Mining Lance - Yay or nay?

[IndigoWyrd]

So mining lances... they have their uses, on the right ship, in the right circumstances.

My long-range Dolphin explorer carriers mining lances, as they're great for chipping off raw materials.

My Type-9 miner also uses them, and they're quite useful there, as they are small class, which occupies an otherwise close to useless hard point, and allows my Type-9 to engage in every form of mining - laser, abrasive, sub-surface and core.

As a weapon...

I have managed to incinerate a sidewinder and an eagle with them, and these were both fairly intense fights - or at the very least, very long, drawn out engagements with the only real satisfaction being that I can say "Yes, I have blown something up with mining lances." A good ramming does more damage, but small ships are pretty hard to buffalo with a Type-9.

 

[Nadreck]

I actually got to use one in combat!

I was using a Courier runabout to get Guardian blueprints. Not a combat build, but it did have a couple of size 1 seekers in the nacelles and a mining lance in the central hardpoint.

Trundling around the site in an SRV, I woke up too many sentinels, and decided to retreat to the ship when I had 5 of them after me. Took off and tried to take them out, but I kept losing target lock for some reason, so the seekers rarely fired. But the fixed beam of the mining lance did the job.

 

[Stealthie]

I have not read every comment but... You can use the mining lance in combat mode.

The right build will allow you to defend yourself without having to stop mining.

How would the mining lance - a tool that, by definition, is a combined combat and mining laser - help you to "defend yourself without having to stop mining"?
Seems like the fact that you'd be using the same tool to mine as you're using for defence would make those mutually exclusive operations.

If you're mining in a ship small enough that you're thinking of using C1 hardpoints for defensive weapons, the smart move is to avoid combat.

Also, the best use of the mining lance is simply to locate desirable ore at long range - as a sort of alternative/supplement for a Prospector.
Fly toward a 'roid, give it a 5-second blast with a mining lance, look at your Contacts HUD and see if it shows any chunks of whatever you're looking for.
If it doesn't, look for a different 'roid.
Course, it's unlikely that you'll be that short of limpets that this will be especially useful, and considering that using a Prospector boosts the yield from a 'roid.

Also, also, I guess the discovery of overlapping hotspots makes my comments, from last year, about the usefulness of lasers seem a bit pessimistic.
Nice that a bit of choice has returned to mining.

 

[Stealthie]

Trundling around the site in an SRV, I woke up too many sentinels, and decided to retreat to the ship when I had 5 of them after me. Took off and tried to take them out, but I kept losing target lock for some reason, so the seekers rarely fired. But the fixed beam of the mining lance did the job.

If you're going to fit missiles to a ship while visiting the Guardian sites, dumbfires all the way.

 

[Kreada]

You can already do that without mining lances with much greater efficency.

I thought mining lasers only function in analysis mode, in which your actual weapons are inactive. If that is not the case, my apologies.

As for defense, I do not mean to imply the Lance be used for combat. I mean to say that you outfit your mining ship with turreted weapons and set them to fire-at-will. Instead of switching between combat and analysis mode, you just stay in combat since the lance does not require analysis mode. Your turrets shoot the little flies and you continue mining while they do the dirty work.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

Like most things in Elite Dangerous mining lance is a half baked idea. It's a good idea, but in execution what you end up with is something that's not good at either of the things it's designed for, and the timewall it sits behind only adds to its pointlessness.

it's too small to fend off anything larger than an SLF or discourage anyone from attacking you, while also being barely functional as a mining tool.

It could be argued that it makes an interesting module for exploration ships where you could combine a mining beam with a bit of protection, but the same applies: it won't actually protect you from any threat currently ingame, and realistically, there is no need for weapons on an exploration ship so why not just bring a mining laser which has no timewall.

For all the people who armed their exploration ships "just in case"....how'd that work out? either you will see absolutely nothing or you will encounter either an NPC or a ganker in which case your paper thin exploration ship with its rubber band-firing mining lance won't really make any difference.

 

[Stealthie]

It could be argued that it makes an interesting module for exploration ships where you could combine a mining beam with a bit of protection, but the same applies: it won't actually protect you from any threat currently ingame, and realistically, there is no need for weapons on an exploration ship so why not just bring a mining laser which has no timewall.

That's what I'm hoping for.

I fit a mining lance to all my exploration ships.
Never needed to use a mining laser to obtain mat's while I'm exploring and I wouldn't attempt to fight anybody with it either but I live in hope that one day I'll stumble on something like, perhaps, a Guardian site on the other side of the galaxy and a weapon will be handy for interacting with it.

 

[Maolagin]

That's what I'm hoping for.

I fit a mining lance to all my exploration ships.
Never needed to use a mining laser to obtain mat's while I'm exploring and I wouldn't attempt to fight anybody with it either but I live in hope that one day I'll stumble on something like, perhaps, a Guardian site on the other side of the galaxy and a weapon will be handy for interacting with it.

Well, that has already been true a couple of times, so that's not an unreasonable hope.

A - while they aren't that distant, you need an energy weapon of some kind to charge the Guardian beacon things to unlock the GSLF blueprint.
B - there's a number of codex discoveries you can get for revealing behaviors of life forms in NSPs, including "retreats from weapon fire"

Although in both cases you could have completed the task with a pulse laser instead, which can be engineered for light weight if you care about the extra couple T.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

Well, that has already been true a couple of times, so that's not an unreasonable hope.

A - while they aren't that distant, you need an energy weapon of some kind to charge the Guardian beacon things to unlock the GSLF blueprint.
B - there's a number of codex discoveries you can get for revealing behaviors of life forms in NSPs, including "retreats from weapon fire"

Although in both cases you could have completed the task with a pulse laser instead, which can be engineered for light weight if you care about the extra couple T.

see? For everything you could possibly use it for there’s a better option.