Mining drones I actually out produce the drone II variant :
< table>
…residue…base…porpoise…orca…
mining drone I…0% …25 * 100 = 2500…77.34 * 100 = 7734…99.26 * 100 = 9926
mining drone II…34%…33 * 66 = 2178…112.30 * 66 = 7412…144.12 * 66 = 9512
< /table>
The residue is the probability that the mining bot will dump the whole load. In every 100 excavations you expect drone I to dump none and drone II to dump 34, which leaves 66 that are actually added to the harvester. This translates to losing 322 m3 or 414 m3 of material every 100 excavations. or in terms of veldspar 3220 or 4140 units mined.
Note: the porpoise and orca m3 values were obtained from a level 5 ship by examining the drone info for each type equipped. The pilot had no augmentations and each ship had a mining drone augmentation rig installed. Also the core bonas was not included.
residue is the chance the drone will drop an extra amount from the remaing roid, it always mines the same amount. Residue only matters if you have a limited number of rocks to mine
Residue is NOT lowering your yield. That is a common misconception. Residue just empty the roids faster by removing additional resources from the source. So with a lot of residue the roids will be mined out faster and you get less overall ore/ice. But you will still mine a lot more ore/ice per minute, even with a high residue.
I remember when the original dev blog article regarding the waste mechanics came out and I read the part regarding waste a few times to make sure I understood it correctly, since almost immediately there was a flurry of posts of the “OMG11!! CCP haets miners” variety.
I’m assuming a “serious miner” (presumably the kind that go ballistic over a mackinaw gank, or you popping their gas huffing venture in LS) misread the article, or did it intentionally to stir up drama, and a bunch of other “serious miners” who couldn’t be bothered to read and understand the post parroted the same misinformation to any ears that would listen.
The sad part is that quite a lot of long-time miners really did believe they were really smart guys by using T1 lasers now and never even noticed that they actually mined a lot less than by using T2 lasers, even with high-residue crystals.
The only situation where T1 mining equipment would have an advantage over T2’s is when you are trying to squeeze every iota of ore out of a rock, like in a WH environment where you don’t know when the next ore anomaly will spawn.
If you are more than 11 km away from the rock, mining drone 1’s will out pace their T2 offerings.
The speed of the mining drone is lowered when it is holding more volume of rock, and the T2 drone holds a good bit more rock.
it is very possible to have worse m^3/sec due to the travel time of the T2 drone going to crap and taking forever to get back to the ship, even if the thing mines ore faster.
In a situation where resources are limited, you are trying to squeeze every drop of ore out of each rock. Speed is not as important as Quantity, and residue lowers the yield of the rock overall. When you only have one rock of Gneiss, and don’t how long it will be before you get another, you don’t want to lose 1/3 of it to residue. And as far as Drone speed is concerned, that is not true. Drone speed to and from the rock, unloaded and loaded, is identical, therefore T2’s will mine more M3/s than T1’s.
Because it means less ore per cycle, which means less isk/h. Lower that number enough and mining becomes pointless as you trivially make more isk and minerals through gun mining (L4 missions for example).
Or maybe you are in a not so safe space and want to fill up ore hold as fast as possible before you skedaddle.
