Step 1: Heat 100% Ferric Roid to melting temperature of Iron
Step 2: Apply strong magnetic field
Step 3: Stand back
Step 4: Laugh as every bot in the sector gets pulled into the rock.

LMAO.

Now THAT would totally be worth doing, Nerde.

I like SMM's idea of being able to "calibrate" mining beams to capture more efficiently at certain temps, and to eliminate some of the scrap ore at lower temperatures, watching their extraction possibilities dwindle as the asteroid reaches their melting points.

That would indeed introduce more skill into the miner's profession, and make it a little more fun.

Random bits of valuable ore in an otherwise worthless asteroid would also be a nice treat. Just, say you're mining carbonic for a mission and all of a sudden you happen upon a hidden vein of Heliocene! Score!

I think this thread is cool. I'm all for making mining more complex and interesting. It should become less boring before long, because of all the other related stuff we're trying to do (making the Hive compete dynamically for ore, making ores tie into the economy, etc), but interesting changes to the actual functionality of mining would be cool too.

It's also possible for us to trigger random small "explosions" on the surface of an asteroid after a certain temperature, which potentially spawn debris that could hit/damage the miner's ship (think of the capship explosions, but on a small scale). Larger chunks and concussion-blast effects as the temperature goes up. Combined with some interesting sound effects (cracking/crackling for ice, and so on), it might be interesting.

Anyway, keep the ideas coming, sounds neat.

Well, if exploding 'roids becomes a reality, the first thing my pirate instinct would think of is booby trapping them to do so on unlucky pilots who try to mine the wrong rocks. Maybe something that would stun a trader for a duration (or just explode causing crippling damage), then send a hail to the trap's owner alerting 'em that it went off. Especially if the traps tended to go off with a radius of less than 100m, so that careful miners who took the time to measure out close to a 100m before activating their beam might avoid the effects after setting off a trap. If I were a miner, I might stock my Centaur with a basic mining beam, and then a couple of seekers; When I find a 'roid a with a trap, and set it off outside it's range, I can just play dead for awhile and wait for whoever laid the trap to jump in. Except now the hunter becomes the hunted!

Maybe competing miners would trap their favorite asteroid fields, taking note of which 'roids to avoid. A guild might take measures to defend their guild territory from unwanted visitors. Pirates could hide in fields they mined earlier to avoid the authorities.

In fact, I don't know how possible this would be, but it would be fantastic if the hive bots would spawn 'larval' bots on the surface of some 'roids, where they'd burrow in and lay dormant, quietly absorbing the sweet mineral succor of their rock, and ever so slowly growing to their 'adult' size. They'd be a nuisance really, because long after a hive was cleared from an area, the 'larva' would remain. Disturbing one of their nesting 'roids would cause them to become agitated, wriggle out and slam into the hapless miner like an aerna seeker, but causing only slight damage. If an asteroid cluster was deemed valuable enough, and had been infested for too long, a team of exterminators might have to be hired to systematically purge the field.

The hive doesn't seem to use "larval bots" from the history. But I like the idea. It's about time we get another enemy faction out there!

Some sort of biological space dwelling creature? :D (I know it has been suggested scores of times)

As an afterthought, they need to make piercing shrieks when they come after you. Something to wake you up, after hours of droll mining.

What I meant by mini-games is like some sort of little 2d (or even 3d) image of the area with a certain ore, and what is underneath it. Or possibly not revealing what's underneath it... AHHHHH! A surprise maybe... Ferric, being Iron? FE? Anyway kindof like Superman can't see through Iron, maybe we could make certain gaseous minerals or non-metals "see-through" so you know exactly what is underneath it. Radioactive materials may also be tricky by giving a kind of glow to the minerals around them, making you think that perhaps the other minerals are radioactive.

I don't know which ores are radioactive, but if there aren't any, we should make some. This would facilitate what I was saying in transporting nuclear material in my "Nukes" thread.

edited...

Anyway, I think this would also end up making ore prices go up, because it is harder to mine with stuff blowing up in ur face every once in a while.

bump...

Hmm, I suppose using multiple mining beams 'callibrated' to certain harmonies might induce some sweet and possible unforseen effects when mining. Similar to a chord of church bells, it'd be the precise frequencies attuned with one another that determine which ores mine best at which temperatures. The effect would be the same as described before hand; a miner would have to have some pretty good intention of which ore he or she's after, and exactly how to go about extracting it most efficiently. The difference is that the science of mining really becomes something of an art, because equipping more mining beams opens up the path for exponentially more potential ways to use them. It'd be an especially neat trick if exactly 12 different types of mining beams were released, each corresponding to a different note on the music scale, and having the potential to be 'callibrated' on the run to different octives. I figure that in the future alot of mining's going to have to be done, so might as well make it interesting, eh wot?

( Remember that a note on the next higher octive is precisely doubled in frequency. For those interested in the physics behind it, read this and consider the relations it has with mining in VO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note )

Hmmm, I like the idea but do we have to listen to our "created music" while mining?

Good point. I guess if anything the notes ought to be barely audible, like a windchime in the distance, only discernable if you had the music turned off. It'd make some pretty creepy sounds in those sectors full of different bot collectors.

Yeah, ok I like that idea.

How about a row of sliders like an audio equalizer. Fiddling the sliders to affect the resonance, based on temperature, could improve the rate, and likelihood of acquiring certain minerals.

Put the whole works in the PDA screen, which automatically activates when the mining beams are started, (I always thought it weird that you mined from the cockpit) Sliders adjust to re-calibrate the beam, getting the user closer to 100% efficiency.

Add in the often suggested cooling beam, and instead of working an asteroid to uselessness, the challenge would be in keeping your asteroid at maximum efficiency during the mining process.

Balance of this could be kept by requiring that the high end minerals like Heliocene, are impossible to mine at low temperatures, and require the miner to raise the asteroids temp to a certain level before it can even be acquired.

Keep the window small for viable extraction, (say 25K up or down), and increase the cooling rate so that even a trip back to dump off your cargo will result in you having to re-heat the asteroid just to start work again. This would add value to mining in pairs, as one could keep the beams going, while the other ships the product back to station.

This could all be easily explained by stating that it is the plasma of each material that is harvested, and not the solid. The material has to reach the temperature that the element becomes plasma, but not exceed that temperature by more than 25k, in order to re-solidify it before storage, and to preserve its chemical composition.

[Edit]

Couple more things, just to finish off the balance/value issue.

With an ore temperature sweet spot, smaller asteroids would be harder to keep at the ideal temp and the rates up, while larger ones would be easier, and therefore more productive.

By matching the mining rate to the percentage of asteroid composition of the mined mineral, it would be beneficial to find high composition asteroids, even if the temp range forced the mining of the most valuable mineral in the rock 100% of the time.

With these paramaters, the same value/size/composition relationship would be maintained.

I love the whole sliding bar idea.

I really love the whole sweet spot idea.

But it should be relative to the current minimum temperature that the ore can be mined.

In other words, I mine at the minimum Temp for Ferric at the coldest=30K, but it's window is relative to the % of Ferric * Skill attained from Ferric.

So calculations would be as follows:

S= Skill Gained per unit=6
P= Ferric % in Asteroid=100%
N= Minimum mining temperature = (Skill / Percentage) * 400
6/100=.06 _ .06 * 400 = __24K__
R= Mining Range= (P/S)*40
100/6 = 16.6667 _ 16.6667 * 40 = __666.67K__
M= Maximum mining temp = N+R
24K+666.67K = ___690.67K___


I also thought this might be a good time to say that, well, ores have different absorption rates from light and from heat. Light from the sun, depending on how close you are to the sun, is paramountto what temperature the roid starts off at. Who came up with the "10K" idea anyway :P. Even if you just make all the roids in the same sector the same temp, that would be better than outlying asteroids being 10K, while roids 1 sector from a Plasma Ball Boiling at Millions of degrees are also 10K...

Heh, SMM. I can imagine people setting up weapon groups with a variety of mining beams to play "music" ingame... that would be sweet, if only for the humor in seeing it done.

Hey anything that adds to mining can't be a bad thing...

Music might be fun, but you can't "hear_in_space!"

I think the hottest rock ever known was about 297000 K. That should have glowed.
And that station of mine with 14000 units of Helio should have imploded into a blackhole.

hmm i'm making a topic about that...