Mining is terrible in this game. Incredibly boring and uninvolving as a whole process. It's just shoot and scoop. You spend something like 15 seconds actually mining, 2 minutes scooping. It's more of a series of short flight tests than actually mining. I don't agree with the posts asking for tractor beams or things that will just gather the ore for you, that just makes it even less involving.
I always thought that the mining process should take several minutes per asteroid and only have to scoop a couple of rocks afterwards. A single asteroid could fill a standard cobra or something. I'm not sure the exact quantities but ultimately, you should get lots of ore from a single asteroid but have to spend several minutes on that single asteroid.
You have to scan an asteroid to determine where the ore veins are, then you have to drill several holes into the asteroid in an effort to get the proper placements for the explosives to break the asteroid apart properly to maximize the amount of ore you get. This puts the vast majority of the focus on the actual mining process instead of the scooping and can take several minutes to accomplish well due to the asteroid actually moving in space, forcing players to get good at learning to fly without flight assist. This makes mining, in my opinion, a high skilled job.
Then you can get into customizing your mining gear. Mining lasers with a better range so you don't have to get as close to the asteroid, or stronger lasers to drill faster. Different types of charges that can break the asteroid apart. Then we can start talking about how to make the scooping faster.
If anyone believes that this will make mining a "mini-game" then I guess I want a mini game. But as someone that works in mining, this isn't exactly how it's done but it is quite accurate for real world mining. The exploration mining to determine where the ore is, the drilling, the blasting, the scooping, the refining all in one ship.
