2 pages and no one has asked him how many collectors he is using? The more active collector limpets you have,the faster the mining...
Uh oh now i have to mine!
- Thread starter S0fa C0mmand0
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Neither do I. I swear I find mining faster without them. :s
That's what I did. I initially needed some Osmium for some engineer mods and I wanted to hit the "refine 25 tons of gold" achievement so initially i forced on those but once I got that out of the way I just shot prospectors and mined every rock just to hit 500. I would try to find the axis of rotation on asteroids and mine from there with my nose almost against the rock, once the asteroid was depleted I positioned my ship so that the cargo hatch was right over the materials, speeding up the collection process.
Well, it's "faster" in that you skip a step, but that's like saying you can get dressed faster without pants.
What's faster, two missions for 500,000 credits, or one mission for 1,000,000 credits?
What step are you skipping? Firing a prospector takes zero time at all and the prospector is generally faster than your ship so you fire while you fly towards the asteroid. Switching firing groups to fire the sprospector and back shouldn't be taking you any extra time either. And than you get the same yield from 10 asteroids as you would 20. It's not faster unless you're OCD and can't resist avoiding the cheap minerals once the prospector tells you what's in them.
I mined with a guy in a T9 running like, 9 collector limpets at a time lol. It was glorious.
Silly Unicorn... mining and the description 'faster' don't belong on the same page, far less the same sentence
Literally firing the prospector, and that's it. It's also "faster" because there's a lot less to mine.
Most people who use prospectors ignore low value rocks.
If you don't, great.
Prospector speed up the process. Ignore or don't ignore bad materials rocks. Doesn't matter.
Two 5A limpet collectors is a 'must have'. Even more. 3 collectors in anaconda.
A collector? I use five collectors and two prospectors on my Conda. I can fill the 224T hold with prime ore in an hour and a quarter.
Why would you use more than one prospector? You know that when you "run out" of prospector slots, it gets rid of the older limpet so you can fire another.
You can have more than one limpet controller of any one type. Well I b danged. Off to outfit the cutter or something. This is killing me.
I use one prospector (3A), a 4A refinery, a 5D and a 3A collector limpet controller on both the Anaconda and Python giving 5 limpets all collecting at the same time... pointless having more than 1 prospector really, the 3A prospector fires 2 active limpets which is more than enough.
A single 2B mining laser on the Python under the nose or in the case of the Anaconda, 2x1B lasers on the small hardpoints at the rear, is all that's needed too. Strips a rock in around 30 seconds... more lasers are a waste of hardpoint space and fire so many fragments off the rock the collectors can't keep up. You could get silly with the amount of collectors and mining lasers, but in reality it's no faster or more efficient.
Mining is about technique more than speed or enthusiasm. Line yourself up on a non spinning axis on the rock of choice, get the nose of your ship close enough that your shields spark and ensure the rock fragments are flying in a straight line under the nose as they come off...speed mining in a nutshell. Ideally, the mining laser should mark a small circle on the rock as you blast away at it.
The more you move around a rock or fire the laser when too far away while mining only means the fragments spiral off in all directions making the limpets work much harder and taking a lot more time. The rock shards also decay once they've been split from the rock, so taking longer to collect them means less yield per shard.
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From my limited experience the above sounds about right. Finding the axis of rotation of the asteroid definitely helps a lot but it can be a bit of a challenge on some asteroids. In general smaller asteroids are easier. If the asteroid is almost perfectly round I don't bother with the axis. Just mine anywhere.
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I find it saves some time while my collectors are working. I can shoot two prospectors, then choose the better one to mine, or both if they're equal in value. I've contemplated only using one, but two works well.
Pretty much my exact setup, here.
Here's what I have to say about prospectors. My profit from mining is 51,769,376cr. I've refined 6,211t of minerals. That's roughly 8335cr/ton and that doesn't include mining missions for valuable minerals. Only mine the good stuff.
Use prospector limpets. You only need the one with two limpets if you're in a pristine metallic. Don't waste your time mining ton after ton of galite.
Use prospector limpets. You only need the one with two limpets if you're in a pristine metallic. Don't waste your time mining ton after ton of galite.