Each unit of production takes 1 of the associated minerals and 1 unit of wealth, so those three are your bottlenecks. Ideally you'll expand all of them throughout the game, via colonization, research, automining colonies, and building more factories. I like to turn Mercury into a financial center, and truth be told mars would be a better fit for it, that tends solve my monetary crisis that I inevitably get into.

Habitat miners are basically the only way to compete with how useful freighter/automine combos are, especially since freighters can do other things and you'll want a bunch of them anyway. That said I played a game with no Automines and asteroid mines gained a new lease on life there(the game was painful in other regards since I limited myself to installation based terraformers as well).

Brings up the next question in this topic line.  What is the cost benefit/detriment of building your AM as a massive orbital via construction factories?

You would need bigger tugs to achieve reasonable speed. Big tugs take forever to build from a shipyard (my 30-engines tug takes 2.09 years), but they can be built faster (barely months) by prebuilding the engine components with factories. It transfers a lot of work from shipyards to factories for both the miners and the tugs, so you need to take that into account. Plus the habitat itself takes 250k tons, slowing the design with dead weight.

In my opinion, a habitat miner with 250+ mining modules and prebuilt tug engines would be worth it. Beats the huge shipyards. I still don't like habitats used in that way, but it's our only solution to assemble a huge mining/terraforming/whatever ship.

Aurora is letting you do anything, so evaluating if something is worth the time and ressources can be difficult. As of yet, I always make too many shipyards and expand them too much, but each new game is better than the previous. Reminds me of DF...

Whoa, thanks for the number crunching, blue emu! I had already given up AMs completely because of their cost and slowness in mining but I had never tried 100k mining stations.

Since 5.70 is still some time away, I think I'll start a new 5.60 game and try them out once my civilian yards are big enough.

It's important to remember that Asteroid Miners are only useful on Asteroids and Comets... but in those specific cases, they do beat Auto-Mines in efficiency. And the larger you make them, the more efficient they are, since the percentage of parasitic weight is reduced.

Of course, this all goes back to the original post. Your economy is going to be based on your individual needs at the moment

I've never had an asteroid that nice... Probably one reason I've not bothered with asteroid miners too much

Yes, the bolded part at the bottom of my post (above) assumes NO governors, ship captains, or techs... and it still beats Auto-Mines by 15-to-24 under those same conditions.

Naturally, both methods have advantages and disadvantages. Auto-Mines have a slower ROI, but can be used on planets and moons. Asteroid Miners are more efficient, but can only be used on Comets and Asteroids; and also require a shipyard.

I must have misread that bit.

Now take it a step further... what is the average mineral amount on an asteroid? And how long would it take to be mined out?

But as I was saying, you can't always count on captains or governors. Having one is icing, but shouldn't be included in the base calculation because it varies so much.