Planetary Mining

[NineballGames]

So Among Certain Like-minded players and streamers we have debated about how we could have more planetary interaction. Mining being one of them.

Without drastically changing certain game mechanics we have come up with a few ideas for this.
For The Ship:
Large Planetary Vehicle Hanger for a Mining Rover.
Detailed Surface Scanners will detect "Hotspots" for deposits on the crusts of small moons and high content type worlds.

The Rover And Mechanics:

The rover is a bit bigger/ bulkier than the normal rover with a mining drill/laser drill on it.
Rover radar detects material density on the surface which you can then prospect like an asteroid.
Rover has a large cargo bay say like 50-100 cargo. maybe on board refinery.

The Mining:
Drill locations have properties like Material content, Different % of minerals and things, different mining hardness for difficulty.
once you find a spot that looks good and has what you want you "deploy" your mining laser which would lock you in position and once you start "firing" it starts
a mini game say like the Subsurface Missile launcher mini game that just keeps going and going.
you could have to manage your speed, depth and maybe heat generated and the more you stay in the "green" the more % of minerals keep popping into your cargo until the
deposit is depleted then you start moving to the next area until you fill up and call in or drive back to your ship! the more you fail the more you miss out on. and the harder the drill spot the more "obstacles" in your mini game

The idea was sparked by a twitch streamer named DFLY1337 and myself talking about how it would be like in the movie Armageddon with mining SRVs and then I, NineballGames, also on twitch added on to that idea with some of these ideas!
we even went over maybe having a wing mission to fly out to a super massive asteroid and landing on it with SRVs, driving around to fissures and drilling to deploy thermal detonating charges on it and shattering the asteroid just like the movie for mining or maybe a mission to "save a space station from asteroid strike"

we talked more about it tonight and I decided it should be written down somewhere.

 

[Stabby_Dave]

I like it. Atm, surface prospecting is pretty dull.

 

[Deide]

Would be cool to utilise the seismic charge launcher in your ship to produce areas that you then mine with a mining SRV. Instead of a mining laser, I think it would be nice to deploy a large corkscrew drill that produces lots of material in the same spot; though you'd need to deploy stabilisers. Once your cargo is full - or maybe a container/cart that you're hauling behind you - you drive back to your ship and dump it into your ship's refinery somehow.

 

[Killnine]

I like the idea.

Would also love seeing automated mining rigs that can be left on a site. They'd take a considerable amount of time to mine a decent amount of ores, and would be vulnerable to piracy unless guarded. Perhaps there would be also turrets/skimmers that could be deployed to deter the weaker attempts at piracy, but mostly mining rigs would rely on not being found.

To prevent mining rig spamming, they could for example require a controller similar to limpets, with a limit on concurrently active rigs. The controller would get status updates from the rigs, and alerts if they detect threats.