The Mining discussion thread.

[Sterlino]

Someone, time ago, started a thread about of ''what you will first do in game ?''

Well i think that the first thing i would like to do in game is :
to buy a good ship and try to start a space mining career.

Do you wanna know why i almost hate all the recent MMO games ? the combat.
I would really like to see a real free game and not only totally focused on combat.
Ok combat is acceptable when you get attacked by space pirates or
(dunno) angry aliens (lol) but NOT all the times and NOT every 5 minutes.
I would like to play a space game where you travel with your spaceship without the necessity to fight with someone somewhere and somehow.
I would like to have a very large commercial ship starting from ''Xico'' and travelling in the same star system to catch some asteroids..
Or maybe travelling to an unknow planet on an unknow new star system in ''the frontier'' ..landing on it and placing my techno extractors to try to find some ''special mineral'' or whatever.
Expecially would be really awesome if there will be not only 1 method to extract resources from a planet or an asteroid.

Doesn't matter if early or more later in the update stages of the game..
Free mining play in Elite Dangerous would be a great achievement in the game creation.

But this is only my personal view of the thing...
You people,
what do you think about 'mining' in ED ?

 

[Steve]

I'm just aware that it's not going to happen until the planetary landings are enabled

 

[Cristari]

I wonder how mining will work with the different type of game play modes there are and with everything feeding back to the game servers.

You find a nice rock that will last you a few days you mine it then go to bed and wake up in the morning to finish it off then when you log in it's completely gone as everyone else has mined it to death before you even started on it and your playing solo!

 

[Capt. Hook]

I hope we get strip miner lasers (not stripping miners) and mining drones ala EVE. Best thing about the game I liked before I quit!

 

[The Land]

I'm just aware that it's not going to happen until the planetary landings are enabled

I imagine asteroid mining will still be in - float up, blast it, pick up pieces, rinse, repeat...

 

[Jokester]

I imagine asteroid mining will still be in - float up, blast it, pick up pieces, rinse, repeat...

Can just see it now, first thing I want to do is go and see the rings of Saturn. Turn up there and they're gone.

 

[The Land]

Can just see it now, first thing I want to do is go and see the rings of Saturn. Turn up there and they're gone.

hmmm, they might be declared a nature reserve... ;-)

 

[Jokester]

hmmm, they might be declared a nature reserve... ;-)

That's an idea, maybe you would need a mining permit for settled systems, but you could go to frontier worlds and just mine anything you want, but with the risk of pirates.

 

[bullfrog]

Its difficult to know where to pitch mining ideas because I dont recognise the engine so it is hard to be sure what capabilities it has.

I would hope that what The Land wants, blast and gather, would be entry level mining and that there would also be more sophisticated methods to use, dependant on owning better ship equipment.

One of the things which occurs to me about mining in Elite is fuel. In earlier versions of Elite you could scoop fuel from suns and this was very useful because it meant you could range widely and gave you a feeling of survivalist independence from the economic infrastructure.

This would be important for exploiting distant uncolonised systems, where the finds would be more rewarding but the support non existent.

As a preamble to distant mining ideas, I would also like the ability to get fuel in other ways. Assuming it is purely hydrogen, I would like the opportunity to scoop it from gas giants and also mine ice roids (like Kuiper belt planetismals) for water and with a suitable upgrade split water into hydrogen and oxygen with the option to put the hydrogen in the fuel tank and the oxygen into cargo, with an additional option to dump the oxygen in cargo if something more useful became available. I dont know what the life support model will be but I assume that like previous versions of Elite oxygen will not feature as a consumable.

Deriving fuel from water would be something which could be expanded on in later updates, where you could get water from other sources like moons, cubewano's and also planet surfaces.

 

[The Space Pirate]

hmmm, they might be declared a nature reserve... ;-)

Good question, and one that needs an answer.

On second thoughts, the rings of Saturn are so huge and there are so many of them - each composed of an untold amount of small rocks - it should take much longer than any of our lifespans to 'mine them out'. I don't think it's a concern.

 

[Geraldine]

Mining wouldn't be very profitable in the core systems like Sol and might actually be illegal

EDIT: Hey want hear something daft and silly I used to do in FE2?

No?

Tough, you going to anyways!

I used to get a full load of 10 MB4s and placed em to create a smiley on the planet surface that you could see from space. They all lit up at the same time.

 

[Capt. Hook]

Mining wouldn't be very profitable in the core systems like Sol and might actually be illegal

Does drilling a hole in another ship to plunder the contents count as mining? Think that might still be very profitable in the core worlds tho no doubt illegal as you say!

 

[Slawkenbergius]

Deriving fuel from water would be something which could be expanded on in later updates, where you could get water from other sources like moons, cubewano's and also planet surfaces.

I like the sound of lowering my scoops and skimming the surface of an alien sea to restock my water, fuel and oxygen supplies.

 

[Geraldine]

Does drilling a hole in another ship to plunder the contents count as mining?

No that's called piracy you naughty boy!

 

[Capt. Hook]

I like the sound of lowering my scoops and skimming the surface of an alien sea to restock my water, fuel and oxygen supplies.

careful what you scoop up though - getting rid of that alien water beastie out of your ubend, 40M light years from the nearest plumber could be a nightmare

 

[HenryS]

That's an interesting point: If the solar system has more resources than civilisation could hope to mine in a few thousand years, then why are people going out to other stars in the first place? How does the economy work if natural resources are effectively free because they're so plentiful? I guess this might be one of those cases of introducing diminishing returns on mining in the same spot, for gameplay purposes.

 

[NextGame]

you could just make asteroids non destructible and you mine them, the loot appears, and you just scoop it up, and after a while it is depleted and needs to recharge

or something

 

[Mr_Jim]

Mining is also a good incentive to explore. I´m thinking the intro for the movie "There will be blood". If you find a really good system with a alot of resources and brag about it in some forum the pirates who can read will see it too.

I myself am wondering how much disinformation we are going to see in the future in the game and on the forums/irc/whatever platform people are going to use.

 

[Jokester]

I hope they retain the ability to follow people through hyperspace, would add scope for a little bit of industrial espionage.

 

[DrBaggy]

I like the sound of lowering my scoops and skimming the surface of an alien sea to restock my water, fuel and oxygen supplies.

That was always fun....and tricky! Easy to get pulled in and/or fried