Orbital miners in the game right now function pretty much like an orbital version of auto mines, but I kinda originally imagined them to work a little differently and wanna write about that as a suggestion.
I've always pictured orbital mining ships to behave more like, for example, the belters in The Expanse. What I mean is, having many, smaller mining ships that indivdually seek out nearby asteroids, mine them and then carry their cargo to a nearby colony. The way I imagined it would have the ships be automated in a similar way to how survey ships are, moving from body to body on their own.
This would require 2 changes:
- Orbital mining working on a body that is NOT a colony
- Orbital miners loading their mined minerals into their cargo hold, instead of dumping the minerals onto the body surface
It would also require a standing order "move to next orbitally mineable body" and the conditional order "when cargo hold is full, unload cargo at nearest colony".
This would let you have fully automated mining fleets mining asteroid belts without requiring you to mark every body as a colony nor would you need to deliver mass drivers to the bodies or tell cargo ships to visit them since the miners will do the mineral shipping themselves.