reasons why people mine.
- it can be relaxing
- some people get enjoyment out of building things they “gathered themselves”
- depending on where you live, it can be easier to mine on site than get things shipped in. industry can increase your profits considerably.
- it scales very well. as you’ve probably discovered with your booster and 3 alts, you can keep adding more and more alts to your mining fleet, with the only real upper limit being how good you are at multi-tasking.
as for your comparison to your friends carrier, frankly i’m more surprised that there is only a 20-40mil difference between your isk/hr. a carrier takes FAR longer to train into with decent skills than it takes to get a porpoise alt and 3 covetor pilots trained up. also the hull alone is worth more than your entire fleet combined, so it makes sense that he would be making more isk/hr. a carrier also doesn’t scale the same way a mining fleet does, you can keep adding as many ships as you can multi-task. he won’t be able to use any more than 1 carrier (or 2 if his micro game is strong)
you are currently at the lowest tier of mining fleet, with covetors, porpoises and bad skills he is nearly at the highest tier of ratting with a carrier, and good skills, the only place to go for him is super carriers.
Your isk/hr will increase considerably once you move into an orca with hulks and eventually a rorqual.