Oolite Bulletins

Malacandra wrote:

...if the solution to a problem is "use an exploit, download another OXP, or both" then the basic idea is broken.

Why might that be? Why every oxp should stand on it's own? By exploit you probably mean that the torus should only be used for speeding up your trip along the lanes. I disagree you with that one. IMHO, if it's in the game, I see nothing wrong in using it to my advantage where possible. Apart from that it is totally possible to play with the miner start without any extra oxps. It's dull, but possible. To make mining interesting and a viable option to other careers, I heartily recommend Ore Processor. But that's optional, if it does not float your boat, then you have the possibility to not install it. The oxp is designed to technically require zero other oxps.

Malacandra wrote:

The main point still stands: if a splinter's drift velocity often/usually/invariably exceeds the maximum speed of a mining ship, then it's a bad mining ship.

As Venator Dha already commented, I have not found this to be much of a problem. Granted, that there rarely are some high velocity splinters, but they usually seem to slow down in time for me to scoop them and even if I don't catch some 'em, then I just let them go and go for another. They aren't that valuable after all.

I'll deal with that word "optimum" for a start. A Cobra Mk III out of the box isn't an "optimum" trading ship but it is very much fit for purpose, in that you can carry cargo from one place to another and soon see enough profit to start buying add-ons. Even a Cobra I will do the job acceptably if you don't mind a slower start. Similarly, my second-hand Vauxhall Astra is not "optimum" but I expect it to have a wheel at each corner, keep out the rain, start, stop and go around corners. If it couldn't do at least the basics then I should have something to say to the dealer if he dared accuse me of expecting a Lamborghini for the money.

Some people's mileage apparently varies but when I tried this start I found a lot of splinters outrunning me and in many cases Torus jump was my only option to close the range. (I'll try keeping a detailed log on another such start and see how it plays.) It's still unreasonably hard to scoop in Torus drive and it's impossible to use it if there's another mining ship in range, a trading ship coming through, a policeman checking that everything is well or a Rock Hermit (which, in-character, ought to be one of my favourite hang-outs) within range.

Blowing up a boulder and then spending half an hour chasing splinters only to find many of them outrunning me is not my idea of fun. Agreed that a splinter is not of great value but that's only exacerbating the problem - a miner is making a living only a splinter's worth at a time and there's already enough waste of time built in when it comes to getting masslocked on the way to sell your load. You don't need the game physics conspiring to make the option any more player-hostile.

This is a shame since from an immersive point of view the chance to play as an asteroid miner is an attractive one, but having tried both I can only say I found it much, much easier to build working capital from a Broke Adder start - blow a few asteroids, buy a couple of tons of Food, slipstream someone to another system and hope you survive your trip down to the station. I found I was able to make that work although I don't dare speculate how long it would take to buy a ship upgrade. But a Mining Transport that's embarrassed for speed by a chunk of rock, I'm sorry to say, just doesn't cut it.

I've tested blowing up a few asteroids down into splinters and I've not yet seen one exceed the Mining Transporter's max speed of 100m/s (assuming the player version is the normal speed) ... but I have seen quite a few going at over 75m/s, so quite possibly by the time you've chased one down the rest will have scattered too much, and it wouldn't take that much for some to go over 100m/s. (It may depend also which, if any, asteroid OXPs you have installed)

Reducing the speed would probably look better anyway: the asteroid slowly splitting apart, rather than flying to pieces - and would certainly be better for NPC miners too, even if the player was using a faster ship.

Yes, if the hermit owns one of those Cobra Mark I miner ships, then you better find another field to mine since you don't stand a chance in your bog slow Mining Transporter. Until you can afford injectors of course, then that arrogant show off can bite your space dust.

Poor miners can only afford Transport Miners and rich miners drive around in Cobra1s. With this start, you're the poor one.

Mining Transporter is slow, really slow. 0.1 slow to be exact. That's the point of it, you can't be much lower in the hierarchy. For comparison Anaconda is 0.14 and Cobra1 is 0.26. The first thing you want to buy is injectors. Before that, you'll better find asteroids that don't have competition. After that, you can outrun other miners.

If you don't find this to be a fun way to play, that's fine. There are a plenty of other ways to play the game.

This has been an interesting debate. I'm going to move the start to Zaonce and try to make it start from a rock hermit. I'm also considering on upping the top speed of the player mining transporter to 0.12. That way the player could outrun core transporters and worms, but would still lose to cobras. Don't want to exceed Anaconda though. That would embarrass Ranthe .

Having started on the miner start, I have to say that, personally, the greater challenges are just surviving against pirates and finding a wormhole to go through once the current system is exhausted of room for more minerals. I was able to easily acquire injectors without any trouble while within Lave's system. However, there is a slight problem that I foresee once I am able to afford that ore processor (I have that oxp along with that asteroid oxp that adds those larger asteroids to systems): given that it takes a while for energy to replenish itself and a miner transporter only has 2 energy banks, scooping all the splinters and processing them could easily take so long that you don't even get 5 splinters from an asteroid before they are all scattered. As far as that goes it would in fact be nice if the splinters and boulders were slower when they broke apart. Otherwise, I think that it's just fine, or at least that's my two cents.

cim wrote:

Reducing the speed would probably look better anyway: the asteroid slowly splitting apart, rather than flying to pieces - and would certainly be better for NPC miners too, even if the player was using a faster ship.

It would make some sense that the mining laser shatters the asteroids and boulders rather than obliterating/incinerating them like other laser types do...so maybe the speed of the asteroid and boulder break-up could depend on the destruction method?

Falcon777 wrote:

I was able to easily acquire injectors without any trouble while within Lave's system.

You can't buy injectors from Lave, unless you have some oxp stations that are higher TL of course. That's the main reason I prefer moving the start to Zaonce and also the reason why in the current version there is a trader that jumps to Zaonce just after your first launch. On top of that Zaonce is safer and you can buy Ore Processor from there.

Falcon777 wrote:

However, there is a slight problem that I foresee once I am able to afford that ore processor (I have that oxp along with that asteroid oxp that adds those larger asteroids to systems): given that it takes a while for energy to replenish itself and a miner transporter only has 2 energy banks, scooping all the splinters and processing them could easily take so long that you don't even get 5 splinters from an asteroid before they are all scattered.

Are you using the current version? One of the reasons for making the equipment primable is that you can keep on scooping splinters even if your banks dry out. When the banks are restored, just activate the Processor and it will continue to process the splinters you have scooped. Even with the hard-wire update you can still manually start the Processor.

Now that all the miners seem to be here and I'm making some small adjustments to these oxps, I would like to here some opinions on the scanning function of the Processor. The old version used custom splinters that you could visually identify to contain certain minerals, but those looked so different from Griff's splinters that it felt like a cheat. You could see from a long way which splinters were from this oxp and which were the boring mineral splinters. I changed that and now any splinter (spawned as "splinter" without any special scripting) can hold minerals. Instead of visual id, I brought in the scanning function. And here's the question, is the random success factor in scanning futile? I could up the energy use a bit and make it a 100% accurate.

spara wrote:

And here's the question, is the random success factor in scanning futile?

Yes, in nearly every case. I just scoop & process, eject minerals if there's still splinters available, as then I know for certain and at worst it's a null gain. The one case I'd use it is if I don't have any minerals left in the hold to eject, if there's nothing after 4 scans then I'll not bother with it/them.

spara wrote:

I could up the energy use a bit and make it a 100% accurate.

This would be good - perhaps as an upgrade to be purchased later rather than as standard. What if the base processor (without scanner) was available at a lower TL with the scanner at a high TL?

Falcon777 wrote:

Having started on the miner start, I have to say that, personally, the greater challenges are just surviving against pirates...

I've found that it depends on what the pirate's flying. I'd rather face Sidewinders & Mambas in the mining transport than a base MkIII Cobra as it doesn't take many hits with a mining laser to drive off or destroy them, and they really can't hit me unless at point blank range (even in 1.80) However a single Krait and I'm toast as it can take the damage and close to point blank range

Venator Dha wrote:

spara wrote:

I could up the energy use a bit and make it a 100% accurate.

This would be good - perhaps as an upgrade to be purchased later rather than as standard. What if the base processor (without scanner) was available at a lower TL with the scanner at a high TL?

Now this is good idea . The scanner could be an upgrade to the processor the same way the automatic functionality is. Just to keep things simple, there would only be the basic Processor without the scanner for sale and it could be upgraded with the Scanner. This would make mining again a bit more interesting as there would be something mining specific to upgrade to after you have purchased the Processor. Have to figure out a suitable cost though. 425? STE costs 450 in the core game.

I like the concept of the scanner very much, but the false negatives generally mean that it goes down like this:

scan - no result
scan - no result
scoop anyway

because the odd splinter that you scoop anyway and process to extract 3 kg of platinum more than pays for the ones that turn out to contain only minerals after all. Given the trouble I have running down splinters anyway, I don't object too much to filling up on minerals since I might have a long wait to find and correctly identify the valuable ones.

I'm perfectly happy with a Mining Transport being left in the dust by an Anaconda if only the darn splinters can be slow enough to cooperate!

spara wrote:

And here's the question, is the random success factor in scanning futile? I could up the energy use a bit and make it a 100% accurate.

I think that would be a good idea. I think the random success factor makes it not worth bothering with the scanning feature at all.

- Neelix

spara wrote:

Falcon777 wrote:

I was able to easily acquire injectors without any trouble while within Lave's system.

You can't buy injectors from Lave, unless you have some oxp stations that are higher TL of course. That's the main reason I prefer moving the start to Zaonce and also the reason why in the current version there is a trader that jumps to Zaonce just after your first launch. On top of that Zaonce is safer and you can buy Ore Processor from there.

Falcon777 wrote:

However, there is a slight problem that I foresee once I am able to afford that ore processor (I have that oxp along with that asteroid oxp that adds those larger asteroids to systems): given that it takes a while for energy to replenish itself and a miner transporter only has 2 energy banks, scooping all the splinters and processing them could easily take so long that you don't even get 5 splinters from an asteroid before they are all scattered.

Are you using the current version? One of the reasons for making the equipment primable is that you can keep on scooping splinters even if your banks dry out. When the banks are restored, just activate the Processor and it will continue to process the splinters you have scooped. Even with the hard-wire update you can still manually start the Processor.

Now that all the miners seem to be here and I'm making some small adjustments to these oxps, I would like to here some opinions on the scanning function of the Processor. The old version used custom splinters that you could visually identify to contain certain minerals, but those looked so different from Griff's splinters that it felt like a cheat. You could see from a long way which splinters were from this oxp and which were the boring mineral splinters. I changed that and now any splinter (spawned as "splinter" without any special scripting) can hold minerals. Instead of visual id, I brought in the scanning function. And here's the question, is the random success factor in scanning futile? I could up the energy use a bit and make it a 100% accurate.

Right, I forgot about the fact that there was a trader taking you to Zaonce right off the bat.

As to the ore processor, I haven't earned it yet on my miner, but I only recently (re)downloaded it, so it should be up to date.

Would the Vacuum_Pump OXZ also be useful for miners or does scooping splinters not use a cargo pod per splinter that contains valuable minerals ?

Lone_Wolf wrote:

Would the Vacuum_Pump OXZ also be useful for miners or does scooping splinters not use a cargo pod per splinter that contains valuable minerals ?

That was part of the original intention actually, that in combination with the ore processor it would be quite useful... that said, it seems precious metals and gems are quite rare in processed splinters, and being unable to reliably scan them currently makes picking and choosing such splinters quite tedious.

- Neelix