Currently if I try to use a mining beam on a player, it'll do nothing.

How about we make them work on players & other ships by making them inflict little damage over time.

The damage it'll deal will be same as getting hit from a single firecracker turret constantly. Damage Being dealt at a little faster speed than firecracker turret but it still won't be high enough to cause any substantial damage.

This would allow me to just mine someone & melt them! Because why not? It's a laser that heats asteroids, it should be able damage ships too.

It'll be a fun addition.

That would then conflict with whether people could mine in a NFZ, fwiw.

I still think a mineing beam should be able to do one of 2 things against another ship, slowly pull it apart and give you parts back, (scrap, fcp on cappies rarely, that kind of thing) or be able to pull items directly from the cargo to yours. Can be stopped by any already existing cargo scrambler or masking addon. It would lead to hilarious/usefull things.

That would be better for a completely new addon.

People could still mine inside nfz just not mine some person. Perhaps we can make so mining beam knows what it's about to mine?

If target is not an asteroid & the player is inside NFZ then it would give a message like - You cannot use the mining beams on another vessel when inside the NFZ. You can only use the beam on asteroids.

This would probably solve the problem with NFZ

I don't see anything wrong with the suggestion itself, but it seems kinda pointless. Considering how short-range mining beams are, it's gonna be practically useless unless your victim is afk or you're an extremely adept close-range fighter. And if you are an adept close range fighter, you'd want to just use actual weapons rather than beams where the damage is very low and you have to continuously stay within 100m or less of your target.

It's supposed to be like *yes I can mine a player if I want to* & not I wanna go on a murder spree with mining beams....

It adds a small sense of realism that has value, but at a cost of additional gameplay complexity and having to train new users about "one more way" they might accidentally trigger tempKoS.

I think there's value in an eventual "salvage" mechanic, which I've written about before, in regards to Debris and Hulk gameplay. Mining beams are an obvious way to go about this.

But, I'm not sure that just adding damage to mining beams is worth the tradeoff, at least for the moment.