Well… it’s new to me, as it wasn’t here last time I was playing.
How lucrative is the moon mining, compared with ‘normal’ mining? I’m talking a player who takes a mining ship and goes after the chunks that are blown off the moon (assuming that’s how it works). What’s the return compared with mining ‘normal’ stuff in an asteroid field or whatever?
Indeed, is that how it works (see #1 above)? Any special equipment needed, or just any kind of mining ship, mining lasers, strip miners, etc?
depends on the moon materials
you can mine with simple t1 mining lasers if you want, anything goes.
It’s only currently available in NullSec and LowSec.
Moons are therefore still owned by various player groups, so you can’t just show up to any moon and start mining.
Once the Drilling Platform has pulled up the chunk of moon and fracked it into an asteroid field it works like normal mining, but the rocks are moving when they are newly formed and gradually slow down.
tomorrow the rush for claiming 0.5 moons begins.
Well, you can. If you find a moon mining field somewhere you can just start mining. The players who created that field get a log of your actions and may object to your mining with force, but there is no game mechanism stopping you. In highsec, starting tomorrow, you might have a more realistic chance of being a ninja moon miner given the limited options of the Refinery owners to respond while you are protected by CONCORD.
I imagine though active fields will be few and far between.
Fixed that for you.
I wonder how CONCORD is going to shot down the refinery itself 
I wonder how big the catalyst swarms will be around the first high sec moon frack’s will be. 
Is there anyway to stop people from mining in your refinery in high sec?
No, unless you suicide gank them.
Moon mining’s been in the game for a long time, it just required POS’es with extractors. Now it requires an Upwell Structure to pull a chunk of the moon up from the surface and then blow it up into asteroid rocks, and once that’s done, it requires mining ships.
Moon mining has always been an alliance (0.0 alliances) source of income, because that’s where the valuable moons are. Now the mechanics for how to get the goo have changed, but the valuable moons are probably still in 0.0.
So, to answer your questions, as far as “lucrative”, from the alliance point of view, I don’t know. It used to be a passive system (set down a bunch of POS’es and collect), and now it’s an active system (CTA mining op, everyone bring your Rorquals, mark your calendars), so I’m guessing more “effort” for probably less payout.
For random solo players, if you try to bring your barge to an alliance’s mining op, you’ll likely get shot by their super-capital defense fleet. I imagine that’s not lucrative at all.
The refinery can’t engage without there being a valid target, citadels are restricted to green safeties and cannot attack without the target being legally flagged to begin with, ergo they can never provoke a concord response
To give you an idea, an R64 moon being mined by a Skiff with T1 strip miners can net an “estimated” value of over 1m a minute with boosts. Honestly, its pretty nice money. If you have good moon ore refining skills, you can further stretch the value.
but these 0.5 will be common ores
No, there are apparently low-end moon minerals available in highsec and wormholes in addition to common ores.
I have a hard time getting those number. What’s the price of loparite/xenotime ? I heard they were in the range of 1500 isk/m³, meaning a covetor with porpoise boost could mine 240M worth per hour. What is the correct model ?
Are you really going to try and mine in a 0.5 System with a timer so that CODE. knows when your Mining Op starts? 0.5 Moons will be a gankarama.
The explosion of the chunk is decided by the corporation.
How do you think NS players do ?
there is no timer, the timer is only for the tractor outside of station and no one but station operators can see when its ready so code and any other ganker would have to camp the station or would need spies, and they wont go through that much effort, how ever also some large alliance will make a mad rush because they have isk on claiming the moons just like PI and it will be another war for a while until it calms down.
Anyone with eyes can tell when it’s ready, and it’s pretty easy to estimate the time to completion on a chunk pull.