Managed to rustle up some crew for a night of Mole mining...we actually made some decent credits this time and nobody accidentally blew my ship up with exploding rocks, miracles
A crew of 4 of us made on average 15-20k each per trip...once I had paid them. I could have just run off with the total takings of course
Later on in the evening flying with a more experienced miner in the front cab and just the 2 of us, we both made 50-75k each on our mining trips given the reduced crew...not bad going and quite an enjoyable distraction. I do like the multiplayer aspect of the Mole but you seriously need to use voice comms as the view and information available from the pilot seat is minimal once you start mining... the text chat is too slow and clunky since you rely on having experienced miners in the cabs to give you directions since most of mining goes on right under the nose or off to the sides where you can't as a pilot see it.
It's always a rule of thumb to try and get folks who already run a Prospector of their own as crew...mainly because it saves suffering exploding ships and me spilling my coffee in fright....you really have to trust that the guys operating the mining lasers know what they're doing. If they don't, you either get a load of worthless crap on board through their inexperience of not knowing to just extract the percentages that'll earn credits instead of just hoovering up everything because it's there...or the ship goes bang after being showered with exploding rocks. As a pilot on a Mole, you have to have the experience to find the more lucrative rocks with the main scanner, ignore the mostly worthless crap and know what you're looking at for the mining cab guys to mine it in the first place...a proper co-op team effort, which I like. The cab crew can also scan for rocks too which is nice since a few potential targets appear off to the sides which the pilot may not see amongst the clutter.
The earning potential of the Mole is roughly balanced with the Prospector for the moment, assuming you can afford to fit a Helix mining head on the Prospector...the larger ore capacity of the Mole means splitting any profits whereas the Prospector is purely a solo venture. As yet, there's no rocks either in mass or density I can't mine with a solo Prospector...at least not that I've found since I forked out for the Helix head....Part of the idea behind the Mole was the ability to break larger mass or density rocks or asteroids containing richer veins of ore combining the larger sized multiple mining heads, that mechanic doesn't seem to be implemented fully as yet. It's still a decent option for a night in Star Citizen with some mates or randoms at least since operating the Mole solo is a complete pain.
The experienced guy I had along for most of the night managed to earn more than enough to buy the 108K aUEC Helix mining head for his Prospector he couldn't previously afford so he was pretty chuffed...whereas I earned enough even offsetting the running costs of the Mole in fuel and repairs to make me like the mutliplayer aspect of the mining mechanic in SC quite a bit more than I did initially.
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