Can we get a comment from frontier on ice mining yields
- Thread starter Long Star
- Start date
Even pristine ice rings have dissapointingly low yields. Max seems to be around 35%, about half what a pristine metallic ring has.
I've never even seen an ice belt. Can you post some locations?
I've never even seen an ice belt. Can you post some locations?
The simplest explanation is that ice is more common than metals.
If you look at the periodic table of elements, Hydrogen (atomic mass 1) and Oxygen (atomic mass 8) .. form your basic, ice.
Magnesium and Aluminium are the first metals (atomic masses, 12 and 13) and you're up to mass 22 before you start getting to the good stuff (Titanium).
Formation of elements happens by atomic fusion inside stars, starting from the first raw material, hydrogen. Hydrogen fuses with hydrogen to become Helium. Helium fuses into Lithium .. That is atomic masses 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> (4,5,6) etc ...
Atomic fusion is difficult to achieve, needing extreme high temperatures and pressures. Small stars can create Helium (2) but you need more energy each time, and a larger star, to fuse heavier elements. For really heavy elements you actually need a supernova explosion.
So, there's a correlation between the atomic mass of the material, and how common it is .. if it's lightweight it's common, if it's heavy it's rare. And obviously, on the principle of supply and demand (with all other things being equal) the rarer the material .. the more valuable it is.
If you look at the periodic table of elements, Hydrogen (atomic mass 1) and Oxygen (atomic mass 8) .. form your basic, ice.
Magnesium and Aluminium are the first metals (atomic masses, 12 and 13) and you're up to mass 22 before you start getting to the good stuff (Titanium).
Formation of elements happens by atomic fusion inside stars, starting from the first raw material, hydrogen. Hydrogen fuses with hydrogen to become Helium. Helium fuses into Lithium .. That is atomic masses 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> (4,5,6) etc ...
Atomic fusion is difficult to achieve, needing extreme high temperatures and pressures. Small stars can create Helium (2) but you need more energy each time, and a larger star, to fuse heavier elements. For really heavy elements you actually need a supernova explosion.
So, there's a correlation between the atomic mass of the material, and how common it is .. if it's lightweight it's common, if it's heavy it's rare. And obviously, on the principle of supply and demand (with all other things being equal) the rarer the material .. the more valuable it is.
Deleted member 38366
D
I always find it irritating to find asteroids like :
8.1% Water
1.6% Methanol Monohydrate Crystals
0.8% Brommelite
I be like.... Wait, what's the other 90% of that thing made of ??!
And why even often have a sub 1% yield? It's absolutely useless.
Anyway, yields in the Icy Belts indeed are very poor. Seems it's cut in half, compared to all the others. ~65% is the Mother Lode non-Icy - ~34% seems the Mother Lode Icy.
Apart from the rather asymmetric Asteroids loving to eat or otherwise kill our dumb Limpets, never found any reason for non-Mission Mining there. Too slow, too painful.
Even an Icy Mining Mission I only take as a last resort, if there's nothing else there. Time needed just is too high, compared to non-Icy Mining tasks.
Low Temperature Diamonds, the only thing that could make non-Mission Mining somewhat worthwhile?
Exceedingly rare, filling up with Painite is a piece of cake compared to that.
8.1% Water
1.6% Methanol Monohydrate Crystals
0.8% Brommelite
I be like.... Wait, what's the other 90% of that thing made of ??!
And why even often have a sub 1% yield? It's absolutely useless.
Anyway, yields in the Icy Belts indeed are very poor. Seems it's cut in half, compared to all the others. ~65% is the Mother Lode non-Icy - ~34% seems the Mother Lode Icy.
Apart from the rather asymmetric Asteroids loving to eat or otherwise kill our dumb Limpets, never found any reason for non-Mission Mining there. Too slow, too painful.
Even an Icy Mining Mission I only take as a last resort, if there's nothing else there. Time needed just is too high, compared to non-Icy Mining tasks.
Low Temperature Diamonds, the only thing that could make non-Mission Mining somewhat worthwhile?
Exceedingly rare, filling up with Painite is a piece of cake compared to that.
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The other 90% is made from backers' tears. You can't mine it again, since FDev mined it all back in the kickstarter.
OP is complaining about belt clusters, they don't have RES.
It's not bad if you're raising your rep with a faction and can get missions that require Ice materials. But as a money maker, yeah it's not great.
Deleted member 38366
D
I actually tried a HighRES once (dead-center), was surprised that the plentyful Pirate NPCs didn't take interest in any of the Icy-Mined standard Cargo, even if it was >30tons.
I found it the only place to gather the typical Icy Mining Mission targets in a much more reasonable time.
Problem is, I never found out what would be the trigger boundary to Pirate NPCs to attack.
Was interesting to be surrounded by upto 8 Anacondas, FAS, FGS, Clippers etc. all scanning me while mining and already holding >60tons of various stuff.
Wouldn't want to repeatedly test my luck with that
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I actually tried a HighRES once (dead-center), was surprised that the plentyful Pirate NPCs didn't take interest in any of the Icy-Mined standard Cargo, even if it was >30tons.
I found it the only place to gather the typical Icy Mining Mission targets in a much more reasonable time.
Problem is, I never found out what would be the trigger boundary to Pirate NPCs to attack.
Was interesting to be surrounded by upto 8 Anacondas, FAS, FGS, Clippers etc. all scanning me while mining and already holding >60tons of various stuff.
Wouldn't want to repeatedly test my luck with that
I've done this several times just mining for materials, so no refinery. Though it doesn't seem to make a difference to the materials spawn whether you are in a RES or not. I've only tried real mining in an Ice RES once, that was in a depleted ring (Baltah'Sine 4B in a quixotic search for vacuum krill) and even in the RES the results were dissapointing.
Gives a good indication of how worthless the ice minerals are.
Oops, i dont read too good
I've mined pristine ice rings a few times, once to see what it was about and the second time for some monohydrate missions. I've never seen an ice cube with more than 20%, and even those were pretty rare for me. Haven't mined an ice res, but yeah, the yields are pretty poor compared to rock. I mine metallics to make a bit of money and change it up, but I won't do that with ice rings, too little return. I will say they look very pretty though!
I wonder if that will be Frontier's reply too.
I tried ice mining for the first time ever the other night for this purpose. I'm working a small cluster of Empire systems on the edge of Empire space and had been running delivery and data missions between them. They're all in boom so there were loads of boom time mining missions, saw a few for ice resources and thought 'cool, haven't been ice mining yet so I'll give it a go.'
Long story short, it's the only time I've been mining when I couldn't even be bothered filling my ship up in the end. I was in a 192 ton mining Python with 8 collectors, a ridiculously efficient mining ship, and in a pristine ice ring but between the hilariously low yields, the fact that pretty much every resource is worth about 50p a ton if you can't find missions to offload it and the fact that I'd managed to acquire a grand total of two tons of low temp diamonds which were the only thing that could have made the trip worthwhile, coupled with the fact that my FPS went down the tubes massively in the ice fields, I eneded up heading back with half a hold full of limpets, selling everything and writing it off as a bad job.
Then I went back out to the pristine metallic ring in the system next door and filled my ship with nothing but platinum, palladium and osmium in just over an hour. Got a nice rep and rank boost from selling the osmium and palladium to boom time mining mission givers and sold the 68 tons of platinum for cold hard cash.
The only way I would ever go ice mining again is if it was for some kind of role play reason. I wouldn't even do it for a CG and I love a bit of CG mining - I've turned in over 1,000 tons of osmium for the Jaques CG that ends tomorrow.
You'd be lucky to manage to fill the ship. I've tried strip mining in pristine ice rings, just taking everything without being selective, and still not fill the hold.
Yep, this.
I’m an avid miner, and I spent well over a dozen hours ice mining when it first got implemented. I was very excited for ice mining, but the truth is it’s literally the worst way to make credits in the game. It may even be worse than straight up exploration. I stacked missions to maximize it as much as possible but in the end, and I did keep track and did the math, ice mining turns out to be about 25% the profit capability of metallic mining. In other words its like 75% less profitable than normal mining. It’s terrible and I won’t ever do it again unless they improve it. FDev either needs to increase the yields of materials greatly or they need to increase the payouts of ice mining missions greatly. Like on an order of 4X as much as they are now just to even make ice mining worthwhile. I’d rather see them increase the ore yields as then LTD’s wouldn’t be so frustratingly rare and impossible to find.
Seeing as how it has not been touched yet I don’t think FDev even realizes it’s broken, or they just don’t care.
they always sacrifice realism when it makes things easier for them to develop... like RNGineers, or the teleportation ship delivery system. But when it comes to easing the grind, realism is always the answer and sometimes even break realism itself.
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