Like I said, I avoided mining in RES after I was told they are a bad place to mine at. And how come that the NPC pirates leave you alone there?
Can any mineral be mined in any type of ring?
OK there are couple levels to this whole thing to unpack
a] the type of stuff you can mine and also the way you can mine it depends on the material type. For example mentioned painite can be found either as lase mineable in metallic rings, or as deep cores in metal rich ring. Surface and SubSurface deposits appear in both I think - just google whatever you are interested in.
b] there are reservers going from delpeted to prisitne. For core mining it shouldnt matter but I always go for pristine regardless - just to mention in case you dont know about this.
c] hotspots influences the type of rocks that spawn. Overlaps do boost this, but not as much as they used to. From my experience single hotspots are perfectly fine. Now its important to remember it doesn boost number of roids of certain type, only whats in those. For example - a vopal hotspots doesn spawn more deep core rocks. It just makes the ones that are there more likely to be of that type. From my testingin a single hotspot about 60% of core roids will have the hot spot type in overlaps it should be more. As far as laser mining goes hotspot will make roids more likely to have deposits of sais type and since you can laser mine every roid hotspot efectively spawns "more" hotspot type roids.
d] prospecting - yield vs composition - theres a typical misconception about prospecting roids and that is that people think % is everything. It isnt. % doesnt show the yield, only what the yield will be procentually composed of. In other words 20% of 40 tons is more than 50% of 10 tons. The yield is a rng that can be observed when you mine an asteorid - just check the % drop in content when you mine, its a fixed number per tick. Lower the number, higher the yield the rock has.
Soif you apply % you see in prospector on yield that youre actually pulling from a rock youll get the final number of how much you mine.
e] res sites
Res sites offer boost to yield, however they do nothing for the infulence itself. You will see same stuff in RES as anywhere else on the ring, however there is a multiplier on fragments you mine. That multiplier depends on res type (low res having lowest bonus and haz res having the highest bonus) and on distance from the rescenter (the bonuses usually start at 30km and get best at 20-15km mark). Again you can observe the bonus by checking the % drop of roid content when you mine it.
If i remember correctly, outside RES the % drop is anwhere between 2.4% and 3.7% per mining tick. In haz res you can get as low as 1.69% contet drop per tick, which means up to 2x bigger yield than outside res. For reference I mine anything above 30% content of what I want and see roids going as high ass 60%.That translates into 20-40ish tons of said material from single rock. As far as I remember you top out at around 17ish outside res site. For me that translates to mentioned 250t of mined stuff in avg 30 minutes.
As far as tactics to deal with pirates in res sites goes thats whole another topic, but it incorporates heavily engineered combat-miner ship build, A rated sensors and a lot of surrounding awareness (both sensor and visual).
Note - there are also completely other ways of mining. Not many ppl know this - roids are persistent with respawn timer. Deep cores respawn after about 6 days (so thats not too interesting) BUT laser and ssd deposits have 2-3 hours respawn rate. Now since these are persitent, it means you can mine same roids every 2-3 hours. This is especially interesting for LTD SSD mining (as it has yields significantly larger amounts when SSD mined compared to any other sub surface deposit types). I have a mapped hotspot area in one of my fav mining spots (cca 60km radius from hotspot center) so I know where all the LTD SSD rocks are. I have devised a route that enables me to mine 400t of LTDs an hour steadily - it requires you to know the route very well but if you make your own (I made the map using slf and triangulation) its not a problem. LTDs have gone low in price since I made this route but its still pretty profitable technique even with lower prices.
