Mining

[Derkylos]

Making all mining profits dependant on mining+hauling is flawed due to the RP nature of the mining corporations.

Sure, something like IMG, BMM, etc is not quite so constrained, as people will not "what the..." at one of their ships out of their direct ZoI, but, considering something like Kruger...they are almost a purely in-house company (constrained by the Liberty war and Sigma-13...how much does Leeds buy diamonds for, now?...).

It's great when you can rustle up members of the appropriate trade faction to haul for you, but it's hard enough to get people from your own faction to play at the same time as you, let alone get people from your "allies" to give up their more profitable trade runs to cater to your RP/profits.

Additionally, if it is more profitable to mine+haul, it becomes far simpler to just haul. Most fields are in the vicinity of bases which sell the mineable commodity for a cheap price, anyway.

Mined materials should sell for a reasonable price (considering the drops in most fields, 300-500 seems "reasonable") either in the same system (but at a sizable distance-re: 49), or in an adjacent system. Don't particularly want to see those mining ships running all over Sirius trading, just to make the "mining" aspect profitable.

Finally, I concur with the idea that there should be more profitable locations than just Tau-23.

I tested all the IMG mining centers last beta, and came back with the following results: Omega-7 was worthless. Nearest place that gave a sale price over 100 for any of the commodities was New Berlin. Cambridge was probably the 3rd best location, but, even there, the density of shootable asteroids was sufficiently low that, combined with the drop rate, it wasn't really worth it (profit was some 300/unit). Dublin was second best with 400-500 credits/unit, still a little on the low side with shootable asteroids and drop rate.

I've not looked into diamond mining in Rheinland/the Omegas (seeing as they ain't our fields...yet), but I know for a fact that Tau-23 was regularly overrun by independent miners...now that trading is more spread out, hows about the same for mining?

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