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Glad to be able to get this ball rolling and start bringing the community into the early process of developing these structures. We're releasing these blogs now so that we can focus Fanfest on listening to you folks. We also look forward to hearing from you all in this thread.

Here's the first set of Q&A after the early feedback and discussion:

Q: What will happen to Siphons in the new system?
A: We currently plan to phase out siphons since they don't really fit with the new system (there will be much more direct ways to steal moongoo). Siphons were a solid attempt at achieving a worthy goal, but for a number of reasons that particular implementation was doomed to extremely niche status. We think that overall direct spaceship interaction will be a more fun way of engaging in guerilla attacks against moon mining infrastructure.

Q: Will Rorquals be able to dock in the large refinery?
A: Yes. The medium refineries will have the same docking restrictions as Astrahus and Raitarus, while the large will allow those ships plus the Rorqual thanks to dedicated Rorqual docking facilities. Non-Rorqual capitals will not be able to dock in the large refinery however.

Q: What types of ships will be able to mine the new ore spawned by moon mining events?
A: The new ores won't require special ships to mine. They'll be minable with the normal ore mining ships that are available today.

Q: Will the new moon ore require new types of mining lasers and drones to mine?
A: Our current plan is to use the same mining lasers, strip miners and mining drones that currently mine the existing types of ore. We are interested in hearing what the community thinks about this however, and are keeping our options open.

Q: Can this new moon mining mechanic be expanded to include highsec and wormhole space?
A: As we mentioned in the blog we think this general mechanic has potential in other areas of space, but we're not currently planning on opening up collection of T2 moon materials into areas beyond lowsec and nullsec. We've run the number and we don't think diluting the sources of T2 materials across more areas of space would be beneficial to the feature.
However in future iterations we would be very interested in investigating expanding this same "scheduled mining event" gameplay to all areas of space using different resources. These might take the form of new resources or allowing the collection of existing resources such as normal minerals or T3 gasses.
For the first release we need to keep a reasonable scope so any expansion of that kind would need to come later if it comes. That also means that if we expand this gameplay to other resources in other areas we'll be able to integrate the lessons learned from the first release.

Q: Will starbases (POS) be removed when this feature is released?
A: No, the removal of starbases will be a gradual process and even with the release of refineries there will still be major starbase functions that are not yet replicated by new structures (cyno beacons, cyno jammers and jump bridges). We will have some news on the next steps towards the starbase phase out soon.

I'm too scared to read it. Plz tell me everything is gonna be ok. PLEASE TELL ME ITS OK.

Just pointing out ...

[img]http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/71988/1/UpwellMoonmining_550.jpg[/img]

Oh, another question: will the current significant bonus for sovereignty for reactions/moon mining be preserved?

Are we in a position to start talking details about a starbase hardware amnesty yet? We already have piles of worthless CSAAs and similar mods, and refineries will virtually finish off existing starbase functionality.

Time to start recycling it.

I wouldn't expect it yet. They still have to replace cynojammers, beacons, and jump bridges.

Okay, third question. I'm needy.

Do you have any estimate on the cost of these things? I'm mostly looking for an answer like "cheaper than a citadel, but more expensive than an engineering complex of the same size" or "cheaper than an EC of the same size." Exact numbers are obviously meaningless this far out.

It was already covered in the blog. Reading comprehension is hard.

Woohoo

So, questions...


Will we be able to set a tax on these jobs?
While we're talking about taxes - will ore compression become a taxable feature?


Will there be a "system index" price attached to the job cost?


Will the new system for reactions involve ME and TE research levels?


Will moons deplete (over say a couple of months?), or will the same moon always produce the same moon-goo "forever"?


Will there be a limit of one refinery per moon, or will an alliance be able to set up say half a dozen, and have one extracting a chunk of moon per day?

Last time I saw moon fracking like this there were tons of xenonorphs and it was generally bad week for everyone involved.

Yeah, see my edit; I found it. Derp.