated mines, which are twice as expensive as normal ones. If you start with more or less standard settings (500 construction factories), building a hundred automated mines will take your manufactures over a year, during which you can't build stuff like research labs, more factories, academies and such. On the other hand, a reasonably small commercial yard with five slipways should be able to build an equivalent of fifty mines at once for half the resource cost. As such asteroid mining modules are superior in every possible way to automated mines, which is why they would be great, if they weren't limited to asteroids and comets.