Gread Lancier
Caldari
PROGENITOR CORPORATION
Intrepid Crossing
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Posted - 2008.02.22 16:57:00 -
[2]
 Quote:
Without offense, but you have ever mined seriously?
Low sec has already noticeably better minerals that high sec, simply the demand in minerals favor high sec low ends, veldspater is much more used than isogen or zydrine.
Doing a mining operation in low sec involve a lot of very vulnerable ships. A barge can be killed in 1-2 volleys, before any defender can kill an attacker, and the barge has little chance of escaping with the hold full of ore. A Exumer has a little better chance, but not a really good one.
To move the minerals you need pimped industrials, with full expanders and rigs, or you will loose a lot of time moving the minerals (using 1 blockade runner for each barge would be very unproductive) again mega slow in warping away.
To really defend those weak ships you need something like a 1:1 ratio of combat ships and scouts to haulers/barges.
So as thing stay today it is unproductive to mine in low sec barring special circumstances (easy to protect system, other activities in the system that make it convenient).
The error (in my view) about mining in low sec (and 0.0) is that the ore is bulky.
I would prefer it to be slow to mine but with a small size ore.
The single prospector mining gold during the gold rush was capable of moving large sums on his mule, even if panning the gold was slow with grams recovered every day if you weren't one of the lucky people.
A less bulky low sec ore would make possible to use a Osprey or other ships to do ninja mining efficiently. Currently you need to dock several times to clear your hold to get the ore to refine 1 time.
Yes I have mined in many places and mine simultaneously with two characters both with freighters for transport and mine in Hulks with near perfect refining skills.
While the mining mechanics is debateable I believe you missed the point of my entire post, which is not play with what low sec is, but to play with what high sec is.
Low sec will never be profitable enough to interest the majority of EVE players because everything is too profitable in high sec. Even if you put 0.0 quality ore and all the LvL4 and 5 missions in low sec, people can still be financially well off and nearly completely support capital ship programs for their alliances in high sec without getting shot at.
Corporate activity drives where population is and what the population is up to. If High sec no longer supports large industrial operations for the major alliance activities in 0.0 you have to believe that people will figure out a way to survive and make low sec inhabitable by groups of cooperative people.
As for your example of how fragile a barge is, all I have to say is if you lose a barge every mining op, what is that compared to what you have gained?
You would not need a 1 to 1 ratio of protector ships for every barge and exhumer. That is not how mining is conducted in 0.0. And there is only slightly different circumstances in low sec.
I would think that if a corp found a good system to conduct mining ops in they would be stationed in the system and therefore transporting goods would not be that difficult and they would have plenty of support for their operations.
I am not speaking about small mining gangs or solo players. I am speaking on large scale corporations working wihtin alliances and such just like 0.0 but in low sec, because they can no longer sustain 0.0 alliances from high sec.
That in itself could work with dispersing the population, opening up the game, expanding markets and lessening the void in low-sec.
But if you can sit in empire and a corp can pull down in a single mining op millions of m3 of ore in a few hours with zero risk, why in the world would anyone even look at low sec?
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