Science & Industry

Proposal to change how moon mining is executed:

1) POS has a mining laser which fires at the moon at regular intervals breaking chunks free. One laser per POS, the amount of materials released from the moon is identical to current rates.

2) The chunks float freely in space on grid with the POS, but occasionally at extreme ranges. These rocks are now target-able by POS and player.

3) Introduce POS tractor beams that automatically pull these moon rocks within the shields. While being tractored, the rocks cannot be targeted. Once inside shields, the rocks enter processors and things proceed as current.

4) The tractor beams consume large PG/CPU resources, thus the POS size is directly proportional to how rapidly the moon chunks can be recovered from space. A single tractor can recover all rocks on a daily basis, but many rocks will be left floating free for a long time. Enough tractors can ensure that no rocks are floating the instant they are blasted off the moon.

5) Moon rocks can be mined by players in space. Friend or foe can warp onto grid with the POS (if you so choose) and begin mining the rocks floating in space.

Suitably awesome animations should accompany these, but

Actually implementing the Visuals only without any gameplay changes would look rly sweet.

You want moon mining pos to shoot the moon? How about similar to current mining laser incarnation: Energy beam from pos to moon and tractor beam that brings back there glittering sparcles of moon goo... Should be easy to do by game developers since it changes nothing how it works ingame... :P

On tractoring idea i like it if towers tractor beam could be jammed, so players that choose to pirate its valuable chunks, could infact go there and steal them... Would actually force some defence on those towers by power blocks... Also would give new small gang raiding party target, lets rob that technetium moon for couple hours...

Clarification:

Imagine that 5 chunks are blasted free from the moon and appear randomly around the POS at ranges from 50 to 300 km away (ignore my knowledge of grid mechanics/lack thereof). Now the POS owners have a scale of setup choices:

A) Equip 5 tractors, immediately lock all rocks for safe operation. This sacrifices PG and CPU thus the owners forego defenses in order to maximize safe yield.

B) Equip 1 tractor, the operation takes 5 times longer, 4 rocks are exposed and can be ninja'd. Maximum defenses on the POS.

C) Equip in-between amount. Balance the rate/guaranteed resource extraction vs defenses.

Now anyone with knowledge can warp onto grid with the POS at a safe point, ninja any exposed rocks until the POS tractors begin cycling onto that rock. Mining moon chunks operation requires mining lasers, so the ninja ship foregos offensive capabilities (remember to fleet up!) at the return of stealing major resources. The Venture comes to mind as an amazing ship for this.

And another thing, but

this is not entirely terrible

POS guns would shoot any hostiles trying to mine it.

What would change from what currently occurs?

This has the appropriate level of dumb to be good

How about, before we spend time working on what is essentially visuals, we work on balancing moon distribution and or balance out what moon goo is used in what production. Currently, certain moon minerals are overly used in ship production while others with essentially the same "rariety rating" are hardly used.