It seems to me that many stations in the outer regions of space were set up near minable fields so that they could mine and sell the ore. That's fine and all, if the station belonged to a mining corporation, but surely stations that manufacture equipment would also set up stations near minable fields because they need those materials in order to make their equipment. (Rochester base, anyone?)
Stations like these could, and should, purchase materials they need at higher prices to insure that the majority of mineral traffic came to thier outposts. I'm not saying they should pay top dollar, but lets take Deturium for instance. In the kyushu region, there are no Deturium fields. Most people go to gran canaria, pick up deturium, and take it to deshima station. We're talking a 20 minute run, and your making 10million a haul of 5000 units. Can you imagine how long it takes to mine that much deturium?
I mined a little gold in Dublin the other day, and it took me that same 20 minutes just to get 200 units. further, the nearest station only bought that gold for a couple hundred per unit. If I were to make a comparable ammount of money on that gold, as I would on a deturium run, it would take me easily 10 times as long mining, because not only would I have to fill my cargo hold, I would have to run it all the way across sirus to a sector that pays well for the comodity.
I propose we add minable minerals to asteroid fields near stations where the commodities are somewhat valuable. This way, we wouldn't have to try and alter all the trade routes to keep the economy balanced. Of course, the farther you are out to the border, the better yeild. This would give pirates a much more reasonable income, and they wouldn't need a separate character to run trade with (not to say that all have a trader alt, nor do I have exact statistics, be we all know it hapens,) It would also give more validity to the fact that pirates aren't allowed to fly transports. Small loads, short runs, fair profits, but not enough to replace the old standby of pirating.
I like mining. I think it adds a lot to the game. The first thing I do when I start playing a new server is mine the Silverton field until I can get a freighter. It's exciting dodging xenos and rogues in a starflier and trying to collect silver at the same time. But once I get even the smalles freighter, which takes roughly 20 trips, I begin running trade, because mining just doesn't even come close.
