Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Moons in low-sec and null-sec have always been drivers of conflict. They are regarded as sources of wealth and therefore important for an alliance or corporation economic backbone.

However, currently there is a small balance issue when dealing with supply and inherent value for each moon mineral. In the past the bottleneck was dysprosium, currently is technetium. If another future balance review triggers further changes into the use and availability of moon minerals, it may create a new bottleneck.

In this post I attempt to describe a small solution proposal that aims to deal with availability, while retaining the inherent value of specific moons and prevents creating supply bottlenecks that are too critical. The solution also tries to rescues as much as possible from existing mechanics with minimal impact.

First, all current moons are changed into 4 basic types:

• Icy: which contain gases and a small fraction of rarity 8 materials
• Rocky: which contain rarity 8 materials and a small fraction of rarity 16 materials
• Metalic: which contain rarity 16 materials and a small fraction of rarity 32 materials
• Exotic: which contain rarity 32 materials and a small fraction of rarity 64 materials
• Graphically, this also means a nice upgrade to the look of moons, each having their unique visual categorization.

Second, the current moon mining arrays are splitted into two variants:

• Surface Mining Array: focused on extracting the most common distribution of materials given the moon type.
• Deep Core Mining Array: focused on extracting the least common distribution of materials given the moon type. Deep Core

arrays require a lot more PG/CPU than the regular Surface arrays.
Each of these mining arrays extract 200 units of materials out of the moon, but the yield is not known beforehand, instead you obtain a spread of the possible materials that the moon has.

Third, Silos and coupling arrays are changed to use just 1 powergrid and 1 CPU unit. They will be required to work better as buffer zones to later sort the yield output of mining arrays and move them to reactors.

Let me try to explain the overall solution using a Rocky moon as example. The rocky type of moon will have mostly cobalt, scandium, titanium and tungsten, but will also have small traces of cadmium, vanadium, chromium and platinum.
If we use a single surface mining array, each cycle (ie: POS tick) the array will obtain 200 units of materials with a 70% spread of rarity 8 and 30% spread of rarity 16. And each cycle might be different than the next, something like this:
Cycle 1: 30 cobalt, 110 scandium, 40 cadmium, 20 platinum.
Cycle 2: 40 tungsten, 40 titanium, 60 cobalt, 30 chromium, 30 vanadium.
If I switch the surface mining arrays for a deep core one, the spread will change to 30%-70% however we will incur on higher fuel costs given the fitting requirements.

Of course i will still need 100 units of 2 materials to do any basic reaction, so Silos and Coupling arrays help to store non-needed output and route the useful stuff.

With the above scheme, exotic moon still provide the best passive income and will be fought over with as strategic assets....but it no longer represents unique source points, and you will no longer be able to create cartels. But most importantly, there are no “worthless moons” within your holding territory, so every moon represents a small income if you can pay its fuel.

Supply is never limited to specific moons but rather to the quantity of mining arrays players are able to maintain in their POS network. You will always have surplus extraction and materials that you will want to react or sell for a side-profit regardless if they weren’t the specific item you were looking for.

There is a final benefit, if you are a large null-sec powerbloc, becoming a t2 powerhouse on your own is possible, but limited to the ability of your logistic efforts and coordination (ie more sandbox oriented).

Up to this point, the changes only involve the moons, the extraction mechanics, the mining arrays and the fitting requirements of mining, silos and coupling arrays. T2 production per se stays the same.

The solution provides some elasticity in the market as alliances will probably switch between deep core and surface mining arrays as needed to create the most profit out of each moon. But at some point it will still be necessary to mine worthless gas to create a full chain of t2 advanced components.

If the demand goes to extremes, which I cannot see happening anytime soon, with every moon in low-sec and null-sec being mined to the fullest, CCP has a last card to expand the number of sources available, high-sec moons, this of course would present some problems on its own, but shows there are options to continue expanding the supply without large interventions in the core mechanics.

Oh crap, I sense another "Vinter is Coming" ****fest and a lot of crying coming from a lot of people.

Better get extra tear-collecting jars ready and a lot more antimatter charges.

Pretty sure that ring mining (which is a great idea and CCP should get on with it) was intended to be as well as moon mining, not instead of.

I think the idea is excellent.

Here are a few of my suggestions.

Orbital Moon Mining from a Ship

I think that Moon Mining should also be upgraded to being conducted from a ship.

Basically the Moon Miner would orbit the Moon deploy its drones and mine the Moon. Although mining in such a manner would take longer it would allow for non POS based mining to take place. Either special Moon Drones or a Moon Boring Laser could be used to mine the Moon.

Such a ship would look similar to the ORCA and would be developed by SOE. They did such a fine job on the Noctis and Primae
that they should have the oppurtunity to continue their work with assistance from ORE.

Moon Planetary Interaction

Just like Planetary Interaction you could establish Moon based mining stations to mine the Moon from. To use Moon Planetary Interaction you need to have a special POS that could control the functions of mining operation from orbit around the Moon.

The Moon POS would come with some very sturdy shielding and armor to protect itself from attacks but would otherwise only be able to have storage silos connected to it that would collect the Moon Material.