I don't think a standing order for this would be as useful as it sounds. The issue is that automating orbital mining means the miners have to use some logic to select targets. Orbital miners are no use if they ignore useful resources to go pull up 25,000 tons of tritanium, for instance. I think most players would rather assign orbital miners to specific bodies than suffer from random selection, and any logic that is implemented will be sure to satisfy no one (except maybe Steve, but that is a big maybe).
There is also the question of whether this is the type of "micromanagement" that needs to be removed, which I don't think it is. Making decisions about where to send orbital miners is part of the core strategic gameplay of Aurora, so a standing order like this has the downside of removing interesting gameplay for the sake of expedience, which has never been Aurora's design philosophy.
So overall I think having the normal orders which can be repeated or cycled is sufficient as it is, and no change of this type is needed. I can see why some people might want that change, but I don't think that rationale is compelling for Aurora.
the standing order for moving to an asteroid with minerals is already in game and last i checked it moves to an asteroid with the highest total yield(all the accessibility values added together), so the only additions would be putting the mined minerals into the cargo hold if present and a conditional order to check for a full cargo hold and to empty the cargo hold at a suitable place
First, there is nothing wrong with suggesting things. Sometimes it isn't practical - for mechanics or coding reasons - but sometimes it finds its way into the game and occasionally I implement it immediately.
On this occasion, there are a couple of issues. The standing order to move to an orbital mining location isn't used in-game. It was originally intended for civilian orbital miners, where the actual mineral composition didn't really matter, apart from having Duranium and being high accessibility, because the end-goal is the same as civilian mining colonies - revenue for the player, with an option to buy the minerals if they match his needs. Civilian orbital miners were not implemented, so the code isn't used. The NPR AI uses a different method for its orbital miners, where it assesses potential targets based on its current mineral needs. Actually it assesses all mining locations, using an AI mining score, but restricts orbital miners to a subset of the list.
This brings us to the main problem with an automated orbital mining order; it's not straightforward to know which asteroid you need to mine. That decision should take into account current mineral stockpiles, overall rates of mineral production for each type and estimated usage by mineral. In a large Empire, the decision also needs to take into account the distances between sources and production, also considering the ease of moving those minerals to where they are needed. Then there is the decision regarding how far to move to the next asteroid. Should I settle for a less useful asteroid that is close by, or set off across a huge system for a particularly good asteroid that will take months to reach. How about accessibility vs amount - is it worth travelling a long way for high accessibility when the amounts are small - and that might be worth it if some key mineral has a large deposit, even though others would be swiftly exhausted.
These are relatively straightforward decisions for a human, because you can weight different factors vs your needs fairly quickly and easily, without even realising the complexity of your decision-making process. That is much more difficult for a program that has to specify and weight all those competing needs and factors in a sensible way that will apply to any given situation. That is why the AI has the mining score code to make it a reasonable decision, even though most of the time it won't be optimal. Humans like to be optimal, so I could quite easily spend a significant amount of time and effort on a standing order for moving orbital miners, and most people wouldn't use it because the results wouldn't match what they need.
With regard to the cargo hold vs colony for the mined minerals; as others have pointed out moving the miners to unload the minerals isn't very efficient. Even so, its a valid choice. However, whether you use cargo ships or orbital miners with cargo holds, you can still choose to load minerals from the surface. You will need to manually assign the next target anyway, so adding a load order isn't changing the management overhead very much - and you can choose to only load the important minerals. I might add the autoload into orbital miner cargo holds at some point, but its unlikely because its a niche requirement and my current spare time is very limited. Maybe later in the year.
