Lances penetrate, right? What if the mining Lance could penetrate deeper in the asteroid, and into enemy ships, mining from a secondary pool of minerals, and dealing extraordinary module damage?
The biggest problem with the mining Lance is a lack of purpose. If you want to fight, you are going to bring dedicated weapons for fighting. If you want to mine, you are going to bring dedicated tools for mining. Nobody needs a weapon / tool that does both of those poorly.
But the name Lance gave me an idea. Medieval lances pierced things. They could go straight through armor. So, we apply that to the mining Lance. It would still be less efficient than the ordinary C2 mining laser, but it would ignore the amount of minerals remaining in the asteroid. It would not take any away from the C2 mining lasers pool, and could in fact keep mining indefinitely.
Before you get too excited, this would not be terribly overpowered. Small mining lasers mine very slowly. If you tried to use purely mining lances, your mining rate would decrease dramatically, to about 1/3 of your maximum potential rate. So using pure mining Lances would likely not be the way to go, but you could mix in a few mining lances, to continue mining for a bit after you have finished emptying the asteroid, but before you have finished collecting all of the floating minerals! Another place where they could be really handy would be if you only had a few tons left to fill up in your cargo hold. You could take a few more seconds to fill up those last few tons before heading back to the station.
When it comes to combat, we could take the exact same thematic approach. These would be mining lasers designed to penetrate deep into the enemy ship and deal module damage. Increase the armor penetration, module damage, and penetration depth, making these the premiere power plant detonators! Large, heavy mining ships could Ram into enemies, and then use the mining lances to destroy their internals, a way for them to fight without actually needing to waste mining capacity by carrying weapons!
I'm really excited by this idea and think it could be a really cool way to help the module, so I would love to hear your insights. Thanks!
The biggest problem with the mining Lance is a lack of purpose. If you want to fight, you are going to bring dedicated weapons for fighting. If you want to mine, you are going to bring dedicated tools for mining. Nobody needs a weapon / tool that does both of those poorly.
But the name Lance gave me an idea. Medieval lances pierced things. They could go straight through armor. So, we apply that to the mining Lance. It would still be less efficient than the ordinary C2 mining laser, but it would ignore the amount of minerals remaining in the asteroid. It would not take any away from the C2 mining lasers pool, and could in fact keep mining indefinitely.
Before you get too excited, this would not be terribly overpowered. Small mining lasers mine very slowly. If you tried to use purely mining lances, your mining rate would decrease dramatically, to about 1/3 of your maximum potential rate. So using pure mining Lances would likely not be the way to go, but you could mix in a few mining lances, to continue mining for a bit after you have finished emptying the asteroid, but before you have finished collecting all of the floating minerals! Another place where they could be really handy would be if you only had a few tons left to fill up in your cargo hold. You could take a few more seconds to fill up those last few tons before heading back to the station.
When it comes to combat, we could take the exact same thematic approach. These would be mining lasers designed to penetrate deep into the enemy ship and deal module damage. Increase the armor penetration, module damage, and penetration depth, making these the premiere power plant detonators! Large, heavy mining ships could Ram into enemies, and then use the mining lances to destroy their internals, a way for them to fight without actually needing to waste mining capacity by carrying weapons!
I'm really excited by this idea and think it could be a really cool way to help the module, so I would love to hear your insights. Thanks!
