Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Being one of the many miners affected in at least some way by the Goon's campaign, it got me thinking about how to make mining a bit different, and also less of a carebear activity, so...

why not have a 'prospecting' ship, that needs the requisite skills (based around the exisiting astrometrics skills), that miners could use to go lo-sec/null (so it would need to be cloaky) and hunt down specific grav sites and then mine them...the ship would be a new variant of the Noctis with upgraded PG and CPU, able to fit strip miners, expanded cargo holds, survey scanner , cov-ops cloak, and so on. To make it usable in low-sec it would need BR level align times.

Although cloaky, mining would need to be done uncloaked, but maybe the sig radius remains very small so that the ship could 'hide' in a belt.

I know there is already the Rorqual, but that is a VERY specialised and expensive ship - this ship would be limited to mining ops so it would be relatively simple to train for (Mining Barge V, Propsecting IV, Cloaking IV as well as Processing skills at IV) and inexpensive to buy (100m ISK?), but with no clone vats or anything...perhaps pilots would need a certain level of standings so that the NPC or Empire in whose space you want to prospect/mine would allow you to do so.

Maybe also introduce a new ore (Unobtainium? lol) that could only be found by prospecting - and the lower the sec status of the system, then higher the value of the ore?

Any thoughts?

H