Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was reading up on the Rorqual and came across this interesting post from CCP Chronotis. He mentions the idea of a secondary market for compressed ore developing.

Instead, mineral compression emerged. Players living outside of empire require large volumes of low-end minerals in order to function. To get the minerals they need, they've resorted to ore compression techniques, where the materials needed for entire fleets are packaged into guns and modules, then shipped where needed and reprocessed.

I think this is a sign of broken gameplay. All regions depend on the ores from empire space, yet those ores are so bulky that it's impractical to move them around. Instead, miners refine their product into minerals and move it to market hubs, where non-empire dwellers spend days turning it into guns for export.

What if instead empire miners were given the ability to compress their ore for transport? Basically, let the blueprint for ore compression be used in empire industry facilities. Maybe even tweak things so that compressed ore is always a better source of minerals than gun compression.

What I like about this is that ore compression is one-way. The miner produces a specialized product, compressed ore, that cannot be repackaged. Intuitively, I think this means that compressed ore would tend to flow from miners, into the market, and then to where minerals are needed. Once industry types reprocess it, the minerals expand and become harder to move. It's possible this might lead to more market hubs, since it becomes easy to move large volumes of low end into a station, but harder to move them out.

This could also be done by giving Orcas one or two ore compression assembly lines, or any of a number of other ways. What do you guys think?