Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I m afraid you lot wont even get to the end of this so I ll just start by apologizing for the rant.

It s not the actual EXTRACTION PROCESS that comprises my idea of having fun while exercising the mining trade, rather it would be the process of discovery, to do 'real' prospecting and then making the find.

The extraction process could be fully automated for all I care. Imagine somthing like the orca deploying a few extraction bots that attach to the asteroid and you just leave them there to do their thing.

Such a bot would in it s most simple incarnation constitute three sections; the digg head, the socket and the shuttle silo. The socket attaches to the asteroid surface and establishes a shaft head from which the digger and the shuttle silo operates. The digger digs into the rock and push back new ore to the silo and once the silo is full, you are free to return to the belt at your leisure to retreive the load in the shuttle silo or the entire unit of course.

Prospecting is the magic word here. To make that really interesting you d have to bring in the much talked-about system wide asteroid belts with truly massive boulder fields that you could get really lost in when looking for rocks to cut up. Also, a new more inspiring model for lunar mining would be required, where you could deploy mining gear onto the sruface. An example would be a HE3 harvesting unit.

The process of prospecting should be fleshed out to include various types of remote sensing/analyzing and sample retreival. Instead of me reiterating the inns and outs of how prospecting works IRL, I heareby provide a link to a VERY informative article from Wikipedia on the subject. My suggestion is that CCP strive to adher to the gernal principles of prospecting at least, all in an affort to make it truly challenging and fun and varied as much as technically possible.

A final thought: mining should accomodate both start outs and experienced miners. However, the upper end mining experience with high yields and heavy equipment and efficient prospecting tools should be exclusively available through extensive skill training so only the most motivated players get there and not a rag tag bunch that dabble with a finger in every profession. Maybe as much as several years of solid skill training to reach the mining end game.

@Fergus McRae, only if they make it possible to filter for Grav sites from 0% strength (or alteast put them in their own sig band). Gravs are already painfully common when you're looking for anything else.