Why
Because they punch holes in rocks the size of battleships and extract stuff from there. Physically they already do “damage” but you can´t fire at ships with it.
What
Kinetic / Therm would sound reasonable to me on a level so that a skiff with a proper pilot and drones would not overcome ~400dps. Perhaps a similar mechanic like the triglivian guns use, so that the damage starts to ramp up? Maybe the most dps with T2 crystals (which should get more damage when firing on ships instead of rocks)
Which purpose
Not to rat with a skiff just to make pvp a little more interessting i mean let´s be serious now. Shooting defenceles barges is not really fascinating. In 8 of 10 times the miner escapes anyway (unless he´s not afk) and in 2 of 10 he´s dead once tackled.
Before now someone says “muhaha no wonder that idea comes from a industry char!”
i have a proper “bad boy alt” myself and as i do look for solo encounters (which are rare in eve anyway as most ppl only fight when they know they will win, but that´s a different sotry) i´d appreciate if miners would stand to fight instead of running.
Besides that i do not see any balance reasons why it should not be done.
If you keep the provided dps reasonable i do not see the danger of barge/exumer attack fleets
What an almost novel idea that almost no one else have thought of in the last 17 years. You are only the 89th person to make a forum thread, so congratulations on your idea that almost never came up before in the history of EVE Online.
Okay is the only new thing, a value and type of damage.
Cutting through largely stationary, randomly aligned, and loosely conglomerated hunks of rock is one thing. Cutting through the energetic force fields, nanobot armor, and a reinforced tritanium hull of a maneuvering ship is something else entirely. I could maybe see mining lasers doing damage to a targeted ship, and kin/therm seems a reasonable damage type…but your maximum DPS is way too high (even including drones). Purely from a lore standpoint, I could maybe see strip miners having the same DPS as an unbonused light drone, and mining lasers less than that. Basically…not worth using, so why bother do it?
If it’s largely nonsensical from a balance and lore standpoint, from a game mechanics standpoint it’s a total non-starter. The cycle time for mining lasers and strip miners is long. If you had them do all of their damage at the beginning of a cycle, they would have an alpha strike to make even the largest arties jealous. If you had them do all of their damage at the end of a cycle, chances are that they’d be dead because whatever they’re shooting at would have had a minute or so to shoot them first. You could maybe have them spread out their damage across their cycle…but no other weapon system in the game does that (even Triglavian weapons cycle quickly and ramp up their damage after each cycle) and it seems a waste to add all new functionality to something that is of questionable balance and lore value.
Go back and look at all the lore and tech stuff about mining lasers.
You have 2 really really, super small lasers on a rotating device (you know the blue beams you see) and a tractor beam centered between them (the yellow beam).
Mining lasers do not “cut” into or thru asteroids…they jackhammer it to death, slowing pulverizing ore into powder or grains of sand. The tractor beam is programmed to draw in only the “good” stuff leaving all waste material behind.
Your Mining lasers can not scratch the shielding of a ship, let a lone a drone… and the Mining equipment I highly doubt has any sophisticated built in targeting gear and/or software.
just to make pvp a little more interessting i mean let´s be serious now. Shooting defenceles barges is not really fascinating. In 8 of 10 times the miner escapes anyway (unless he´s not afk) and in 2 of 10 he´s dead once tackled.