COMPLETED CG Taurus Mining Ventures Initiative

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TAURUS MINING VENTURES OPERATION CONCLUDES​

07 APR 3308
Pilots’ Federation ALERT
A corporate initiative to mine and deliver ores to the Synuefe CE-R c21-6 system has ended successfully.
Taurus Mining Ventures had performed scientific research within the system, claiming that the properties of some natural substances had been altered by an unknown type of local radiation.
The company’s head of research Dr Ruben Carpenter announced:
“We now have sufficiently large quantities of coltan, lithium hydroxide and methanol monohydrate crystals mined from locations in Synuefe CE-R c21-6. These irradiated ores will be analysed to determine their potential commercial value. Samples that were provided from other systems will also be very useful in our comparative studies.”
“To all the pilots who assisted in this endeavour: thank you! Your hard work is greatly appreciated. The Heart of Taurus megaship will remain in Synuefe CE-R c21-6 for several weeks, and you may collect your rewards from there.”
Taurus Mining Ventures confirmed that studies to identify the source, effects and application of the local radiation are continuing. The scientific journal The Empirical has reiterated that these ‘atypical radioactive signatures’ have not been independently verified.

 

[Astaran]

A friendly reminder for all CMDRs who used my FC TCS Havamal (XHB-L6M) as a base of operation and ship storage for the duration of this CG:

The FC will depart for the bubble this evening. Departure at around 17:00 Elite time. I will stay in the bubble for a while i, but I intend to start a deep space expedition in a few weeks, so you better make sure all your stuff is removed from the FC by then

 

[Bottom Hat]

Wasn't able to log in for the number of hours it would have taken to get myself to tier 4 and knew that at the beginning, so no big deal. I just went in for the practice (and getting blown up in the process by someone calling Salvation a war criminal and wanted to stop the mining operation because of it, reminding me once again why CG's should be done in Solo).

NOW: Within the next four weeks I expect a full report on the analysis of this material we've been collecting to see how this "mysterious radiation we've never encountered before" has affected all this stufz. If there's no result and it was all for nothing, well, we know for a fact that all that stufz we collected in on the Heart of Taurus and @Bottom Hat will have our permission to go to where ever this mega ship is docked and go get that stufz.

They had two megaships worth originally, but I hazzed the one wiv all they stuphz in it, init.

Hence the cg had to be arranged to replace what I hazzed!

 

[Cori]

The remaining question to be answered is: was this tale of irradiated ores genuine, which might lead to some technological breakthrough, or was the whole story only made up by Salvation to distract from the other CG, with no truth behind it at all?

 

[Horse372]

A friendly reminder for all CMDRs who used my FC TCS Havamal (XHB-L6M) as a base of operation and ship storage for the duration of this CG:

The FC will depart for the bubble this evening. Departure at around 17:00 Elite time. I will stay in the bubble for a while i, but I intend to start a deep space expedition in a few weeks, so you better make sure all your stuff is removed from the FC by then

. And thanks again for the dock space.

 

[Sync Mercy]

The truth lies in between.

The HoT is not a military ship. Sending it near the Musashi and having it publicly ask for support just draws more attention to the Musashi's location, so it cannot be a pure distraction.

I think that Salvation needed the materials the CG asked for new development, as well as Guardian Artifacts. Sending the HoT alone would be too risky with all the people being anti-Salvation, so he had to get the Musashi close-by, but the Musashi was already tasked with collecting Guardian Artifacts, meaning the HoT had to go to the Musashi and not the reverse.Salvation then made that radiation pretense for the HoT to be out there and ask for mats collection. Taurus will just release a statement saying that the radiation made the ore worthless and thus "discarded it all", when in reality it'll all go toward Salvation's weaponries.

 

[Neilski]

I wasn't really bothered about the rewards, so I just dropped a few token tonnes in to expand the prize pool for those that were.

Very kind of you
I've always wondered if signing up for a CG is enough to increase the number of contributors and hence drive down the 75% (or other) threshold, or if you actually have to make at least one contribution. Has this ever been established, definitively?

 

[Cori]

Very kind of you
I've always wondered if signing up for a CG is enough to increase the number of contributors and hence drive down the 75% (or other) threshold, or if you actually have to make at least one contribution. Has this ever been established, definitively?

Adding more contributors at the bottom doing only the minimum effort should drive up the 75%, 50% and 25% boundaries, if anything. You have to make at least some contribution to come into the 100%, though.

 

[Neilski]

Adding more contributors at the bottom doing only the minimum effort should drive up the 75%, 50% and 25% boundaries, if anything.

Eh? Not understanding why you'd think that. If a bunch of people sign up and contribute the bare minimum, this will lower the 75% contribution level. Think of it as just lining everyone up in order of contribution size and then the first quarter of them (between the 100th and 75th percentiles) simply get no reward at all. If 1500 people were already signed up and the 75% level was say 1000 tons, and then 501 people signed up and delivered 1 ton, the 75% level would automagically become 1 ton.

You have to make at least some contribution to come into the 100%, though.

Ah yes I do now recall that you don't get told you're in the 100% until you contribute, but does this actually mean that the thresholds aren't affected until you do? One way to find out (if not already definitive of course) would be to have a coordinated mass sign-up at a quiet time of day

 

[Cori]

Eh? Not understanding why you'd think that. If a bunch of people sign up and contribute the bare minimum, this will lower the 75% contribution level. Think of it as just lining everyone up in order of contribution size and then the first quarter of them (between the 100th and 75th percentiles) simply get no reward at all. If 1500 people were already signed up and the 75% level was say 1000 tons, and then 501 people signed up and delivered 1 ton, the 75% level would automagically become 1 ton.

Ah yes I do now recall that you don't get told you're in the 100% until you contribute, but does this actually mean that the thresholds aren't affected until you do? One way to find out (if not already definitive of course) would be to have a coordinated mass sign-up at a quiet time of day

Bad phrasing, perhaps. I meant that adding more people at the bottom would increase the number of people in the higher brackets. In terms of the numerical targets for each one, yes, they'd come down.

I'll admit I haven't tested it but I wouldn't really expect Commanders who don't count as part of the calculation of the 100% level to nevertheless be counted towards calculating the 75%, 50% and 25% levels.

 

[Neilski]

I'll admit I haven't tested it but I wouldn't really expect Commanders who don't count as part of the calculation of the 100% level to nevertheless be counted towards calculating the 75%, 50% and 25% levels.

Yeah I reckon you're probably right, but it's hard to believe with a forum like this that none of us have ever gone as far as proving that question one way or another
(Of course, if it turned out that simply signing up was enough and we managed to demonstrate that, FD might then feel the need to change it anyway to prevent... em, let's call it abuse )

 

[Maolagin]

Bad phrasing, perhaps. I meant that adding more people at the bottom would increase the number of people in the higher brackets. In terms of the numerical targets for each one, yes, they'd come down.

I'll admit I haven't tested it but I wouldn't really expect Commanders who don't count as part of the calculation of the 100% level to nevertheless be counted towards calculating the 75%, 50% and 25% levels.

In a sense this experiment happens naturally at the very start of every CG - you have an early period when many people have signed up but haven't contributed anything yet. If the quartile brackets were 25% of the total number of signups, you'd expect that sometimes the entire bottom quartile would be filled by people who hadn't contributed yet. But you never see this, the 75% threshold is never equal to zero. Without access to data that only Frontier has, that's probably about all you can say, but I think it's reasonably convincing evidence that only players with a nonzero contribution count towards the bracket sizes.

 

[Neilski]

In a sense this experiment happens naturally at the very start of every CG - you have an early period when many people have signed up but haven't contributed anything yet. If the quartile brackets were 25% of the total number of signups, you'd expect that sometimes the entire bottom quartile would be filled by people who hadn't contributed yet. But you never see this, the 75% threshold is never equal to zero. Without access to data that only Frontier has, that's probably about all you can say, but I think it's reasonably convincing evidence that only players with a nonzero contribution count towards the bracket sizes.

Ahh, that sounds like an excellent argument to seal the deal. I do have a small niggling doubt though, because the only place I know of to see the threshold is Inara, and I have always had issues getting Inara to recognise that I've signed up at all, despite running ED Discovery (and I've inspected the journal updates which should provide that info to Inara). I normally have to manually force an import of data from the Frontier servers (even the daily-ish download doesn't seem to accomplish it) or hit the "Participate" button, and only after that will it track my contributions and show which band I'm in...

 

[CMDR Jago Kain]

IIRC we did test this (or get confirmation from Frontier) some years ago. If you haven't contributed you are not part of the 100%.

Edit: With more thought the fog is clearing. It was originally the case that simply signing up for the CG made you a "contributor". This was unintuitive and gamey so it was eventually changed to the current state but I couldn't tell you when.

 

[Kakamage]

Not sure why there's hate from CMDRs that don't like the paintjobs. If you're not a fan, enjoy having some time off from a CG. I'm a CMDR who has only a single paintjob and I genuinely appreciated the ability to acquire a few more for relatively minimal effort.

I managed to scrouge up enough in the final two hours to get to 126 (whew) and learned a bit about mining!
-For example, I had no idea why collector limpets and mining lasers would be placed on the same action button. I assumed that firing more than once would just force just-launched limpets to sacrifice themselves as new limpets spawn. Turns out that assumption was grossly wrong and they only get launched when the originals die from time-out or distance.
-I also learned why people have 3/4/5 collector limpet controllers. The limpets are pretty fast but collecting the quantity of fragments flying off the asteroid takes longer than I thought! It makes so much more sense to have a ton of them out for super-fast collection.
-I learned a bit about filtering but wish there was a screen on the refinery page with a master list of universe-wide mineable materials instead of having to rely on recently-lasered, free-floating fragments to add or remove from the filter list.

 

[Neilski]

I learned a bit about filtering but wish there was a screen on the refinery page with a master list of universe-wide mineable materials instead of having to rely on recently-lasered, free-floating fragments to add or remove from the filter list

Yup, you and a few thousand other users have wished for the same thing for a long time. It's one of quite a few QOL things that I guess will probably never happen, sadly.

 

[Neilski]

Edit: With more thought the fog is clearing. It was originally the case that simply signing up for the CG made you a "contributor". This was unintuitive and gamey so it was eventually changed to the current state but I couldn't tell you when.

Ahh yeah OK that makes a lot of sense. If they had wanted that behaviour from the start, an easier/better way to achieve it might have been to simply consider everyone signed up to every CG but keep that hidden until/unless you contribute something. That would also instantly have avoided the "oh noes, I delivered stuff 10 times but I forgot to sign up" grief

 

[WayLongWay]

Ahh yeah OK that makes a lot of sense. If they had wanted that behaviour from the start, an easier/better way to achieve it might have been to simply consider everyone signed up to every CG but keep that hidden until/unless you contribute something. That would also instantly have avoided the "oh noes, I delivered stuff 10 times but I forgot to sign up" grief

This wouldn't work for those (few) who want to deliver the same goods to the CG station without participating.

 

[Neilski]

This wouldn't work for those (few) who want to deliver the same goods to the CG station without participating.

Wow, it never occurred to me that such people could exist but yeah I guess you're right.

 

[Cori]

Not sure why there's hate from CMDRs that don't like the paintjobs. If you're not a fan, enjoy having some time off from a CG. I'm a CMDR who has only a single paintjob and I genuinely appreciated the ability to acquire a few more for relatively minimal effort.

I managed to scrouge up enough in the final two hours to get to 126 (whew) and learned a bit about mining!
-For example, I had no idea why collector limpets and mining lasers would be placed on the same action button. I assumed that firing more than once would just force just-launched limpets to sacrifice themselves as new limpets spawn. Turns out that assumption was grossly wrong and they only get launched when the originals die from time-out or distance.
-I also learned why people have 3/4/5 collector limpet controllers. The limpets are pretty fast but collecting the quantity of fragments flying off the asteroid takes longer than I thought! It makes so much more sense to have a ton of them out for super-fast collection.
-I learned a bit about filtering but wish there was a screen on the refinery page with a master list of universe-wide mineable materials instead of having to rely on recently-lasered, free-floating fragments to add or remove from the filter list.

I don't hate the paintjobs, although I'll admit it's a bit annoying that so many of the recent ones - from CG or Twitch drop - are for ships I don't fly. Luck of the draw, I guess. Bring on the Krait II, Cutter and Courier paintjobs!