When you know a rock is almost done, because you are paying attention with your survey scanner, you can end the cycle early so that time is not wasted. This is particularly useful for strip miners which have a default cycle time of 3 minutes. It would be useful of the modules tooltip would tell you how much has been mining on the current cycle so I don’t have roughly guess the right moment.
This is particularly useful if this waste mechanic comes in. How the CSM guy that was on Talking in Stations explained it, waste is applied first, so it is possible to get nothing on a cycle. So for example you get 1000 ore a cycle, and there is 1000 left in a rock. What would happen is 1000 would go to waste first, then you get 0. However if you stoped at half cycle 500 would go to waste and you get 500.
I’ve always thought miners should end their cycle when the asteroid has 0 ore left in it. Your guns stop shooting when there’s 0 hp left right? And logically, if there’s no asteroid left to mine, how the ■■■■ does the module keep mining?
I know there’s efficiency reasons to not calculate ore taken until the end of the cycle. An area of conflict I predict is a miner being salty they missed out on ONE CYCLE of ore. A sacrifice I’m willing to make to have the asteroid disappear once it’s been fully mined.
I’m just trying to think how to sort out the allocation of ore when there’s multiple ships and modules. I’m not even against it being the first person to activate gets the final cycle, the other guy is ■■■■ out of luck.