Are Hotspots still Hot?

[FlaviusGlok]

Is it just me or have the hot spots recently been not so hot. Meaning that there are deep core asteroids but not necessarily matching the hotspot mineral. Lately I have been getting a lot of minerals other than what the hotpot is for. Most recently in a Musgravite hotspot with the following: Mus g - 1, Alex - 3, Monaz -2, Serend - 2 This has been typical for a couple of weeks or so.

This makes selling at a good price a pain in the butt!

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

I have had the feeling this has been happening for months (finding the majority of cores in hotspots to all be a different type instead of the hotspot label), but I'm not a big miner so I assumed other people would know better...

 

[Northpin]

Is it just me or have the hot spots recently been not so hot. Meaning that there are deep core asteroids but not necessarily matching the hotspot mineral. Lately I have been getting a lot of minerals other than what the hotpot is for. Most recently in a Musgravite hotspot with the following: Mus g - 1, Alex - 3, Monaz -2, Serend - 2 This has been typical for a couple of weeks or so.

This makes selling at a good price a pain in the butt!

Could be a bad luck streak
I once found 5 bromellite cores in a row while in void-opal hotspot...

 

[HRDiagram]

I've recently been into a Rhodplumsite Hotspot, where I found 3 cores of Rhodplumsite, 3 of Serendibite, 2 or 3 or Monazite and one of Painite.

As far as I am concerned, it could have been called a Whateverite Hotspot.

 

[Treya]

Maybe we should think of hotspots more as probability spots.

I honestly never thought of them as anything but.


Back when Void Opals were still selling like hotcakes my average time between cores was around 15 min. Nowadays after switching to rocky rings that has come down to about 6 min. The biggest difference of course is that instead of focusing on just one type of core we can now mine every core we come across. And after an average haul I usually see about 40% of the advertised mineral in my hold with the remainder made up by varying amounts of other stuff. Correlating that with the difference in search time suggests to me that the general distribution around a hotspots center hasn't changed (or very little).

 

[FlaviusGlok]

That doesn't surprise me in the least. Maybe we should think of hotspots more as probability spots.

As an aside, does anyone still believe that the external appearance of an asteroid says anything about its contents (apart from the obvious like fissures and surface deposits)? The idea is quite nice, but unfortunately not reflected in my daily experience. Seems to be all purely random and arbitrary.

I don't think shape means a lot. I think it may be a bit of both though. For instance the really small deep core asteroid pulse wave imposters seems to be common and I believe never produce. be careful, sometimes a larger asteroid looks small if you are seeing it on end only. Within a field there may be several or a few shapes that produce while others may not. But to say only one shape produces with no randomness is wrong. I have a type 9 heavy and literally will never mine long enough to run out of limpets so rarely do I get up close to look for fissures.

As another aside I have noticed a significant difference in pulse wave signatures in dark asteroid field vs full sunlight fields. I have not seen that discussed. The black lines that eventually merge into black areas in the first part of the scan are telltale signs. But on my PC this can take on a greenish look when in sunlight.