Yet another mining idea

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

I’ve been returning to the game and as always I switch back and forth between mining/industry and PVP here and there. I know it’s a common sentiment especially with new miners to try and come up with some idea to make the activity more active, but…

My idea aims to give the option to make mining more active and a bit more competitive with just one account.

New ship: tech 3 mining barge. This ship would require some heavy skill investment obviously, and it would make use of a couple new systems. The gameplay loop would consist of:

  1. Once on grid with ore, activate new “Industrial Excavation Core”, and the ship would do a T3 dessy kind of transformation from its normal folded up state, into a sort of space mining gantry. It would be a big squared off ORE style hull, with 4 or so massive arms unfolded to create a bay for asteroids in the middle.

  2. Once core is active and ship is locked in place, use tractor beam to pull in an asteroid. Once asteroid reaches your bay, you can switch to an “Excavation view”, and for simplicity’s sake, this would be in a similar vein to the PI camera, where you can rotate the asteroid in any direction and zoom in and out to inspect.

  3. Activate new module, “Deposit Density Surveyor”, and once again similar to PI, you can rotate around the asteroid and inspect a heat map to find where the deposits of ore are physically within the asteroid.

  4. The main mining method would be the use of new types of mining drones. There would be a drilling drone, and a “swarm” drone. A drilling drone would, obviously, drill into the asteroid straight down, allowing you to switch back to your surveyor and probe for density at the level you drilled to. Once you find a suitable deposit, switch to your “swarm” drones to go in and extract. There would be one more tool on your belt to use, a module “Industrial Ionized Plasma Saw”, which allows you to make sweeping cuts to the asteroid and break it up into large chunks that can be surveyed and mined.

The idea here is to give players the option to either mine with finesse, slowly drilling and finding deposits and extracting all ore with minimal waste, or to cut the asteroid up and get it mined quickly, albeit with of waste and ruined ore.

This whole process would speed up mining overall, with the quick cutting method allowing you to get an entire asteroid’s worth of ore in less than a minute depending on how fast you can go. While the slower drilling method would only be a bit longer. To give a nice round number, maybe 45 seconds to cut and waste, and maybe 1m30s for the slower method. Obviously this would need some tuning and adjusting of levers to find a good balance.

Maybe this sounds dramatic, but considering barges can already strip rocks in a few cycles, I think the balance would be okay, especially considering it would be a heavy skill investment. This would kind of allow players to have a second option for their mining career, as a specialist, instead of multiboxing yet another barge.

Anyway, that’s my idea I’m throwing out into the void. I tried to think of a way to get the player a little more engaged, but in a way that still felt EVE, while also keeping in mind that dev time is a thing, hence the similarities to PI.

Thanks for reading o7

2

And while you are sitting there using the mining core, locked in place, you get shanked. The end.

4

Well yes, that’s the point, you shouldn’t be able to do this or anything totally safe from PVP

5

A T3 barge would be ungodly expensive and would be a ganker’s wet dream. No one would field it.

6

Like how nobody fields Orcas or Rorqs? My idea isn’t supposed to be something any new alpha can jump into after a week of training and just go nuts mining for cheap and easy

7

That’s why we drag mine with Orcas and don’t use the core. Instant warp if trouble enters local.

8

That’s what T1, meta, and ORE lasers are for

And that’s what crystals are for

9

I’m really not trying to crap all over your idea. A T3 mining barge sounds cool and all that, but why would dedicated miners want the process to be more involved and take even longer when I can just use a fleet of Hulks to wipe out entire belts faster and more efficiently?

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