Science & Industry

This has probably been talked about before...would really like to hear what people think about this. If it is something I can do on my own with a chosen belt would be nice. I don't know exactly how the spawn mechanics for static belts work,but a few experiences out in space have given me suspiscion to think that this engineering strategy has been practiced before. Hey, if a dev would weigh in, it would be great. Guess it could be called "selective mining" and "breeding" the rocks we harvest regularly. Is there such a method?

You'd need to shepherd the field very carefully, though.

Ok, so you have to monitor the rocks pretty closely then. Seen it in a 0.5 dead end system that was "owned" by a 50 man industrial corp that had an alt corp that would suicide gank other miners that came to "thier" system. The asteroids there were humongous!

but why would you want to do that?

lets say you wont mine for a week and let an asteroid field grow - then you will mine it but the yield will be only that one week you didnt mine,so you will actually have to 1,police the field and 2, be ready for a reaaaaaly long day in office mining all that ore

i find that too much work for the same yield as i would get mining every downtime

i can see doing it for ***** and giggles tho

Go to a system without a station. These are ignored to a certain degree by miners becasue they require more work hauling the ore away to another system. Your find belts that have been let for quite a time here.

I have read a lot of theories about this over the years.

The idea is that if you leave rocks with a ore left they will respawn at down time larger than they would if you pop them. It is believed that doing this over many months you can build up the belt to larger rocks each down time. I have not tested this myself, as it only takes one miner to come in an cherry pick/pop the rocks you left.

I have also read this can be used to farm certain types of rocks. by always leaving the higher value rocks not popped and popping the veldspar for example the popped rocks could respawn as a different type while the rocks left unpopped will grow with each downtime. This would allow you to culture a belt an maximize not only the size of the rocks, but the types as well. I have also not tested this theroy.

There is another story which I have actually seen happen before. All belts spawn in a semi circle. different belts spawn in different sizes around a predefined arc. Some larger belts can have large gaps in that arc, while still being on the same circular path but appearing almost as two separate belts on the same grid. Many belts have a very large radius to the arc, even to the point where much of the circle is off grid from the warp in. At times a portion of the belt can spawn at other points around the circle/arc, even off grid from the main part of the belt. These can be found by flying off grid from the main belt following the arc/circle that main belt is on(easier to judge with the tactical over lay on). Using this method I have found segments of static belts spawned actually off grid from the warp in. These generally contain larger rocks as they are often over looked by the average miner. These are not hidden belts, but just rocks spawned further along the circle/arc of the main belt when that arc has a radius larger than 450km. It is rare but it does happen, I have seen it.

One thing I do know, is that when ever I have mined a belt out completely, leaving not a single rock no matter how small, the next day the respwaned belt was very small, not even worth mining. So popping the whole belt does not trigger a respawn of a fresh full belt. It seems that it takes time to grow as mentioned above.

as long as belt can be mined in few h there is no need to change anything. and with some corp op u clean whole system.

right now the respawn rate is somehow like 1/3 -1/2 of full asteroid so if u leave system for 2 days u get full field.

There is also the fact of the security of the system in question,

While not mining in a system for while might alow the roid to increas in size to s cirten extent that would not alow them to reach the max size for that type of ore, if you are located in a high security system. For example in the system that we live in nulsec, even if we compleatly empty the system out over the cousre of the day the roids come back masive in comparison to higher security space. Though from past experiance from living in high sec, systems that were almost never mined would only have a very small amount in the astroids in comparison.

So i belive if you are wanting to farm astroids i would find the most isolated system posible to mine in, this would both alow you to some what more control the "growth" of the astroid and also the mining of them. But in all ohnasty i would just recomend that you find a system that is to your likeing and stick with it. And over time you might bulld up a routine of mining the belts that allows for the astroid yeiled that you are looking for.

Hope this helps a little bit,

Fly Safe

going to call bullshit on this theory.

4 days.
600k m3 from the belt on the first and second day,
just shy of 300k the third day.
and today is looking like another 600k based on how fast i'm stripping the belt, will confirm when i'm done.

however, it seems to be completely random, since i've been stripping every asteroid from the same belt every day.