I'm sure that this has likely already been brought up by other people out there, but I think it bears being brought up again.
From what I've read of the description for the "Collector Limpet Controller", I understand (perhaps erroneously) that you can either use it actively, but then it burns out. Or you can use it passively, but then it 'collects chunks of mining debris' for a set period of time, and then it too burns out.
So really, instead of making Mining a viable profession in Elite Dangerous, all that's happened, is that it's become slightly less tedious, but no more viable. That is to say, there is no reason why anyone would want to waste their time trying their hand at mining, because it's so vastly tedious. All this could be changed, of course, if FD were to bring back the MB4 mining machine. Or perhaps over the last 100 odd years, the machine has spawned progeny, and we're now looking at seeing the new-and-improved MB7 mining machines hit the stores soon?
In any case, I think there would be a LOT of people who would start to choose mining as a hobby and as a profession, if it were made as simple as it was back in the days of the MB4. For those of you who don't know, an MB4 mining machine weighed about 40 tonnes and you could carry as many of them as you liked (provided you had the cargo space to accommodate them). Their operating instructions were beyond simple:
You'd find a suitable planet or asteroid to land on. Once you safely landed on the surface, you'd click a button to deploy the MB4, which would then move itself out of your cargo bay and on to the planet surface. It would then start mining all by itself, with no further input required from the owner. Via the tracking devices implanted onto each MB4, the owner could monitor the wherabouts of each mining machine and never have to worry about losing them. If you had several MB4's, after deploying the first one on a planet or asteroid, you could go off and deploy a second one in a different system and a third one in yet another system, etc... and the mining machine tracking devices would make sure you were always of where they were.
After a reasonable amount of in-game-time had passed, you would return to the site of an active MB4, land very close to it (on the same planet/ asteroid, of course) and you'd simply collect all the goodies that the MB4 had mined for you. Though I believe that the maximum amount of minerals that an MB4 could hold in its hopper was 10 tonnes, so no matter how long you waited for it to mine its way through an asteroid -for example- you'd never come back to find more than 10 tonnes of minerals waiting for collection. But once you collected the minerals that were waiting in the hopper, the mining machine would immediately continue to mine. There was no need to redeploy the mining machine after just 10 tonnes of minerals were mined. In fact, the manual for Frontier: Elite 2 even recommended that if you were lucky enough to find a particularly rich seam of deposits, that you should NOT move your MB4, as it probes very deeply below the surface, and if you move the mining machine, you may not be able to find that same rich seam again.
But even still... Even if you didn't have the cargo space to concurrently carry more than 1 MB4 in your hold, you could still purchase 1, then fly it out to a mineral rich asteroid, land and deploy it, then return to an appropriate station where you could buy another MB4, load that one into your cargo bay and then fly it off to a different mineral rich planet/ planetoid/ asteroid/ etc... The end result would be that you could have enough MB4's actively mining on their own out there in the black, so that you could continually just go from one to the next, picking up the full 10 tonnes of mined minerals each trip, with no down time. Though I believe that you needed about 30 MB4's to make this miners dream become a reality.
Now in this iteration of Elite, I understand that planetary landings are still on the drawing board. Nevertheless, surely it wouldn't take much to allow us to be able to land roughly on asteroids in Resource Extraction Sites (or possible in asteroid clusters, not really sure about the latter, as I've never really been close enough to one to know if it's possible to land rough/ crash onto one of them)...
So I would implore the Gods and Goddesses of FD to please, pretty please, pretty pretty please, with Lavian Brandy on top, Please give us back our MB4's so that we can make mining a profession again, as opposed to what it is now (please check the forums complaints against mining to see what mining currently is...).
Thanks and
Peace
Razar
AKA Cmdr Narendil
ps: Also, there seems to be an inordinately LARGE number of ships being destroyed inside space stations. An unrealistically large number, in fact. In fact, it's beyond ridiculous. You'd be forgiven for thinking that every station in civilised space is secretly run by Space n a z i's, considering how many pilots they murder and how frequently they do so! This is especially dangerous to those of us who run one or more ships without shields, as the debris caused by the murderous station defense n a z i's, tends to be unavoidable at times and it can cause truly alarming amounts of hull damage to an unshielded ship. And please don't say "Just fly carefully," because that doesn't help. When debris is careening around the station, going in all directions, and coming from all directions, you simply can't avoid it all. You can certainly attempt to avoid the debris that you can see, but our visual fields only cover, at the absolute most, about 40% of the space in which debris might be hurtling towards us. So once again, please FD, please fire the damn Space n a z i's who have managed to take control of Space Station defences. Please stop the incessant murder of random NPC pilots (whose wrecked ships constitute a significant debris hazard for unshielded ships).
Thanks again.
Razar
From what I've read of the description for the "Collector Limpet Controller", I understand (perhaps erroneously) that you can either use it actively, but then it burns out. Or you can use it passively, but then it 'collects chunks of mining debris' for a set period of time, and then it too burns out.
So really, instead of making Mining a viable profession in Elite Dangerous, all that's happened, is that it's become slightly less tedious, but no more viable. That is to say, there is no reason why anyone would want to waste their time trying their hand at mining, because it's so vastly tedious. All this could be changed, of course, if FD were to bring back the MB4 mining machine. Or perhaps over the last 100 odd years, the machine has spawned progeny, and we're now looking at seeing the new-and-improved MB7 mining machines hit the stores soon?
In any case, I think there would be a LOT of people who would start to choose mining as a hobby and as a profession, if it were made as simple as it was back in the days of the MB4. For those of you who don't know, an MB4 mining machine weighed about 40 tonnes and you could carry as many of them as you liked (provided you had the cargo space to accommodate them). Their operating instructions were beyond simple:
You'd find a suitable planet or asteroid to land on. Once you safely landed on the surface, you'd click a button to deploy the MB4, which would then move itself out of your cargo bay and on to the planet surface. It would then start mining all by itself, with no further input required from the owner. Via the tracking devices implanted onto each MB4, the owner could monitor the wherabouts of each mining machine and never have to worry about losing them. If you had several MB4's, after deploying the first one on a planet or asteroid, you could go off and deploy a second one in a different system and a third one in yet another system, etc... and the mining machine tracking devices would make sure you were always of where they were.
After a reasonable amount of in-game-time had passed, you would return to the site of an active MB4, land very close to it (on the same planet/ asteroid, of course) and you'd simply collect all the goodies that the MB4 had mined for you. Though I believe that the maximum amount of minerals that an MB4 could hold in its hopper was 10 tonnes, so no matter how long you waited for it to mine its way through an asteroid -for example- you'd never come back to find more than 10 tonnes of minerals waiting for collection. But once you collected the minerals that were waiting in the hopper, the mining machine would immediately continue to mine. There was no need to redeploy the mining machine after just 10 tonnes of minerals were mined. In fact, the manual for Frontier: Elite 2 even recommended that if you were lucky enough to find a particularly rich seam of deposits, that you should NOT move your MB4, as it probes very deeply below the surface, and if you move the mining machine, you may not be able to find that same rich seam again.
But even still... Even if you didn't have the cargo space to concurrently carry more than 1 MB4 in your hold, you could still purchase 1, then fly it out to a mineral rich asteroid, land and deploy it, then return to an appropriate station where you could buy another MB4, load that one into your cargo bay and then fly it off to a different mineral rich planet/ planetoid/ asteroid/ etc... The end result would be that you could have enough MB4's actively mining on their own out there in the black, so that you could continually just go from one to the next, picking up the full 10 tonnes of mined minerals each trip, with no down time. Though I believe that you needed about 30 MB4's to make this miners dream become a reality.
Now in this iteration of Elite, I understand that planetary landings are still on the drawing board. Nevertheless, surely it wouldn't take much to allow us to be able to land roughly on asteroids in Resource Extraction Sites (or possible in asteroid clusters, not really sure about the latter, as I've never really been close enough to one to know if it's possible to land rough/ crash onto one of them)...
So I would implore the Gods and Goddesses of FD to please, pretty please, pretty pretty please, with Lavian Brandy on top, Please give us back our MB4's so that we can make mining a profession again, as opposed to what it is now (please check the forums complaints against mining to see what mining currently is...).
Thanks and
Peace
Razar
AKA Cmdr Narendil
ps: Also, there seems to be an inordinately LARGE number of ships being destroyed inside space stations. An unrealistically large number, in fact. In fact, it's beyond ridiculous. You'd be forgiven for thinking that every station in civilised space is secretly run by Space n a z i's, considering how many pilots they murder and how frequently they do so! This is especially dangerous to those of us who run one or more ships without shields, as the debris caused by the murderous station defense n a z i's, tends to be unavoidable at times and it can cause truly alarming amounts of hull damage to an unshielded ship. And please don't say "Just fly carefully," because that doesn't help. When debris is careening around the station, going in all directions, and coming from all directions, you simply can't avoid it all. You can certainly attempt to avoid the debris that you can see, but our visual fields only cover, at the absolute most, about 40% of the space in which debris might be hurtling towards us. So once again, please FD, please fire the damn Space n a z i's who have managed to take control of Space Station defences. Please stop the incessant murder of random NPC pilots (whose wrecked ships constitute a significant debris hazard for unshielded ships).
Thanks again.
Razar
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