Ship launched fighters – Mining Edition

I'm not into mining but for some reason I thought of a concept for fighters intended for mining usable in solo play with NPC pilots as well as enabling multicrew mining.
I might have forgotten to consider the one or other problem but well... here you go


The Prospector Fighter:
Loadout

  • material scanner: scans an asteroid in front of the fighter for its material composition (takes a few seconds)
  • marker canon: shoot a marker at an asteroid. The mothership can see and target the marker in order to fire a prospector limpet at the asteroid. max. 5 active markers
NPC crew
  • NPC in mothership: follows the fighter
  • NPC in fighter: standby near the mothership
Multicrew
  • MC CMDRs can scan and mark asteroids for the mothership pilot to prospect and mine

Additional

  • the mothership pilot can't see an asteroids material composition till a prospector limpet is used on it
  • to negate the advantage of the SLF capable ships of not having to use limpets to find out asteroids material composition, we would need a composition scanner (size 1 modul) for smaller ships

The Mining Fighter
Type 1 intended for solo mining

  • capable of mining asteroids
  • capable of monitoring/launching the motherships collector limpets at the cost of a slower mining rate
Loadout
  • low class mining lasers
  • limpet controll interface
NPC crew
  • NPC in mothership: positioning of the mothership "close" to the fighter and its target asteroid with the cargo hatch faceing the asteroid
  • NPC in fighter: mines the motherships target asteroid
Multicrew
  • MC CMDRs can use the mining lasers

the idea is to have your NPC pilot increasing your collector limpets efficiency by facing the asteroid with the cargo hatch while you can position the fighter at an ideal mining spot and monitor the collector limpets and launching new ones when some expire
having the NPC controll the fighter won't be much help because they can't identify good mining spots and just start mining your target asteroid (might even risk loosing the fighter due to the asteroids spin)
Type 1 is aimed at solo players giving them the ability to controll their collectors from the fighter at a slight drop in mining speed. Not really good for multicrew as the MC CMDR can't use the limpet interface.

Type 2 intended for multicrew mining

  • capable of mining asteroids fast
  • no controll over the motherships collector limpets because better mining lasers have more mass and need a lot mor energy
Loadout
  • high class mining lasers
NPC crew / Multicrew
  • same as Type 1

the idea is to give a MC CMDR a mining fighter with slightly faster mining speed than Type 1. using it for solo mining won't make much sense as the risk of having your NPC pilot crashing the fighter is to great and you cant controll your collectors if you are in the fighter yourself
 
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The mining in ED requires complete redesigning. So the idea being looking like patch to the current system is deniable.
 
As I said, I don't have much experience when it comes to mining (I only did that bit required for the engineers),
but from what I've seen on the forum I'm aware that mining needs some huge changes to make it more intresting.

That being said, I didn't inted this idea to "fix" mining.
I simply wanted to include fighters in mining and throw multicrew into the mix at the same time.

I do think the idea is worth discussing...
 
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