So I had this idea today for a super mining laser. It would be limited to the mining frigate, barges and exhumers.
How it would work is, any asteroid it is mining is completely mined in one cycle. To balance it, you can only use one and no other mining lasers or strip miners. It would have bad efficiency.
Maybe start at 50% efficiency and skills can boost it to 75%. This would also increase the duration of the cycle. Cycle can start at 1 minute and raise to 3 minutes. And can not be interrupted.
To be fair I suck at balancing. Thought it would be interesting to think about.
But I am curious if anyone would use such a thing if it was balanced?
Considering how huge certain asteroids get if left alone for a bit, this would be way OP, especially if combined with an Orca sitting nearby to offload into.
I just thought it would be a cool idea. I didn’t say they needed to put it in the game. The mining lasers and strip miners we have work.
All I wanted to do was start a discussion about something that I randomly thought about. Who knows maybe someone could have thought of something better. Help keep the game fresh.
You posted your idea, expect people to poke at it, find flaws, and generally criticize it.
If you want to start a discussion on a general topic or something similar then title and present your thread as such rather than posting a specific idea for criticism. Something like “what sorts of other mining lasers do you think could be added?” and then post that as your idea.
■■■■ lol, that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all this time! I always post with the hope that people will rip my idea a new bunghole and start shoving things in it. If they can’t, it means my idea is sound, because the majority of our player base (the ones whose opinions are informed at least) are bitter and angry and only too happy to point out the failings of a suggestion that would change their game.
What I would like to see is a mining … mine. Like, demolition charge. You shoot it at an asteroid and it blows the asteroid up into smaller asteroids with lesser amounts of ore in them.
Wait, they’re kinda doing that with the moon mining patch they just released.
Well, that’s ok, I still want to see it. CCP should introduce the “small” version of the Refinery Structures they just introduced, namely a Mobile Refinery Depot that we can drop in the belt just like the MTU, and what it does is, just like the Upwell Refineries, it has this super mining laser in it that blows up all the asteroids in the belt into smaller chunks, so that the Alphas and newbies with the smaller mining ships (not the barges) can also experience the pleasure of mining an asteroid (well, chunk) to depletion in one cycle of the civilian mining laser that they usually have.
Think of the godrays with all those thousands of asteroid chunks in the field!!! Wait, nevermind, they’ve already done the godrays with the extra debris. Well, still, it would look awesome!