Came up in a discussion with a friend regarding trying to supplement colony building using manual laser mining and the new refinery contacts.
Currently manually mining materials for colony building suffers from similar time efficiency issues to trying to manually mine your own fuel. It just isn't worth it from a time investment perspective, the limitations on sub capital ship cargo space means that trying to mine bulk materials for construction requires several trips to and from the mining site, to a port with a refinery contact (which is not guaranteed to be nearby, and not easy to get set up in a new colony), then either to a carrier to store or directly taken to the construction site. Whereas one could much more easily do a single mining run of the normal high-value minerals (platinum, monazite, etc.) then use the earned funds to just buy all of the construction metals directly and skip the mining step entirely. Not to mention the fact that the current mineral -> metal ratios make refining even less appealing as you will end up with only half the metals that your cargo hold maximum allows for.
One way to smooth this process would be to add a refinery service as a fleet carrier customization option. Trading a portion of carrier cargo capacity and a weekly fee for a mobile mining base that minerals can be converted directly on and the metals immediately sold to the carrier owner or transferred directly to cargo would smooth out the construction material mining loop and encourage group mining activities as the carrier would now serve a similar role to the mining capital ships seen in games such as EVE Online, allowing for bulk material compaction (direct 2:1 mineral -> metal conversion), and mass storage that can be jumped from the mining site to colony site in one trip.
Development time wise I would expect this to be a relatively low time investment for effect feature. Considering that fleet carrier services that add contacts to carriers already exist (exploration data, bounty redemption, etc.) this should require little in the way of bespoke coding to implement.
Currently manually mining materials for colony building suffers from similar time efficiency issues to trying to manually mine your own fuel. It just isn't worth it from a time investment perspective, the limitations on sub capital ship cargo space means that trying to mine bulk materials for construction requires several trips to and from the mining site, to a port with a refinery contact (which is not guaranteed to be nearby, and not easy to get set up in a new colony), then either to a carrier to store or directly taken to the construction site. Whereas one could much more easily do a single mining run of the normal high-value minerals (platinum, monazite, etc.) then use the earned funds to just buy all of the construction metals directly and skip the mining step entirely. Not to mention the fact that the current mineral -> metal ratios make refining even less appealing as you will end up with only half the metals that your cargo hold maximum allows for.
One way to smooth this process would be to add a refinery service as a fleet carrier customization option. Trading a portion of carrier cargo capacity and a weekly fee for a mobile mining base that minerals can be converted directly on and the metals immediately sold to the carrier owner or transferred directly to cargo would smooth out the construction material mining loop and encourage group mining activities as the carrier would now serve a similar role to the mining capital ships seen in games such as EVE Online, allowing for bulk material compaction (direct 2:1 mineral -> metal conversion), and mass storage that can be jumped from the mining site to colony site in one trip.
Development time wise I would expect this to be a relatively low time investment for effect feature. Considering that fleet carrier services that add contacts to carriers already exist (exploration data, bounty redemption, etc.) this should require little in the way of bespoke coding to implement.