Food for thought
Today tried to keep up with this forum - which got me thinking.
What if -
Instead of adding the waste mechanic as purposed - astroids/ice as mined would create clouds of dust/shards/gas. These clouds would be harvested by Mining Frigates, Mining drones, and the Rorqual Drones. They would have a two to three hour life span before despawning (basically like wrecks).
1: Provides an activity for new bros, and lower skilled pilots to assist in gaining 100% yield of a belt. - They won’t be shunned from fleets for lack of skills or causing loose of ore (creating the waste).
2: Provides an activity for Industrial Command Ships to still harvest resources, while also providing compression and boost to the fleet. They won’t be competing with the barges and exhumers for astroids, and prevents them from being used as solo miners.
3: Barges/Exhumers (or a ship with mining lasers) would be needed to create the clouds.
4: This creates a symbiotic relationship between needing barges/exhumes and/or mining frigates/expedition frigates and/or industrial command ships to achieve 100% yield on belts.
Numbers (just an example, I’ll leave the fine tuning to the developers)
Units harvested : Units sent to the cloud
T1 strip mining lasers 2:1
T2 modulated strip mining lasers 4/6:1 or 1:4/6, depending on the crystal tier and if they want to have more yield for themselves or send more to the cloud to be harvested by support ships/frigates or go to waste after despawn.
Faction strip mining lasers 8:1
Having a ratio that always sends units to the spawned cloud, guarantees that not barge/exhumer pilots have ore to gather as well, but is lost if support ships are not there to harvest.