Ughhh Mining - why are collector limpets so stupid and/or fragile?

[Requiem Mortis]

I find if I keep my ship stationary they live longer. Moving forces them to recalculate their path usually directly through a rock fragment.

 

[Charles Erika von Hackbeil]

I witnessed a small difference in which ship I use to mine (or fire limpets):

When I´´´ m in the Python I will destroy every third prospector (it will just crash into the ship and die on minimal movement or slightly too high speed), same goes for collectors when I´ m moving at more than 30 m/s - they mostly die when I´ m in the Python.
Switching to the Krait Mk II makes most of these problems go away, which makes me think it´´ s just an "unlucky" limpet path with some of the ships. But whatever the reason is, it´´ s highly annoying and needs to be dealt with. We had this problem for too long now.

Hello Frontier?

 

[GunnerBill]

Slightly related - In the mining CG. mining lasers only, I have had 3 or 4 occurrences of a fragment being below the surface of the asteroid. This has the annoying effect of your collectors one after the other suiciding into the rock. I even tried scraping the surface in case the fragment was just sitting on the surface but no, it was annoyingly out of view and no amount of cargo scoop scraping over the surface made any difference.

Yes. This is actually reason #3 for limpets to kill themselves. I've even seen limpets push chunks into the rock when they've suicided themselves.

What I have found with clipped chunks is that they follow their normal trajectory and can eventually pop out of the other side - if they don't expire first. Try giving any part you can see a good nudge to give it some speed and it may sail right through the rock.

Ore chunk clipped into surface of asteroid:

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I don't know anything about programming, but I know about vectors in photoshop and illustrator. When I think about controlling a limpet I imagine a start point and an end point and a vector line of travel between them. Changing the course of this line should be feasible in real-time if a rock or ship comes in proximity- it would just deform the line. The only reason a limpet should get destroyed is if that line got pinched out before it could be redrawn. I just don't quite get how these things are so fickle.

1. Straight line to target. Wohooo
2. Asteroid spins, chunk obstructs now vector.
3. Limpet Crashes
4. Starts checking vector again for obstructions... oops.

 

[Watcher]

We've been over this. Because it is literally part of game lore that machine learning and AI are banned in this society. Everything is deliberately stupid.

That's why we can't have nice things like multi-jump autopilot.

Even skimmers are actually telepresencing-multicrew-NPCs. Or something.

We really ought to have some background lore in the Codex about this.
Then again I seem to be saying that a lot recently. I also might be biased, I like having something to listen to while mining...

 

[Solsticide]

I'm surprised the disposable nature of limpets and having thousands of limpet corpses cluttering up space hasn't angered some interstellar environmental agency or something. I'm sure they'd love a good rant about that on Galnet.

 

[D3rv1sh]

Another great example of good game design. Let's have automated collectors that can collect materials for players. But hey, we have to have some way of penalizing players for being lazy. I know, let's make them dumb collector limpets. Let's remove collision detection on them. The example of the U turn has already been given. They have 0 collision detection when scooping a fragment close to the asteroid and quite happily U turn right into an outcropping of the asteroid. They are quite literally babies that need sitting. The primary reason I don't enjoy mining as much anymore.