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Just discovered something else that really helps when breaking up nvidium ( not cost efficient to do with ore or silicon )
Mosquito Missles. It will bust up any rock in one hit. Advantage when busting up Nvidium is the range you can do this at. This helps save fps, and thus less rocks cluster back up on you
When doing large clusters it is going to take multiple times of busting the roids up before they are all gone. So on the first visit, just break up all the rocks with mosquito missles ( or other looong range attack with no aoe ) untill all you have left are collectable rocks and the rocks that are one stage away from being collectible. ( plus possible clustering back up due to system performance ) This will fill up 10 mercuries with 400 plus ore each.

When those mercuries are done by either a full cargo or no more collectible rocks to pick up, go back in and use either apsg or a mobile mining laser. With all the rocks left being just one step away from being collectible you can safely bust them up with the psg, and its best to use mobile miner to bust up what ever rocks clustered back up again.
Doing it this way really seems to be the least time consuming/ least waste. Spent the last week doing nothing but mobile mining and started 5 new games ( experimenting.. I think I am gonna move on now before I start dreaming of asteroids ) Getting consistant results in each case. So yeah Mosquito missles are a definite plus when dealing with large clusters of nvidium.

Only asteroids required a mobile drilling system to break them up into rocks (a hornet missile could also be used for this purpose)

Back in X2 it was said that the use of Hornet reduced the number of fragments you got from an asteroid (compared to MDS). Does that assumption hold in the X3 model too?

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Anonymous Miner

An interesting question to which I do not yet know the answer .

I'll get back on this at the weekend.

Thanks for waiting.

I have found no difference between shooting a map asteroid with a hornet missile or mobile drilling rig.

In both cases the asteroid breaks up to form 3 type zero rock clusters.

The test was done using a type zero map asteroid. The vast majority of asteroids in X3 are of this type.

(3 type zero clusters yield a total of 34596 collectable fragments. The number of minerals obtained per fragment depends on asteroid yield.)

@Incubi - Good point, mosquito missiles are really useful at the beginning of the game when manual mobile mining. They fit is pretty much every TS, are cheap, plentiful and fast. Just the thing because IREs are in short supply in Argon Prime

Bunny wrote:I have found no difference between shooting a map asteroid with a hornet missile or mobile drilling rig.

In both cases the asteroid breaks up to form 3 type zero rock clusters.

Nice. The scenario that I have in mind is a Nividium Asteroid. Obviously, I have to be in sector for either MDS or Hornet. But I might be forced to fly away from the rock, even beyond the Hornet range. And the sector is foggy, so after blowing up that asteroid, there is nothing on the map to navigate by. "Drop Satellite?" Satellites are soft and tend to break if fired at.

So. Group Management System - Group Hotkeys. The "Launch Missile" hotkey. Never tried that for this purpose, but in principle it should make a ship fire its missile (Hornet) at my target (the Asteroid).

Had the Hornet been "lossy" I would have had to re-think my plan. Not that it really matters, for 35,000 fragments mean awfully many cargo units of that Mineral.

This is handy for finding rocks in fog:
Target Rock Clusters

Back after a romp in XTM, a new game and I'm doing the old Nividium start. Nice to see your script in the bonus pack as I'm doing this vanilla. Anyway, my Nividium collector has 2 options: collect rocks in sector and collect Minerals in Sector. Whats the difference?

It tells you in the Bonus Pack readme, but to simplify, Collect Rocks just collects any collectable minerals in the sector. Collect Minerals will actually attempt to break down asteroids to collectable size, THEN collect them.

Thanks for this informative guide, just what I need right now.

I do have one more question:

I just fitted a Mercury with all of this gear including a mobile drilling system. When I go to freight, the mobile drilling system is listed with "install" next to it. When I click install, it takes me to the weapons screen, but the only thing I can install in the weapons bay is the PAC that I have, it wont let me put the drill in....

Do I need another type of ship, or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks.

Can someone please, please, please explain in plain English how exactly to use the Ore Collector to actually collect Ore? I've read everything I can find on this and nobody seems to want to explain it without abbreviations or assumptions that the reader is already somehow familiar with mining?

I'm in X3:AP. I have a Mercury which is fitted with a Mobile Mining Laser and an Ore Collector. I was disappointed to discover that you have go through an entire rigmarole to just fire off a charge from the rear-mounted Mining Laser (which has to be done by approaching an Asteroid, physically turning the ship 180 around so that the back faces the intended rock and then letting loose with a shot - what a complete pain), unless I'm doing it wrong..?

But even though I have finally worked out how to blow up an asteroid I now just cannot work out how to actually collect the resulting ore?

Please, someone, explain it as if to a 10 year-old child (I won't mind). Any help will be very gratefully received before I lose patience altogether with this game (and I really want to keep at it - it looks fantastic on my PC and is honestly the kind of space sim I've been looking for a long time). Sorry for venting. Really frustrating - seems like such a simple thing to want to do...[/i]

All the Ore Collector does is allow you to pick up the resulting rocks by simply flying over it the same as picking up any other cargo. Without the Ore Collector, running over the rocks would cause a collision, and damage to your shields and hull.

And yes, doing it manually is a bit of a pain, which is why most players set up a mobile miner to do it for them. You should also be aware that this particular guide is oriented towards Reunion, not TC or AP. There's another guide listed in the Guides Sticky that is for TC and should work for AP, too. TC/AP does some things differently, so you should probably check out that guide.

Nanook wrote:There's another guide listed in the Guides Sticky that is for TC and should work for AP, too. TC/AP does some things differently, so you should probably check out that guide.

Okay, thanks for the advice - I will go check out the other guide. Also, that little link in your sig to the abbreviations FAQ - brilliant! Just what I was looking for! Now I might actually be able to understand what people are going on about in these threads. Thanks!

I got a Teladi vulture, equipped with an ore collector, MDS, and an IRE just in case, a Duplex installed and ofcourse the Special command software, commanding the vessel to collect rocks is ineffect... it just comes in the sector and standing there... even if there are rocks to collect and asteroids to break.... i remember there was a command to break up rocks in a sector, think it's the fight command MK2? do i need that also?

@ andertox: Which game? In X3TC/AP a standard Vulture will not mount an MDS in the turret, did you mean a Vulture Miner (which cannot mount an IRE)? Those single slot turrets cannot mount 2 weapons anyway so either the MDS or the IRE is redundant.

The 'collect rocks' command does not break rocks at all and so does not need a weapon, it just collects the smallest size rocks such as those that the Player or other ships have already broken up.

In X3TC/AP there is no target/break rocks command. You use the 'mine minerals' or 'mine and trade' commands if you want rocks (smaller than a full-size asteroid) to be broken automatically and later collected.

Does the Download even work any longer?

@ Kaada: Which download? This thread has several. Anyway, that would be one of the down-sides of resurrecting very old threads.