Mine, all mine! My dally with mining.
24 Feb 2021CMDR CWolfXUK
I tried mining a couple of times... 
One of the main ways that a lot of pilots employ to make money in the galaxy is mining. Not digging holes in the ground, mining in space involves drilling through asteroids with dedicated lasers, launching missiles with drill bit tips or even the brute force of a high explosive to crack an asteroid completely apart. Asteroids found within the rings of certain planets can yield massive results. Anything from previous elements to low temperature diamonds can be found for those willing to put the time in. Mining can also be a hazardous adventure, one wrong move and a ship can collide with one of the giant rocks, resulting in the destruction of that ship. Another risk miners face are pirates, opportunistic attacks from single craft armed to kill or dedicated wings of organised pirate groups, any pirate attack can result in disaster for a miner - flying ships fitted for breaking, refining and hauling rock, they tend to be neither agile nor armed for combat.
Mining is also something I have never really been involved in. Back in the early years it was a lot more complex, lasering chunks of rock and then having to fly your ship at the resulting fragments and literally scooping them into the cargo bay. In more recent times a lot of that mess has been replaced with the advent of limpet drones. These tiny robots have a very rudimentary brain, either guiding the robot to an asteroid and to scan and report on the mineral content or, more usefully some would say, actually collecting things and flying back to the ship with them. I personally use limit myself sometimes to salvage wreckages I find after combat.
I think it was this revelation that tempted me to try mining again. First I tried with an adder class ship, small and inexpensive, essential at the time as my finances were not yet very well built up. I fitted a mining laser, collector control system, refinery, cargo bay and as many limpets as I could squeeze in.
My initial attempts at carving my fortune from the surface of the space boulders were not very successful. Yes, I took chunks off them, refining various materials from the fragments. The problems that mining brought for me were twofold; total inability to defend myself if I got intercepted and the problems of finding something worth mining. In hindsight, it would not have taken that much research to figure out where I was going wrong - I was still a young pilot at that stage and instead just brushed mining off as a corporate game, not for independents like me.
I returned to earning my credits through combat and the occasional trading run for the next few years.
The advent of new technologies and techniques caught my interest more recently, with new seismic charges and the aforementioned drilling missiles becoming readily available. The thought of making things go boom certainly seemed more exciting than just firing lasers into a rock. This happened around the same time that the great mining rush for void opals and low temperature diamonds began and I feel I may have gotten a little caught up in that too.
I pooled my resources, selling off some old equipment and went for the latest ship available, the massive Lakon built Type Ten Defender - so named as it was originally constructed to battle the newly returned Thargoid fleets. I chose the ship due to it's size, defensive capabilities and also the fact it could take a hit from a rock and survive. Research was done, not making the mistake of last time, limpets were loaded, various new equipment fitted and off I went.
My plan was simple, go to a relatively quiet system, one containing a planet with rings of ice and no stations. For my first time deep core mining I wanted to be able to focus on just that, so avoiding other ships by avoiding populated systems made sense to me. I travelled quite a way out and found a suitable system, a suitable planet and no other ships.
As I approached the target planet I activated my surface scanner, after first discovering that I needed to be in slow supercruise for it to actually work, and I aimed it at the planet's rings. The first probe I launched soared through the blackness of space between us until it neared the ring I had aimed at, then it veered off course, caught in the gravitational pull of the planet and slipped neatly between that and the ring, hurtling off into space. I fired again, this time taking gravity into account and aiming just out from where I wanted the probe to go. Again the probe curved but this time the new path this caused led it straight into the ice and rock filled ring. A pulse of blue swept across the image of the rings on my cockpit overlay and three orange patches appeared, highlighting good mining spots. Firing up the engines to a higher speed I flew straight for the nearest one, hoping that the scan was right.
The rings slowly changed from a band of colour into a line of massive rocks orbiting the pale blue planet. My supercruise cut out and I stared at the bewildering array of shapes in front of me. Activating the pulse wave analyser sent out another virtual wave of energy on my display - mimicking the actual wave of energy the system sent out. On my display this caused a couple of the asteroid bodies to faintly glow orange. I turned the ship to the right on a whim and fired the scanning pulse again. This time one of the rocks burst into a bright orange colour - denoting possible good content. The type ten's engines rumbled as I started moving closer to my target. I launched a limpet equipped with a prospector tool. The limpet flew nearly as fast as a missile then slowed itself before attaching to the surface of the great rock. A drilling tool, barbed with sensor equipment, bored down from the little probe and did the job of assessing the find. My computer reported the results, which turned out to be very positive indeed. The asteroid had some surface deposits of low temperature diamonds and a great core too. Following a hint I had acquired from another pilot I activate my night vision display, which made it a lot easier to see the fissures in the surface of the asteroid. Flicking the weapon group controls I loaded up the abrasion laser, aimed at the surface deposits and pulled the trigger. A ring of energy shot out and smashed into the surface of the rock, dislodging the valuable deposits into space. I waited as the asteroid rotated on it's axis from the impact and fired at the second one I had spotted. This one took two shots until it came loose. Lowering the cargo bay and launching a collector limpet I then waited for those deposits to be brought in, be loaded into the on board refinery and confirm the find. This was my first time using the equipment so I just wanted to be sure and I was not disappointed. Now for the big goal. Switching weapon systems again I loaded the seismic charges and aimed for the fissure in front of me, pulling the trigger I watched the shot zoom out and make impact.
Beep, beep, beep.
I waited, watching the countdown with anticipation and expecting a big explosion. The timer ticked down and then.
Boom!
The explosion rocked my ship but not the target. I checked my flight recording to see what went wrong. I had not noticed that my shot with the explosive had missed the fissure, bounced and headed straight back to me. I tried again, this time taking a bit longer to line the shot up. This time not only did the charge look as if it went in properly, it also started to flash brightly - the charge had a warning beacon in it. Just to be certain I fired another charge into another fissure and that too started blinking.
The timer rang out.
The explosion was huge, the blastwave rocking my ship and causing half my computer systems to flicker off. The heads up display failed completely and I stared out of the transparisteel cockpit at the rock before me, split wide open into two main halves and a lot of other chunks. There was a massive dust and ice cloud around it, expanding out as I watched.
My systems came back online and I immediately checked my scanner. There were large amounts of low temperature diamonds, most of them floating around near the centre of the detonation, a few still attached to the main bulk of rock. I launched three limpets to start the collection and then toggled on my abrasion blaster to release those last pieces still attached.
Some of the desired materials made it back to my ship and I smiled to myself, this was fun. Then my smile faded as my limpets lost the plot and crashed into loose fragments of the asteroid. I needed to be closer to stop stray rocks hitting them. I launched three more and engaged my ship thrusters to move into the middle of the debris. This seemed to work and the limpets continued collecting, in my mind I could almost hear my little workers singing a song. The air in my cockpit became very cold, the thermo readout for the ship plummeted and ice started to form on the canopy. I had not considered how cold the core of a low temperature diamond could be!
With all the useful fragments completed I started my search for more suitable rocks. I found a few and did manage to make a good harvest.
I can see why someone would find this a good way to make profit, however, for me the task of then finding a suitable system that would take the haul at a reasonable price, then go back out to do it all again, that was daunting. For fear that boredom could occur, resulting in me colliding fatally with one asteroid too many, I decided that I would rather continue to make my money bounty hunting and working to support a cause.
I guess there are different types of pilot out there; those that will happily do any job for profit, those that like to do jobs that they can relax through and then my type - those who want to spend the time they can in space actively. Combat is a thrill, flying fast and loose - as in those old holovids - then going home to my family knowing that I have reduced the evils in space, that's how I work.