Idea (mining)

[Hielor]

As someone who's earned most of my credits mining, I have to say no.

Currently, for a solo miner in a Hegemon in T23, it takes me about 20minutes to fill my hold, then about 20 minutes to get to New Berlin, then another 20 minutes to get back. That's if I'm really pushing it and don't do any RPing or run into any pirates along the way, and use a less-than-optimal return commodity load, but we'll use it anyway.

At that rate, I'm already only spending only 33% of my time mining. The rest of the time I'm a trader. Even if you double drop rates, my transit times remain the same, so then I spend 10 minutes mining and 40 minutes in transit, down to 20% of my time mining, but it's still a total of 50 minutes. To keep the same rate of cash earning per total time, you'd need to lower prices by only 17%--that still makes for a very expensive cargo hold on the trip out there, and if I get pirated close to the end of the line I've lost 30minutes of time (whereas before I would've lost 40minutes).

For someone mining for hauling partners, you'd end up with the scenario where a single miner can keep a fairly large number of transports continuously supplied, which requires a lot more people to pull off (so that I'm not just sitting there on a giant pile of ore waiting for my transports to get back). Even then, 3/4ths of the people involved in your mining operation will be nothing but traders, and profits would probably increase from what they are now.

Which, of course, would cause mining profits to get nerfed to account for this, which would completely screw the solo miner and cause those traders to move back to normal trade routes anyway.