Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've had my strip miners auto reload crystals before. Are you sure you have enough crystals in your cargo hold?

Total remake of Mining Crystals to work better in every way possible and also maybe to be used with perhaps Ventures with new lasers.

I would like to get rid of these bulky crystals and have crystals that work as ammo instead.
A T1 crystal takes 0,025 damage when it gets damaged.
This is an average damage of 0,0025 per cycle and thus u can use it for around 400 cycles and the weight is 6m³.

A strip miner can hold 10m³.
So... I would like the crystals to have a volume of 0,15m³ and that u can load 3 times 20 of them in the SAME strip miner and of different types. (Although Id like them to take up less volume... How could that be bad?)
Every crystal has a 10% chance to get destroyed thus u can mine for around 200 cycles.
But then again... Why not uncomplicated the whole thing and make one crystal wasted at every start. Just need to make them 0,015m³ and 10 times more more of them :-)

The strip miner detects what ore is to be mined and uses one of the correct crystals IF present.
It checks Strip Miner slot 1 first and then slot 2 and 3. If the correct type is not found no crystal is used so then u mine without crystals.
Lets say u have a few Veldspar T1 crystals u wanna use up before using the T2... Just load them T1 into slot 1 and T2 into slot 2. The strip miner checks slot 1 first and uses them and when empty it checks the next slot and finds the T2 of correct type...

The crystal handling now is bad... In a Hulk u have different types of crystals.. 3 of each partly damaged plus spares.
U can see the damage when they are in the strip miner but not when in cargo hold and u can refine a almost broken crystal as if it was 100% fine (donno if this may be a bug).
This will be solved... No more partly damaged crystals thus no need to keep track of it and no more lots of places taken in inventory.
Just 1 place for 1 crystal type.
Also u should not need any space left in cargohold to load a new kind of crystal even if another type is already loaded.

So how would this work?
Lets say u wanna mine Veld and scord... ok so load some veld and some scord crystals in any slot and start mining :-)
When right click on a strip miner u get the option to reload all (= all miners and all slots).
And when right click on a strip miners "ammo slot" u can select what to load there.
It is likely that u often would want to load the same crystal type in all strip miners and in the same slot number...
Thus the first option could be "load into all strip miners in same slot" and if u only have say 30 crystals then they should be divided into 3 stack of 10 so to say... thus 10 in each miner if u have a covetor or hulk.

This will be tuned so that the crystal builders will have to make the same volume crystals with the same amount of resources needed as before.

The numbers for T2 would be max loaded 12 pcs and risk to be destroyed will be 20%.
Or 60 pcs if one will always be used for every start.

If I got the math wrong then just look at the principle :-)

Also the crystals, or rather what u see on the slots on the miners, it should be way better to se visually directly what kind of crystals are loaded and with a bar how many are left. Just with a fast glance u should know :-)
And u can skip the hassle with always checking what u got with ya at undock, how damaged they are, how many spares and so on.

The whole point with this is to make things a bit bore intelligent and user friendly.
I mean... we are in space with a shitload of tech... Why not make things accordingly and not like it was steam powered?