Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I really do like the idea of using webs to slow it down to manageable speeds. I think they could so something like that to reduce its inertia, and repeated webbing slows the entire thing down to a crawl. It'd be a good minigame for an inty (or even a venture) to grab the thing with webs to bring it down to slow enough for the barges to start working on it. I also agree with the earlier post about them being rather large, but to a certain degree. They should only be as large as IRL comets, which can still get pretty damn big. I think instead of normal ore since comet composition usually does not include many big rocky bits, it would include a combo of mostly ice products, some decent moon goo at the core, and a a mix of gas and fullerenes. All in all, very valuable, just difficult to secure.
Something like a particulate cloud that increases damage in relation to mwd speed might be interesting to try and pull off. It would make combat someone interesting, especially if it did something hilarious like apply to drones too. This would go in with the terrain thread that keeps coming up about making certain areas of the game have different combat landscapes and attributes. Would find it pretty funny if a guy in a crow got his ass shredded by micrometeorites from going too fast. Would have to include a visible cloud or something. So much potential with this...

Well, don't get overboard. Comets are not planets or planetesimals and the size of most comets varies between several hundred to a couple kilometers. We already have huge, 16 km Veldspar roids in belts, think of that as a regular size for them.

I am also not sure about the "scanning down with combat probes", since you would scan down the comet grid and the ships in there in one go, which is in my opinion a huge reduction in effort for PVP. PVP doesn't need to be even easier than it already is.

Increasing is one thing, but making PVP ridiculously easy and spoil all those brats out there is not desirable. Scanning down hidden belts with Core Probes and then maneuver in there in your cloaky worked before Odyssey well enough and was challenging for the PVPers. In my opinion it's time that these challenges come back to PVP.

It doesn't make any logical sense that these comets be hard to find. When they are in the outer solar system, of course they are virtually invisible. What makes them detectable is moving towards the sun and developing a tail. These tails can be hundreds of millions of kilometres long - up to 3.8 AU!

Having an easily found object that will attract several miners will make PvP more likely yes (I see this as a good thing) but it will also create content - and I don't mean "hahahaha I blew up your retriever!!" "content" either. Right now miners rarely bother with a defensive fleet, in part because gankers only rarely show up and as a result it's boring as heck to be in those fleet. With an incursion like event for mining, gankers are almost guaranteed , a defence fleet makes a ton of sense, and fun stuff will follow. I think that's a good thing no?

+1. Would love to see either this or ring mining implemented. It will do a lot to make mining more interesting.

It's a cool idea, but how would it not be boring? Consider a miner who wants to sit down for 2 hours every other day and do this.

It seems after a month, this wouldn't be particularly exciting. In fact the ability to AFK and do other things due to the simplicity of regular mining would probably become the preference.

Don't get me wrong I like the idea; it just needs to be actually exciting to do more or less indefinitely. The rest of the PVE is not like this. I'm not really sure there's a reasonable way to make ISK-making activities fun in the long run. As such I'm usually a proponent of very simple, easy, automated ways of ISK making. This seems like it would not be as simple as regular PVE while not being particularly exciting either.

It's not a +1 or a -1. I'm more pointing out how adding such various features won't really fix the stale state of mining.

This NEEDS to happen- a more active activity for miners would be a great addition, and this would be a perfect way to do just that
+1

Let me just paste in a very old post of mine.
Comet Mining

The main problem with comets is that they are moving. Very fast. They have speeds ranging from 350 m/s when they're the farthest from the sun (and practically invisible) to 415,000 m/s when they are catapulting around the sun it the lowest distance, averaging at 45,000 m/s . No ship is flying fast enough to keep up with a comet, let alone a mining barge. In order to stay close enough to a comet for mining endeavours new technology is needed: The Tug Link and the Anchor Probe.

Once the location of a comet is pinpointed with Spectrographic Probes the prospector can attempt to send Anchor Probes out to the comet. The chance of successfully fixing the Anchor Probe to the comet depends on the quality of the probe, the skills of the operator and the distance to the comet. Once the anchor is fixed a ship fitted with a Tug Link can warp to the comet's location. Once in close proximity the Tug Link connects with the Anchor Probe, pulling the ship out of warp and connect it with the comet via a strong tractor beam. The ship is then dragged behind the comet close enough to start mining.

In game terms this means: First normal probing of the comet like any other location. The greater the accuracy the better as the distance from the location is calculated into the chance of fixing the Anchor Probe. Then you warp to the pinpointed location and launch a Anchor Probe. It will take a few minutes for the probe to reach the comet and fix itself onto it. When successful one then has a bookmark for the comet where one can warp to. Attempting to warp to the comet without a active Tug Link will abort the warp and give a message like 'You cannot warp to this location without a active Tug Link.'. The warp will bring you into close proximity of the comet, like 5km varied by the normal warp deviation. The comet location is a deadspace area, so the warp-in point will be fixed.


The comet has three parts that can be mined: The ice shell, the rock core and the dust tail.

Comet Ice is very rich in all kinds of isotopes and heavy water due to the strong exposure to the solar winds but is lacking in liquid ozone and strontium clathrates as those materials are too unstable to endure the radiation. It can be mined with a standard Ice Harvesters

Comet Cores have to be mined with a Deep Core mining laser. There are four possible kinds of cores, frozen core, crystalline core, rocky core and metallic core.
Frozen cores have higher amounts of strontium clathrates along other ice products.
Crystalline cores yield a variety of minerals, Rocky Cores yield non-metallic raw moon materials. Metallic cores can be refined into metallic raw moon materials.
The kinds of cores could be broken down further into varieties that yield some material more and some less and some not at all to bring in more diversity an element of luck and to make it more easy to balance the availability of the extracted materials, minerals and ice products.

Comet Tails are mined with Gas Cloud Harvesters. While the yield on the comet dust is rather low it can, in opposite to the other parts of the comet, be mined as long as the comet is available. Among atmospheric gases, traces of contents of both the ice shell and the solid core can be extracted from comet dust. The more rare minerals and materials should not be available in comet dust though as this would make farming a comet for them too easy and would disturb the market for those items.

this is just one of many features CCP promised and never implemented.

the best example for this, though, is Incarna.

a valuable addition - would bring ventures out into the field - stick a MWD on a venture, 2 gas harvesters, set it on the comet, and let the barges catch up in their own time.

I have one question - how do you mine the moongoo - do we need a new harvesting system or will strips work?