Player Features and Ideas Discussion

for those of you that use mining drones, i thought that this would interest you a bit:

a covetor with max skills and no implants nor links (to keep the numbers easy to work with for examples), has a cycle time of 144s for its strip miners, the cycle time for a mining drone is 60s + however many seconds it takes for the drone to transit between asteroid and your ship.

thus, one can solve for the maximum range that you can assign your drones to mine at while keeping at or below your strip miner cycle time via the following equation

2(x/.3) + 60 = 144 , where x is range in km, .3 is drone speed, 60 is drone cycle time, and 144 is strip miner cycle time

2(x/.3) = 84

x/.3 = 42

x = 12.6km

this means that if you have your drones mining at a range of 12.6km or below, they will "cycle" equal to or faster than your strip miners.

is this information really relevant to anything? kinda

we can use the same equation, 2(x/.3) + 60, but this time we need to know what range the drones are mining at ( we will use 18km).

so, 2(18/.3) + 60 = 180.

this means that at a range of 18km, your drones will take 180s to fly between your ship and the asteroid, mine, and fly back to your ship.

since most asteroids are usually outside of 18km when you are in a belt and 180s is 3 minutes, i believe there should be a mining drone specific skill to increase mining drone speed to help alleviate the considerable cycle times. this would help the miner using these drones enter warp faster as they would not need to wait as long for their drones to come back and it would marginally improve ore harvesting.

i personally believe a rank 1 or 2 skill that increases drone speed by 10% per level would be sufficient.

at level 5, this skill would allow ones drones to cycle at 140s at a range of 18km, which is a 40s decrease from the original cycle time at an 18km range.

Rocks like hugs too.

While not add medium mining drones already ? The harvester are a old relic but yet the next new icons for ship and drones have medium mining drones, plus and more important the Covetor and the 3 Exhumer can deploy 5 five medium drones, with the Skiff being able to have two flight of medium in bay.

Even with maxed skills, the small mining drones are really underwhelming, sure they add some yield, but for the hassle of tacking care of them it's not worthwhile to me, they are slow even with a drone navigation computer and with a small (but ok for their size) yield.

These medium and maybe the small should be mining still too, I don't really understand why they orbit the asteroid when they mine, because if they finish their cycle on the other side of the asteroid (and they are huge in nullsec) regarding the player ship, it makes them go a longer way back.