I mine a lot, and watch what I am doing.

It appears to me that, if I completely clear a belt, the next day it regens with all small rocks. 2 days later the rocks are back at full size.

Has anyone else seen this happen?

You also seem to be suggesting that YOU would rather believe what someone has told you than do the research yourself?

I have my belts bookmarked, but my Orca gives a 48 km wingspan. There are few occasions when I have to move in-belt. If that happens, the Orca is slaved to the primary miner. It actually seems to be faster than warping out, then in again. I realize that all miners don't have the advantages I do, but my real questions is about re-spawning.

There are a lot of variables in mining. I'm really having a lot of trouble controlling the ones that impact on the re-spawn of a particular type of ore in a particular belt.

I started another experiment today where I mined all of the Kernite out of one of my favorite belts.

When I got there it had 17 Firey Kernite, 2 Luminous Kernite and 1 Plain Kernite, but there was another miner there because I got up late. I'll mine it out again tomorrow. The number of units won't tell me much, but better than nothing.

Rocks stay in the same locations in a belt and stay the same type. For example if you completely mine a Veldspar rock it will come back at that exact same location as a Veldspar rock . It won't respawn as a different type or sub-type of ore. Regarding recovery rates I haven't studied that aspect that much.
We used to set up lines of GSC's approximately 5km apart within range of the best rocks. About fifteen GSC per belt. That worked quite well until they started 'disappearing' well before the thirty day limit and even though they were anchored & passwords set. It seemed to be a CCP problem/bug but they wouldn't have it so we stopped using that method a long time ago. Good times though.

Next I'm going to try scanning a particular rock, in a particular belt, to see if leaving it alone makes it larger.

Yes, it will get larger, by the same amount of ore that would have spawned in that satge of the respawn cycle.

That may be true, but I have the time to find out for myself. I feel better when I do that.

In high sec if a astreroid is not popped it will respawn the next day larger, if it is popped it will respawn at a random base size, usually very small. By mining a belt carefully, so you do not pop any rocks each down time the rocks will get bigger.

It has long been the practice of some miners to farm belts in this way. After several weeks they end up with these farmed belts having far larger rocks that an unfarmed belt. This is also the case in back water systems where there are no miners, the rocks are relatively untouched so are much bigger.

It`s a universal mechanic, you have started on the observation and data collection over time, you have noted it has a repeatable pattern so you continue to observe until the mechanic is revealed.

Most intelligent/educated miners knew it after 1 week of the new mechanic being introduced and have used it to their commercial advantage. It pays to have lots of uninformed miners out there (who are acting just like bots when all is said and done) as they waste cycles and self harm their potential returns which keeps prices for competent miners higher.

When you get an understanding, keep it to your self, it is so easy to work out that those who don-¦t, don-¦t really deserve to know.

Rocks only have 3 sizes: Small, Medium, and Large. That is why there is a 3 day cycle.

In hi sec belts that are heavily mined, I've noticed ALOT of higher-grade ore, e.g. concentrated veldspar, dense veldspar.

Out in low sec, 90% of ore is plain vanilla ore. e.g. veldspar.

If asteroids respawn exactly the same, why is low sec ore so crap?