Well I hope they add restock before the cg or limpets might just become the new void opals
you can craft your own limpets with super common mats
Well this got me thinking. Time is the ultimate currency in this game, goes the wisdom on the forum. So in the (I think unlikely) event that restock isn't available for the CG, what would the exchange rate be?
In the comparison below, let's presume the necessary scouting has already been done, so you know exactly where to go to harvest each.
Limpets: need 10 iron and 10 nickel to synth 4 limpets. Both are tier-1 mats, so probably best to bookmark a planet with high iron/nickel percentages and a large number of geo sites (maybe something like Stuemeae GG-Y c8714 1). Someone would have to remind me of the refresh time for geosite drops, but it's long enough you'd want several for farming. Given how dense the core is, there will undoubtedly be one within one jump. I'd guess about a minimum of 3-4 minutes from jump-in to landing at a surface site on a close-in planet. If you're quick with the SRV I'd guess you could mine out the piceous cobbles in 5-ish minutes, and (with large variance) ballpark 10 Ni, 20 Fe. So that's roughly 10 minutes work for four limpets. The next four will be slightly cheaper, since you just have to hop to the next geosite, until you exhaust that system. Let's round down to 2 minutes per limpet as an optimistic rate to target.
Void opals or other core mining resource requires finding and cracking a motherlode asteroid. Again, given the density of the core, there's probably a hotspot for the material you want within jump range of the CG system. Opals will tend to be a bit farther from the star, but you can approach rings faster. Although let's rule out emergency dropping, since if we don't have restock we probably also don't have repair services yet. So I'd call it 2-3 minutes from jumping to arriving at a (already mapped) hotspot. Experienced core miners are reporting they can reliably pull around 90-120 t/hr of core materials, which works out to cracking say 5-8 asteroids per hour. So you're looking at about 12 minutes work on the low end to first opals, but once you're going it's possible to approach 2 t per minute.
So given that time is money, if you just need a single synth of limpets it's slightly less work than getting a single unit of void opals. But if you wanted to pay someone in void opals to bring you bulk limpets, the appropriate exchange rate would actually be around
four void opals per limpet. Pricey! (And questionably sustainable - you'd be doing well to bring in 4t of core resources per limpet spent on mining unless you do manual scooping.)
