And a size 1 (or smaller) active and passive sensors are classed as commercial.
Excellent! I'll keep that in mind.
It's August of year 11
I've completed all the geo-surveys with the exception of four long period comets that are all out past the range of my old survey ships. Ikeya-Zang is just reaching its aphelion of 9.5 billion miles. Books is on it's way in but is still beyond that distance, and Hale-Bopp and McNaught-Russel are still on their way out.
GSV Newton 1 (My Grav-Survey Ship) has already found 5 jump point locations though I'm years away from opening THAT can of worms. It's finished with 27 of the 30 survey locations (though I know from the game set-up that it's not gonna find any more jump points) and is happily tooling around the cosmos.
So I decided it's time to do some empirical testing of the success rate on Geo-survey teams while I develop my tech. ...and to watch how Earth mines out. I've got 400 ground based mines that were converted from the 40% of my conventional industry that I converted. Plus I built 80 automated mines figuring that I'd deploy them to the stellar bodies with the most abundant minerals.
Right now I'm analyzing how people may be jumping into space mining too early simply because it's there. (Of course that depends on what mineral availability you start with on Earth)
I set up a spreadsheet with all the Earth Minerals and their availability and plugged in the quantities and developed an average return per mine. In my specific game it's 5.72 in Year 11 down from 5.82 from when I first started tracking it (about year 7 or so) Nothing's gonna mine out for at least 5 years and the least plentiful minerals are the ones that have started bringing down my average Earth Mine Yield. Just to be on the safe side, I've also got 5 mass drivers ready to go so as to quickly deal with any shortfalls.
The bodies with the most available minerals have (at best) a simple availability sum of 5. I'm prepared to move auto-mines when Earth yields start plummeting but I've got a stockpile of everything with Duranium being the lowest. I've got two years production on hand and the resource is still at availability of 1 on Earth with 35 years until depletion. Corbomite, Boronide, Mercassium, and Uridium are the most troubling as to years to depletion. But each of those has at least 5 years of current production stockpiled and most over 10 years worth.
The only projected shortfall on the list (based on current project usage rates) is Duranium.
Again, that can best be resolved by staying Earthbound.
Does that analysis seem sound or am I missing something?