Science & Industry

Hi! :D

I mistakingly made a thread in General Discussions about it and, I admit, didn't really ask the proper question.

To bee honest, I'm not sure how to ask it in the first place.


So we all know that asteroid belts regenerate a bit after downtime.


Let's assume there's a clean belt.


Not even micro asteroids left.


Now DownTime hits. Belts magically grow a bit. The server restarts.


How long would it take the 'average miner' to wipe the belt clean again, after downtime?

I'm not even sure what kind of tools or setup the 'average miner' uses. Does that include an orca alt or not?
I don't know. I just want to be broad.



I'd love to know more about this. Amounts of m³ mineable per hours, respawn rates, the proper ships for the task,
whatever you know or can tell!


And if I'm not actually asking for what I want to know, feel free to point me into the right direction! :D


I'm a complete mining noob! :D



Thank you so much! :D

With 2 Hulks and an Orca, plus a hauler, I can clear at most two full belts before I want to go do something else. I never timed it though.

There are larger fleets that can deplete full belts in just a few minutes.

A single belt will keep every Venture pilot in the system busy all day.

If you are making some comment on availability, then I can assure you that there are more hisec asteroids than miners can possibly mine. However, many miners refuse to look for asteroids beyond their backyard. Systems without a station are also often unpopular. I'm always surprised at the large number of ignored belts I find as I travel.

What exactly does that mean? What are the time frames you are talking about?

How large? :D

Any ship can mine, they can fit ming lasers and usually carry mining drones.

That said, there are only 7 mining ships.

The venture is the smallest and cheapest. It's a frigate, which is the smallest ship size in the game (except the shuttles and pods ofc.)

Then there are the mining barges.

The procurer has a large tank, a small yield and a small/medium ore hold.
The covetor has a small tank, a high yield and a smal ore hold.
The retriever has a small tank, a medium yield and a large ore hold.

The procurer is good for mining in dangerous regions. If you think a ganker might show up and blow you up you should use this ship. It's about 10-20m isk, so it is quite cheap.

The covetor is excellent in fleet mining (with orca or rorqual boost), thanks to it's low ore hold they usually jettison mine (drop the ore into space) and an orca or a hauler is collecting it and transporting it, that way the covetor can stay in the belt and keep on mining. It's about 50-60m isk (I believe)

The retriever is a really good solo mining ship. If you are mining on your own, and want to get your hand on some isk you should use a retriever. I think it is about 50-60m isk.

-

These ship have better versions, called tier 2 versions.

Procurer->Skiff
Covetor->Hulk
Retriever->Mackinaw

These are upgrades, and cost around 200m isk each.

Yes it makes sense:

It doesn't matter, each time after dt, the belts get a fixed amount of roids, with a fixed size. If the roids weren't completely empty that fixed amount gets added to the roid.

Thanks to this, there are some incredibly huge veldspar roids in worm hole space which can't be mined out in days (you could mine 1 roid for several days non stop).

So according to EFT and an ALL LEVEL V character, a covetor mines 1616 units of ore ? That's including t2 drones.

Or is that m³? How does the roid translate into ore?

How is the mass of the roid connected to the mass of the ore?
Does this chart explain it? Is there mass lost in conversion from asteroid to ore?

ok here is the down low.

Each system has a max belt unit, these are the ones you can right click and warp to. These are static.
Each belt unit has a max size, this is the maximum m3 the belt will take, and more often than not is reached in 3 full down times from a clean wipe and is left untouched since then.
Each system also has a maximum m3 that may or may not be the total sum of the system belt units max m3.

During each downtime if the belt is wiped clean, it it given it's stock amount, think like 1 unit of each type that belt has, then is given a stock m3 amount that is then randomly distributed across it's stock ore types.
If the belt is NOT wiped clean, it is given a random amount of m3 to be spread across random ore types. The amount given can be 0 to what ever CCP's value is.
It is good practice to left belts rest for 3 days since this will net you the most m3 of the belt.
Example would be: In one of my old systems, a fresh system would have about 2mill m3, and after 3 dt's would have close to or over 9mill m3 of ore. on the 4th downtime, there was little to no change.

Depending on your fleet size, this could mean having to chain systems while you have others cool down and restock.
So in the end, IT IS NOT IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO DEPLETE BELTS DAY IN AND DAY OUT

As for how long it will take you to deplete the belts, these is where the handy dandy survey scanner in a bonus hull like the Rorqual or Orca comes into play. It requires some work, but if you are serious about mining then it is important to do a few times.

Scan all the belts, in the result, ctrl+a to select them all, then ctrl+c to copy them, in a excel, paste the raw dump, while making sure to separate the data by tab, or do what I do, paste into notepad, the whole systems data dump, then find & replace Find (a copy pasted tab) replace with : - (dash or minus sign), then copy that and dump into excel and separate data dump by -, then find & replace any extra stuff you do not need. m3 etc.
Then what I do is move each ore type into it's own Column, usually starting at row 3 so I can use the top 2 rows for final data results.
Once all data is grouped, I then go ahead and do sum(XY:xy) for each ore type, then on a separate page I plug in the info, how many units of ore type X, followed by m3 for a format like this:
veld [ Units | Volume ]
scor [ Units | Volume ]
Against starting from row three to leave the top two rows for results.
On the first row I would make it show System Volume [ Volume ]
The volume information is important.

From there we use that information for later calculations.
What we need to get is your fleets mining amount.
We use this formula (Volume divided by time)
Say I use strip miner 1, and it gives me 1885 m3 per 120 second cycle, it would be [1885/120] and would give us 15.70833~ m3 per second, this information is your base mining amount. We also use this information to find your maximum hourly mining amount if you ran at 100% efficiency, meaning you always get 15.70833~m3 per second.
An hour is 3,600 seconds, so we times that per second amount to give us our hourly max, which in this example is 56,550 m3 per hour. Even if you have different miners with different per second, it is still a good way to see your fleets max mining amount. all you have to do is plug in each persons per second and times that by 3,600. so in our example, if I have ten miners mining the same amount per second, I would then just 10x the per second and get 157.0833~ m3 per second, times that by 3,600 and I get 565,500 m3 per hour mined.
Of course it is extremely hard to run at 100% efficiency, even bots will not be able to do it. After your first hour you check your actual mined amount and compare it to your max to get your efficiency rating. [actual divided max times 100] For example, if my actual mining amount was 400,000 m3, while my maximum is 565,500, I plug in [400,000/565,500*100]
which gives me: [0.7073386383731211*100] next step is [70.73386383731211]% efficiency. you can double check this by taking that 0.7073386383731211 and subtract that from 1, you get 0.2926613616268789, times that by 100 to get 29.26613616268789%
Now take that 565,500 and subtract 29.26613616268789% and you will get 400,000, same as our actual.

Now, going back to the systems current ore m3, we take that and divide by the amount per second/per minute/per hour etc to find out how long it will take your fleet to mine out. It is as simple as that, just takes work to actually figure it out. :3

edited my post for more information.

It doesn't feel like my question got answered, but I guess now I have a base to start. Gotta find me some stripped belts and start depleting them. ^^