more medium miner testing

[zakaluka]

I had some questions to answer that didn't have existing answers in any old content that I could find. Is one of the medium miners a better value than the others, in a practical sense? I know about the quantum anomaly efficiency score but they're only considering travel & cargo capacity, not mining time.

Some old references:
JK Ninja's analysis of miners & service crew
The QSNA mining efficency calculation
Arshiba's mining efficiency tests from CoH
Falcrack's test of factors that influence mining rate from CoH

* I recall the vanguard variants performing worse, so I'm only going to test one vanguard hull to verify that things haven't changed.
* I started a creative mode game, starting with 7 different medium miners. See my table below.
* Each ship has a MK1 engine, mining turrets, an MK1 mining drill, of their own racial types for the turrets & engines
* Each ship has a rank 8 (2 and 2/3 star) pilot, and Veteran crews from creative mode. Every one has "combined skill" rank 7 (2 and 1/3)
* I built a mining base in heretic's end and shut down production. Then parked everyone right there. My personal ship is in Morning Star, so mining is all OOS.
* One at a time I set each miner to work for the station, dropping resource probes as they went, and let each one make 6 hauls. I recorded start and end times, and calculated ore per hr from the result.
* Then I re-loaded (to make sure starting conditions are the same) and ran the test again for each one of the miners

Results are not a surprise:
1- Plutus sentinel performed the best - this isn't really new, but maybe only because of a limitation of my test? See below. Worked appx. 10% faster than the next best miner.
2- Drill sentinel and Manorina sentinel performed adequately
3- Alligator, bolo, and porpoise under-performed this scenario
4- Plutus vanguard under-performed, as expected - I believe all vanguard variants would under-perform their sentinel variants but maybe just for this scenario (more testing needed)

hull Rate (ore/hr)
alligator 7200
bolo 8562
drill sentinel 9846
manorina sentinel 10047
plutus sentinel 11209
plutus vanguard 9000
porpoise 8023

So the plutus sentinel, in a mk1 loadout, working in a high density ore field, can earn 560,000 Cr per hour when it's not getting interrupted for police scans. That pays off its own cost in less than an hour.

Some things I learned
I had read discussion about a "mining efficiency cap" in some very old forum posts, but I didn't understand. I don't know if there's a cap on actual mining efficiency, but there might be a maximum useful amount of mining efficiency in any given situation. I think every one of my miners was above this maximum. So, we'll have to go again with different conditions.

Maximum useful mining efficiency? Each ship only needed one "tick" of mining to entirely fill up its cargo hold. I suspect that adding more mining efficiency, i.e. upgrading the drills to mk2 wouldn't give any benefit whatsoever. So if I ran this same test again in a less ideal resource field, with green pilots & crew, I'd expect the miners with smaller holds to gain ground.

Future questions to answer:
- If the miners need multiple "ticks" to fill their cargo holds, does the ranking change?
- When is it worth using mk2 mining drills? Prior tests on this forum showed that it's only sometimes worth it but didn't answer this question. I suspect I'd find answers like: when the crew and pilot are un-skilled, or when collecting silicon.
- How much do the results change when mining silicon, especially from a less ideal resource field?

I plan to eventually run this again with slightly different conditions, to answer more questions.