From plowshares to swords - arming mining ships for fun and profit

[mrjonesandme]

I can't be the only one who experiments with arming mining ships as a sort of reserve fleet. The mining ship captains seem to build up experience relatively quickly, leading to an abundance of 4 star and higher captains. The ship chassis themselves are relatively cheap, especially when the player doesn't have their own shipyards rolling yet.

While I failed to find success in giving mining ships torpedo launchers (couldn't get any of them to fire the torps, and I was using 4-5 star pilots-possible bug), I did find success in arming M mining ships with ion guns and pulse or plasma turrets, and sending them in against fighter swarms or a lone cap ship.

I also field L Argon mining ships with a mixture of missile turrets, pulse turrets, and combat drones. As long as I stick an experienced captain in, I'm finding that they do surprisingly well. I was able to kill a K + it's supporting fighters and a P or two IS with a fleet of:

- 1x L Argon gas miner - two missile launchers with heavy swarm missiles, the rest of the turrets set to pulse, 1 repair drone, the rest combat drones
- 10x M drill vanguards - 1 mk1 ion gun, the rest of the turrets either plasma or pulse (depending on how I want to use them - cheap fire support against fighters or capital)
- 7x S fighters-whatever I could afford. Novas - 1x ion, 1x pulse or plasma (default order, dock at L gas miner)
- 4x Argon courier ships - 2x plasma (default order, dock at L gas miner

I command these individually/mass select, I don't assign any of the ships a commander. I set their default order to either defend a position, dock at a station, etc. I then usually use the "attack targets in range" of command while selecting everything at once.

When there is no pressing need for them, I swap out the mining ship's drones/main gun and send them back to resource collection, and/or cycle out the pilots to my actual combat ship fleet. The M mining ships take the most losses, but I'd rather lose a drill than lose a nova, or if combining fleets, something more expensive like a centaur.

[Tanvaras]

Interesting, Might have to play around with this idea as well.