I’ve been on holiday the last week, which is why no blog updates. What I have been doing is trying out mining for the first time since limpets were first added. Back then, limpets blew up 75% of the time, hitting the cargo hatch.
So, with some time on my hands, I equipped my Type-9 with a refinery and some collector/prospector limpet controllers and set out. Arriving at a HIGH resource extraction site, I started mining and within half an hour, I had a lot of minerals and trouble. A wing of pirates dropped in, scanned me and in very rapid order destroyed my ship. Ouch! 3.5M CR rebuy.
Lesson one. Don’t mine in Resource Extraction Sites!
For safe mining, you need to drop out in unmarked areas of the planetary rings at least 20km away or more from the RES sites. CMDR Ranualf has written an excellent guide to mining on the forums here.
Following Ranualf’s advice, I switch to my Anaconda (more guns made me feel better) and equipped it with a refinery and a prospector controller and two limpet controllers.
I found mining a bit like fishing. You blast the rock fragments from any given rock, then wait a short while for your limpets to hoover them up for you. The minerals and metals just fly in. You go through limpets in the ratio of around a third of the cargo you collect. I managed to fill my 284T hold using 100 limpets. An exchange of 10,000CR of limpets for 2.2M CR of metals and minerals.
As you can see from my income log on Inara.cz, trading gets me the most money, while mining and bounty hunting in a RES are fairly equal.
But here’s the critical difference. To get 10M CR in three loops of a trade run, you need a 200M CR Imperial Cutter (and the rank to buy one), but my "padawan learner" CMDR Awesome_Gamer was able to equip a Type-6 for mining and was making 1M CR per run to the RES area. That means he was making the basic value of his ship each trip. Furthermore, bounty hunting in his Vulture, CMDR Awesome_Gamer was making the same amount of bounty as my more expensive Federal Assault Ship.
While trading is the "licence to print money" at the top end of the scale, combat and mining are far better options for newer players, with mining offering the most reward for minimum risk.
Now that CMDR Awesome_Gamer has two ships, he can switch between mining and combat as the mood takes him (much as I do) so the game never makes you feel like you are grinding.
Currently I've parked my mining ship and I'm back in the FAS for the Hammer of Justice Community Goal in Phiagre (is that a blue planet?), so a few days of pew-pew before I decide what I'll be doing next.