2 issues with mobile mining!!

[riddler251]

Oddly enough. It was not working as of the OP. However, I just switched back to it, and it seems to be working.

[Playbahnosh]

Contrary to popular belief, mobile mining DOES work, and it IS simple. At least not harder than building a mining station.

First of all, the basics. A ship needs the following to be able to mine:
- Ore collector
- Mineral scanner
- XL cargo hold
- some space left in said cargo hold
optional: - weapons to break up rocks
optional: - a "home base" to deliver minerals to

Keep in mind, that if you homebase the miner to a TL (or any other ship where it can't dock) you also need a Transporter Device installed on the miner to be able to transfer the minerals to the homebase. You can also equip miners with jumpdrives, mosquito missiles for missile defense and fighter drones.

If you do not equip the miner with weapons, it cannot break up rocks, it will only collect the already broken up pieces of minerals in the vicinity. But even if you equip it with MDS, miners will never never break up asteroids (the ones you can put mines on). If the miner runs out of minerals to collect, and there aren't any rocks to break up, it will stop.

As for the Prospector script, it's best to download the SPK file and the library file from the S/M forum and use Cyrow's Plugin Manager to install it. It will surely work that way. Keep in mind though, that your game will be ***modified***, and you won't get any achievements from that point on.

The Prospector works largely the same way as the vanilla miner script, with some modifications. First of all, you'll need a pilot to fly your miner, so at first you can only launch the Prospector command while the ship is docked to a station. After that, you will pay a salary to the miner. A big advantage of the Prospector is the optimized mining behavior (it uses nav beacons to mark mining areas), the ability to blow up asteroids, the ability to work together with other prospectors (and the ability to mine Nividium). You can also homebase them to your own factories and complexes, where the prospector will monitor the mineral levels and if the minerals get too low, it will head out and mine more, thereby keeping your factory stocked automatically. The biggest advantage is undeniably the option to save and load work orders, so if you want to ramp up production, you can program new prospectors with just one click. You can transmit work orders to single ships, sector-wide or you can even transmit them to all your prospectors in the universe. Prospectors gain experience with time, so they will be more efficient in their work and can do more stuff. Read the thread in the S/M forum for details.

[Flozem]

[Morkonan]