The mining system is outright TERRIBLE, and the main culprit is the scooping system. It's like the developers decided that they needed some kind of extra mechanic for mining over just aiming your laser, so they added the scooping and refining system. Refining is quite fine, though it is very tedious having to constantly open a menu to dump stuff you don't want. Scooping however is a complete game breaker. When you mine an asteroid, the ore will shoot out in any random direction, often times on the OPPOSITE side of the asteroid you are mining.
Now, going around chasing nuggets of ore all over the place is a frustrating experience as is. Add to this that you have to aim your scooping properly as well, and everything will take even longer. Once you're done picking up some nuggets, well, you often times lose track of which asteroid you were mining in the first place, because you can't mark them in any way.
This whole system is mind-numbingly boring, tedious, annoying and frustrating. You name it. My impression is that the devs spent time and energy on making an interactive mechanic to steer away from the usual "push-a-button-and-wait" system used by many games, but forgot the detail that it would probably be helpful if said mechanic was fun at least. I much prefer the click-and-wait style of Eve Online (unless it has changed in recent years) because the current implementation is nothing but frustration. I tried it, and will never try it again unless it changes.
Implementing some kind of tractor beam or automatic ore scooping device to equip your ship with would probably be the easiest way to fix this mess. Doing something about the constant need to enter a menu to manage the refinery would help too, but is less important.
To be honest, the scooping isn't the issue with mining. It's annoying - I'll give you that, but it isn't a deal breaker. You get better at it. I can pick up the 5-10 fragments of from mining an asteroid in probably under a minute or so unless the asteroid was spinning really heavily. The issue is its progression flat lines (like bounty hunting does). I've been mining in a Cobra and it works just fine. Why would I use a bigger ship? I could stay out mining longer, but that won't actually make me more money per time spent. Trips back to the refinery take a few minutes. Staying out longer in the field is just asking for trouble. I wouldn't want to get caught with a hold of 50-100 Platinum/Palladium. 34 is enough.
Larger ships can mount larger mining lasers and refineries, but there's two issues with this. One, no one knows what better mining lasers do besides break off chunks faster. If this is all they do, it's fairly pointless as you can fire a mining laser forever with 4 pips in weapons. Second, bigger refineries are good, but for example there are only 7 possible minerals/metals in a Metallic Pristine field (the only place you should be mining). Why would I want a 10 bin refinery?
Here are my suggestions:
1. Add a module that scoops up/tractors beams/whatever fragments into the refinery, but make them only on larger ships. This means that smaller ships can mine, but larger ships can do more "automated" large scale mining. This encourages serious miners to advance while not penalizing smaller miners. It also encourages more specific ships. Too many of the multi-purpose ships are the "best' at what they do. Multi-purpose usually they aren't the best at specific roles, but that isn't the case here.
2. Allow the refineries to be programmed. By this I mean you should be able to tell your refinery to either a.) auto-refine a mineral/metal and b.) auto-eject a mineral/metal. This way you could tell it to always eject Indite for example and always refine platinum. Would save the annoyance of switching back and forth after each ton is refined.
3. Please tell us what larger mining lasers do. If they don't do much, please change that. For example, larger/better lasers should increase the fragment %'s. Perhaps on bigger ships, larger lasers could break off very large chunks (maybe even tons at a time, rather than fragments). This again would encourage miners to have bigger, "mining" vessels rather than souped up Cobras/whatever.
4. There is no reason to mine Rocky/Ice/Metal Rich rings. Mining is already fairly tedious, so you need to find the "optimal" areas to make it worth you time. This makes mining lesser metals/minerals rather pointless. Perhaps there should be some more valuable use for some of them? Right now I tend to stick to Platinum, Palladium, Gold, and Silver because they are the highest priced. Perhaps Ice rings should be minable for water that can be sold to large-population worlds? I just know you have some reason to mine the other stuff - or why have them in the game?
5. Add some spice into mining. Alien artifacts popping out of asteroids. Pirates stashes uncovered while mining. Stuff like that.
Honestly, mining isn't anymore boring then trading. In fact, I enjoy it more so. It's at least more active. But it does need some love. The issue is it's fairly easy to outfit any ship to be the "ideal" miner almost instantly. All you need is 1 mining laser and 1 refinery. Cargo space is relative - just depends on how long you want to mine in one sitting. Unlike trading, it doesn't increase your profits dramatically to have a bigger load. So once you get the hang out of (which takes a few attempts) that's it. There's nowhere to go.
The only true way to show respect for your fellow human beings is to share a conflicting opinion so that both sides can consider another point of view to further refine their own opinion, to broaden their understanding of reason and rationale. In my opinion, intelligent debate is the pinnacle of respect for one another.
