Miner Fighter Range

[daeamarth]

This may apply to others but so far even with fairly advanced fighters the range appears to be so small it is pointless.

I have a station that has several asteroids within 10KM with a range of 0.75 my miner fighters are basically useless outside on a ship at which point why not just install mining lasers that require little to no crew.

I would think within a controlled sector your fighters should have a much greater range. I wonder if this impacts delivery of goods. Do I need to move my stations so close they are nearly touching for transport?

Am I missing something?

[umop-apisdn]

There shouldn't be any minable asteroids within range of a station... and even if there are, there won't be for long. Don't put mining fighters on stations.

As for the utility of mining fighters, they allow "simultaneous mining", meaning that instead of a single ship firing its mining lasers at the rock one wishes to extract metal from, there can theoretically be up to 120 fighters mining that rock (and/or any other resource-bearing rocks nearby)... plus any mining lasers on the carrier. As one might imagine, this drastically increases mining speed.

[yert527]

I thought their range was limited to like 3.5km max. I was so excited to make fighter miners and park a carrier in a asteroid field, but then I found out I need to basically park right next to the thing.... I might have well used a small mining corvette with a trash captain and lasers.

Though after seeing how my slightly armed miner goes on missions and just "auto-gets" way more minerals than I need, means there is no agency, strategy, or caution needed in mining .... it kinda of broke my love for mining since I can automate it in a "dice roll".

[umop-apisdn]

Yeah, get a few Miner captains on ships with a squadron or two of mining fighters and a mining subsystem and whether you're emptying individual sectors in minutes by instantly evaporating entire asteroids, or sending them off on map-based mining missions for millions of metals per hour... it kinda takes the fun out.

Fear not! You can always play "make number go up" with stations

[Astasia]

Originally posted by yert527:

I thought their range was limited to like 3.5km max. I was so excited to make fighter miners and park a carrier in a asteroid field, but then I found out I need to basically park right next to the thing.... I might have well used a small mining corvette with a trash captain and lasers.

Though after seeing how my slightly armed miner goes on missions and just "auto-gets" way more minerals than I need, means there is no agency, strategy, or caution needed in mining .... it kinda of broke my love for mining since I can automate it in a "dice roll".

Yes, this was the 2.0 update in a nutshell. Remove player agency, strategy, design and logic, replace it with easy mobile game style missions for infinite resources.

Mining fighters are basically useless on manual mining ships, outside of their ability to potentially save turrets slots by using them to mine instead of turrets. They don't actually function like carriers in actual gameplay since they are so short range. Their only real purpose is to make a bar go up on the mining mission window to inflate your free infinite resources even more. Inside the fantasy simulation that is the mining mission, having a lot of mining fighters allows the carrier to mine many asteroids at once, multiplying the resource yields of the mission. It's too bad it doesn't do that in actual gameplay, they used to have a much longer range.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Yes, this was the 2.0 update in a nutshell. Remove player agency, strategy, design and logic, replace it with easy mobile game style missions for infinite resources.

I get what you're saying, but I think you're missing one relatively minor detail; the ships you send out on map-based mining missions appear to be actually mining the area.

I've been paying attention, and have noticed that if I haven't been to an area before, all the asteroids are intact, in every unexplored sector. If I send out a map-based mining mission or two (or five...) before I start wandering around, there's an awful lot of "half-chewed" asteroids when I show up and start looking around.

Originally posted by Astasia:

Mining fighters are basically useless on manual mining ships, outside of their ability to potentially save turrets slots by using them to mine instead of turrets.

Now this, I have to disagree with completely. Have you not actually made a full squadron of mining fighters and watched them obliterate entire asteroids in under a second? Same for salvage fighters; a full squadron (or two, or three) can instantly evaporate an entire wreckage, where ship-based lasers will take a few seconds (at best).

Originally posted by Astasia:

They don't actually function like carriers in actual gameplay since they are so short range.

Also demonstrably untrue. Use a legendary turret at a fighter factory, and crank their speed up over 1,000. By the time the carrier gets turned toward the next rock, the fighters have already "eaten it all gone".

Originally posted by Astasia:

Their only real purpose is to make a bar go up on the mining mission window to inflate your free infinite resources even more. Inside the fantasy simulation that is the mining mission, having a lot of mining fighters allows the carrier to mine many asteroids at once, multiplying the resource yields of the mission.

On the one hand, the entire game is a "fantasy simulation"... that's part of being a "game". On the other hand, and as I stated above, the mining missions actually interact with the game world. Wrecks and asteroids get chewed up and deleted, even in sectors you're not in. "Multiplying the resource yield" is because the ships really are chewing up rocks and/or wrecks faster.

Originally posted by Astasia:

It's too bad it doesn't do that in actual gameplay, they used to have a much longer range.

You should probably try these things in-game before complaining about how they don't work... because empirically, they do. Fighters will travel at least 20+ km to get to a target ship/wreck/asteroid, so your "range" argument holds absolutely zero water. If they used to have an even larger range, that's great... but fighter range right now is not at all weak.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

I get what you're saying, but I think you're missing one relatively minor detail; the ships you send out on map-based mining missions appear to be actually mining the area.

I've been paying attention, and have noticed that if I haven't been to an area before, all the asteroids are intact, in every unexplored sector. If I send out a map-based mining mission or two (or five...) before I start wandering around, there's an awful lot of "half-chewed" asteroids when I show up and start looking around.

They do not. When 2.0 first hit beta there was zero interaction between the missions and the actual galaxy. A lot of people complained about the various issues with this update, one of the minor tweaks the dev made was to have the ships on mission occasionally show up in systems and pretend to be doing stuff. They will "mine" asteroids in the system for a while and then jump out, these actions have no effect on the mission rewards and are just fluff, a small attempt to try to make the mechanic a little more immersive.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Now this, I have to disagree with completely. Have you not actually made a full squadron of mining fighters and watched them obliterate entire asteroids in under a second? Same for salvage fighters; a full squadron (or two, or three) can instantly evaporate an entire wreckage, where ship-based lasers will take a few seconds (at best).

Also demonstrably untrue. Use a legendary turret at a fighter factory, and crank their speed up over 1,000. By the time the carrier gets turned toward the next rock, the fighters have already "eaten it all gone".

A mining ship loaded up with powerful mining lasers on auto will chew through asteroids fast enough that the main time sink is flying around the map to get to them, and if properly placed your ship doesn't have to turn at all to accomplish this. Mining fighters don't change this. You still have to fly around hugging asteroids, and there are rarely any clusters of asteroids of the material you are after close enough to mine more than a couple without flying on to the next area. Having to load and unload the fighters between systems removes much of any trivial increases in yield per time. Not that anyone is spending much time manually mining anything these days.

The rest of your post seems to be based on your first misconception about captain missions interacting with the world. Ya, it's not a thing, they poof out of existence and generate free resources and then poof back into existence. The ships you see show up on sectors occasionally are basically ghosts. This was all explained by the dev during the 2.0 beta and subsequent updates.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

I get what you're saying, but I think you're missing one relatively minor detail; the ships you send out on map-based mining missions appear to be actually mining the area.

I've been paying attention, and have noticed that if I haven't been to an area before, all the asteroids are intact, in every unexplored sector. If I send out a map-based mining mission or two (or five...) before I start wandering around, there's an awful lot of "half-chewed" asteroids when I show up and start looking around.

They do not. When 2.0 first hit beta there was zero interaction between the missions and the actual galaxy. A lot of people complained about the various issues with this update, one of the minor tweaks the dev made was to have the ships on mission occasionally show up in systems and pretend to be doing stuff. They will "mine" asteroids in the system for a while and then jump out, these actions have no effect on the mission rewards and are just fluff, a small attempt to try to make the mechanic a little more immersive.

Absolutely and demonstrably false.
Ships on mining and/or salvaging missions that show up in the sector you're currently in will cheerfully mine rocks and salvage wrecks; they frequently jump in and gank the stuff I'm mining and/or salvaging with the ships that are not in my dedicated mining and salvaging fleets.

They collect the resource loot, although they leave subsystems and turrets behind, and if they jump out without picking everything up, those resources are locked to "the captains"; you are unable to pick them up without "stealing".

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Now this, I have to disagree with completely. Have you not actually made a full squadron of mining fighters and watched them obliterate entire asteroids in under a second? Same for salvage fighters; a full squadron (or two, or three) can instantly evaporate an entire wreckage, where ship-based lasers will take a few seconds (at best).

Also demonstrably untrue. Use a legendary turret at a fighter factory, and crank their speed up over 1,000. By the time the carrier gets turned toward the next rock, the fighters have already "eaten it all gone".

A mining ship loaded up with powerful mining lasers on auto will chew through asteroids fast enough that the main time sink is flying around the map to get to them, and if properly placed your ship doesn't have to turn at all to accomplish this. Mining fighters don't change this. You still have to fly around hugging asteroids, and there are rarely any clusters of asteroids of the material you are after close enough to mine more than a couple without flying on to the next area. Having to load and unload the fighters between systems removes much of any trivial increases in yield per time. Not that anyone is spending much time manually mining anything these days.

Again, demonstrably untrue. Follow the instructions in the text you quoted, and make fighters that move quicker than their carrier; the carrier's armament becomes irrelevant, because it never gets into range of the targets. Fighters have plenty of range, you just never see it because they're targeting the same thing their carrier is... and your fighters are slow.

Originally posted by Astasia:

The rest of your post seems to be based on your first misconception about captain missions interacting with the world. Ya, it's not a thing, they poof out of existence and generate free resources and then poof back into existence. The ships you see show up on sectors occasionally are basically ghosts. This was all explained by the dev during the 2.0 beta and subsequent updates.

... and again, this is demonstrably untrue. I'd like to think you're just incorrect, but your insistence on these falsehoods makes me think you're being deliberately dishonest.

Open your eyes and look. Fly through a couple sectors full of rocks, verifying that there are no "half-eaten" asteroids in them. Write down the coordinates, so you can double-check them later. Send your mining fleet on a map-based mining mission centered on those sectors for, say... 2-3 hours. Go have dinner, and/or watch a movie.

When the miners return from their mission, go look at those sectors again, and notice that there are several "half-eaten" asteroids now, as well as "hidden resource" asteroids that only have 3 sides because they've been cored out.

For that matter, send your fleet on a mission centered on the sector you're in. Watch them show up (or not leave in the first place), complain about you watching them while they work, and eat every rock or wreck in the sector.

They most assuredly do interact with the game world, and your claiming otherwise is why this discussion is over; I can't debate with someone who will cheerfully lie through their teeth rather than admit they're wrong.

[meltingpointsp]

Originally posted by daeamarth:

Am I missing something?

I don't know if this solves the issue completely, but you can use the attack order (with an asteroid selected) on your miner fighters instead of harvest - the attack order has unlimited range as far as I know.

[InquisitorSoran]

I usually fly next to a resource depot and turn off the power to my engines & thrusters, then I tell my ship to mine the sector and watch the R-Miner fighters zoom off into space and transport me the ore, cuts out the travel time from asteroids to the depot entirely.

[LORDSOL]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by yert527:

I thought their range was limited to like 3.5km max. I was so excited to make fighter miners and park a carrier in a asteroid field, but then I found out I need to basically park right next to the thing.... I might have well used a small mining corvette with a trash captain and lasers.

Though after seeing how my slightly armed miner goes on missions and just "auto-gets" way more minerals than I need, means there is no agency, strategy, or caution needed in mining .... it kinda of broke my love for mining since I can automate it in a "dice roll".

Yes, this was the 2.0 update in a nutshell. Remove player agency, strategy, design and logic, replace it with easy mobile game style missions for infinite resources.

Mining fighters are basically useless on manual mining ships, outside of their ability to potentially save turrets slots by using them to mine instead of turrets. They don't actually function like carriers in actual gameplay since they are so short range. Their only real purpose is to make a bar go up on the mining mission window to inflate your free infinite resources even more. Inside the fantasy simulation that is the mining mission, having a lot of mining fighters allows the carrier to mine many asteroids at once, multiplying the resource yields of the mission. It's too bad it doesn't do that in actual gameplay, they used to have a much longer range.

what game are you talking about Avorion is based on mining and from the sounds of things you don't play Avorion

[LORDSOL]

Originally posted by daeamarth:

This may apply to others but so far even with fairly advanced fighters the range appears to be so small it is pointless.

I have a station that has several asteroids within 10KM with a range of 0.75 my miner fighters are basically useless outside on a ship at which point why not just install mining lasers that require little to no crew.

I would think within a controlled sector your fighters should have a much greater range. I wonder if this impacts delivery of goods. Do I need to move my stations so close they are nearly touching for transport?

Am I missing something?

I apologize for my comment