There are many mining modules indeed. Especially for ore equipment it can get muddy with how many categories there are, with how there are ‘deep core’ variations that can mine mercoxit and ‘modulated’ versions that can use crystals.
I’ve added all categories to a table:
| Type \ Size | Regular | Barge-sized |
|---|---|---|
| Gas | Gas Cloud Scoop | Gas Cloud Harvester |
| Ice | Ice Mining Laser | Ice Harvester |
| Ore | Mining Laser | Strip Miner |
| Mercoxit | Deep Core Mining Laser | Deep Core Strip Miner |
| Ore w/ crystals | - | Modulated Strip Miner |
| Mercoxit w/ crystals | Modulated Deep Core Miner | Modulated Deep Core Strip Miner |
This results in 11 categories of mining equipment for 11 types of Mining Mutaplasmids.
To start, I think it’s fair that barges and frigates aren’t competing for the same mutaplasmids. The modules they use are a completely different size after all, which is consistent with how for example mutaplasmids for different smartbomb sizes too have different mutaplasmids.
Things do get a bit muddy with how there is overlap between mercoxit and ore equipment (deep core equipment can after all mine regular ore too at reduced rate), I think it’s not strange to expect different mutaplasmid categories for the vastly different behaviour of crystal-based mining versus non-crystal mining. Or mercoxit mining versus regular ore mining.
But maybe CCP could combine those categories as there’s a big overlap, and make a general ‘ore/mercoxit strip miner’ and ‘ore/mercoxit laser’ category, reducing the 11 categories above to 8 or 6.
11 categories of mining equipment with the usual 3 tiers of mutaplasmids each (decayed, gravid, unstable) and you’re looking at 33 mutaplasmids.
It’s a lot, but I don’t think it’s much different with how mutaplasmids work elsewhere.