8. Drones – You know, those little crosses that buzz around.

8.1 What Drones Can Do For You – That depends on which you use.

8.2 Minimizing the traveling time factor effect – Yep, there is a down side.

9. Ice Mining – No, I am not talking about digging around in your freezer.

9.1 Figuring your Cycle Time – Wee more math!

9.2 The Hulk or Covetor for Ice Mining? – Not bad ideas, but not the best either.

10. Mercoxit Mining – Been around forver, and isn’t going away.

10.1 Is Mercoxit mining still viable? - Hard to not be.

11. Mining Foreman Link – Gang Assist Modules

11.1 Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency

11.2 Mining Foreman Link – Laser Optimization

11.3 Making them work - Voltage = Current x Resistance

12. Rigs – Expensive, but handy.

13. Show me the money – What everyone wants to know.

13.2 Ice Values – Yes, more charts.

13.3 And the winner is! – Seabiscuit!

13.3.1 Drones help – Just like automatic vacuum cleaners.

13 4 The Miner's Uberness – Indeed, we make the universe a better place.

14. The Rorqual – Big Mama ORE

14.1 The Industrial Core – The big squeeze.

14.2 Capital Tractor Beam – Haulers what?

14.3 Clone VAT Bay – Squishy!

14.4 Fitting the Rorqual – How much money do you have?

14.5 Strategies – Where do you want to go today?

14.6 Setting up a remote mining camp – Not a simple task.

14.7 Logistics use – Tada!

15. Exploration and Gas Cloud Mining – Space the final frontier … and drugs!

16. Links – Helpful places

17. Conclusion - It's over!

8. Drones – You know, those little crosses that buzz around.

Drones are not to be forgotten about or ignored, since they can significantly raise your ISK / hour ratio. Of course I am talking about Mining Drones here if you were not sure yet, it is however not a bad idea to have a few combat drones in your drone bay if you have the room in case some pesky interceptor or that random spawn of pirates decide to start heading your way.

Before I go any further, I want you to read this very carefully and apply it. In fact, if it helps, you can make multiple post it notes and stick them everywhere in your house:

Stay away from Harvester Mining Drones!

I invite you to read the rest to understand why.

As mentioned earlier, two skills influence the yield of your drones, which are Mining Drone Operations and Drone Interfacing. Take note that drones cannot mine Ice or Mercoxit. First, let us have a look at the different drones available.

Drone Type …………… Speed (m/s) …… Base Yield ……… Cycle (in sec)

Tech 1 Mining Drone .…… 400 …………… 15 ……………… 60 …………

Tech 2 Mining Drone .…… 500 …………… 25 ……………… 60 …………

Harvester Mining Drone … 250 …………… 30 ……………… 60 …………

Does anything immediately strike you as odd there? First thing to look at is the speed, and you can see right away that the Harvester Mining Drones are extremely slow compared to the other two! What about the speed is it that is important?

The traveling factor!

Unlike mining lasers, drones must travel from and back to your ship before you get any ore in your cargo. They will need 60 seconds to finish their cycle. Any traveling time to and from the asteroid isn't factored in the cycle time. Simply put, Harvester Mining Drones are twice as slow as Tech 2 Mining Drones, and yet, their base yield is only 20% better and they cost 20 times as much as the Tech 2 Mining Drones!

The only way that you could make them worth the effort is to park your ship right on top of the asteroid, and that is a fatal thing to do. You always want to have room to maneuver your ship incase you do need to pack up and leave for some reason, and banging into the side of an asteroid in an already slow ship trying to warp out isn't going to help your cause.

See section 8.2 for further details and explanations.

8.1 What Drones Can Do For You – That depends on which you use.

Much like the yield of lasers, the yield of each drone is individually calculated and then the number of units of ore is truncated before transport to your cargo. My calculations will factor maxed drone skills, feel free to change the formula to reflect your skill tree.

As I mentioned earlier, Mining Drone Operations 5 will increase your drones yield by 25% and Drone Interfacing 5 by 100% . I also made it clear that the Harvester Mining Drones suck, so we will use Tech 2 Mining Drones for our example: 25 * 1.25 * 2 = 62.5 m3 / cycle. Using Omber again, it means 62.5 / 0.6 = 104.17 = 104 units of Omber / cycle (per drone).

Since you can control 5 drones at a time, which means your drones will bring in extra 520 units of Omber per cycle, or 31,200 per hour. This however does not factor the traveling time we talked about earlier. 

An issue with drones is that they suffer a lot from higher volume ore like Bistot (volume of 16m3) since the number of ore units is truncated at the end of every cycle. A good example of  this is seeing that training Drone Interfacing to level 5 won't bring any benefit when mining most high end ores. How so? 

With a perfect mining drone yield of 62.5 m3 / cycle, we get: 62.5 / 16 = 3.90 = 3 units of Bistot/cycle (per drone). 

New since Revelations, the Drone Mining Augmentor rigs (see section 12) can help a little. Whether choosing this rig over another is worth it will depend of the situation you think you will find yourself in.

8.2 Minimizing the traveling time factor effect – Yep, there is a down side

Parking your ship as close to the asteroid as you can is the best way to minimize the traveling time. If you can be under 1KM away from the asteroid you send your drone on, the traveling factor will almost be negligible. Our 31,200 units of Omber per hour still won't be true, but it should be relatively close. It has been argued and debated that doing so renews the role of Harvester or Elite mining drones, that is, that getting close enough to cancel out their speed makes them superior to Tech 2 mining drones.

Although this is true in theory, it is not in the real world. In my experience, which I like to think is quite extensive; there will never be an asteroid within that range for your drones to mine. That is, not an asteroid worth mining at least. Furthermore, their insane prices means losing them puts an enormous blow on your wallet – and you will lose mining drones. There is no reasonable argument to be had in this matter. Losing drones, especially in 0.0, is almost a certainty. A simple crash to the desktop will result in your drones dying when facings pirates. If jumped by pirates, you will always prioritize your ship over your drones, and the chances you can recall all of them back before you get popped are next to zero. For those who cannot grasp the huge cost difference, harvesters cost on average 200 times more than T2 mining drones (35 mil versus 175k). It is true that, throughout this guide, I have proposed you buy expensive ships, modules and implants and although it is probably impossible to statistically prove the chances of losing drones versus the chances of losing the said ships, modules and implants are higher, simple logic tells us so. Mining drones are paper thin, one smartbomb will make them just another bit of space debris floating about, and I promise you, they are the favorite targets of pirates when they jump mining operations, and they won't miss them!

For all the previously mentioned reasons, I will stand by my original comment, that is, that harvester mining drones are an absolute waste of your well earned ISK. In 99% of all situations, their superior yield will be neglected by their speed. If you are a miner that falls in the remaining 1% of situations and think harvesters still bring you more dough for your efforts, then fly over to Jita and get a quintuple to serve your needs. 

That is it for the drones section. As you can see, they are far from useless. In fact, mining Crokite, it will bring in an extra 7 mil ISK per hour (approximately, as always) so they are not to be ignored. However, maxing out your drones yield should not be prioritized over barge or crystals training, for example. It is a nice long term (if not last) objective for veterans. As always, you can weigh the pros and the cons for your self.

9. Ice Mining – No, I am not talking about digging around in your freezer.

Ice Mining follows a different set of rules. Instead of training skills or fitting modules to increase your yield, they will instead lower your cycle time, which means more cycles per hour, which means more ice units per hour. 

The only mining lasers capable of harvesting ice are the Tech 1 Ice Harvester strip miners, and their Tech 2 counterpart, which means ice, can only be mined by mining barges or exhumers. 

As I said cycle time is what counts when mining ice, and the difference between the Ice Harvester I and II is noticeable:

Laser ………………… Cycle (in seconds)

Ice Harvester I ………… 600

Ice Harvester II ………... 500

Every time your Ice Harvester completes a cycle, you will get 1 unit of ice. The exception to this rule lies with the Mackinaw, which has a built in bonus of 100% ice mining yield which means for every cycle, you will get 2 units of ice instead of 1.

There is only one skill that affects ice mining, which is Ice Harvesting, which reduces your cycle time by 5% per level. Although Mining 4 is required to use Ice Harvesters II, it does not change anything in the cycle time or yield of your harvesters. The equivalent of the Mining Laser Upgrade, called the Ice Harvester Upgrade (IHU) reduces the cycle time by 5% for each of your Ice Harvesters.

Skills you will need: Ice Harvesting 5

The logical choice for mining ice is to get a Mackinaw, as no other ship will out mine it. Plus, they are very affordable. Currently they cost about half to three quarters as much as a Hulk.

9.1 Figuring your Cycle Time – Wee more math!

Before we go any further, you must know that unlike regular ore mining, if you do not let your Ice Harvester complete the full cycle, you will not get an ice unit. Again an exception lies with the Mackinaw, which will still give you 1 ice unit if you have completed more than 50% of your cycle time. 

You will notice the Mackinaw has a 25% penalty to cycle time, but gives a 5% reduction in cycle time per level. So if you have Exhumer trained at level 5, and using Ice Harvesters II, you will get the following cycle time: 500 sec * 1.25 * 0.75 * 0.75 * 0.95^2 =  317.28 sec

Essentially, it means every 317.28 seconds, you will receive 2 units of ice per ice harvester. Since you can fit two ice harvesters on your Mackinaw, it means you will harvest 4 units of ice every 317.28 seconds.

To  know  how  much  this  translates per hour, you  need  to  figure out  how  many cycles you will complete per hour.  An hour has 3600 seconds, so 3600 / 317.28 = 11.34 cycles per hour. Roughly, if you bring it down to 11 cycles per hour, it means you will get 44 units of ice per hour.

9.2 The Hulk or Covetor for Ice Mining? – Not bad ideas, but not the best either.

Although the Covetor has no bonus to its ice yield, the Hulk was secretly given one, just not a very obvious one. It has a 3% reduction in cycle time per level. Which means, with an ice harvester II: 500 sec * 0.75 * 0.85 * 0.95^2 = 287.67sec

You will manage to complete just a little over 12 cycles per hour. Since every cycle you get 1 unit of ice per ice harvester, and a Hulk is capable of fitting 3, you will end up having 36 units of ice in just a little under one hour. Not too bad, but it still doesn't match the Mackinaw for mining ice.

Here is a break down of the Mackinaw versus the Hulk:

Mackinaw: 44 Ice units per hour, 317.28 seconds for one cycle, 11.34 / 11 cycles an hour.

Hulk: 36 Ice units per hour, 287.67 seconds for one cycle, 12.51 / 12 cycles an hour.

Here is a table that breaks down what each type of ice will refine into:

Ice Name …………… Heavy Water … Liquid Ozone … Strontium … Oxygen … Nitrogen … Helium … Hydrogen

Blue Ice ………………… 50 …………… 25 ……………… 1 ………… 300 ………………………………………

Clear Icicle ……………... 50 …………… 25 ……………… 1 ………………………………… 300 ………………

Dark Glitter …………….. 500 ………….. 1000 …………… 50 ……………………………………………………..

Enriched Clear Icicle …… 75 …………… 40 ……………… 1 ………………………………… 350 ………………

Gelidus …………………. 250 ………….. 500 …………….. 75 ……………………………………………………..

Glacial Mass …………… 50 ……………. 25 ……………… 1 ……………………………………………… 300 …

Glare Crust …………….. 1000 ………….. 500 …………….. 25 …………………………………………………….

Krystallos ……………… 100 …………… 250 …………….. 100 ……………………………………………………

Pristine White Glaze …… 75 ……………. 40 ………………. 1 …………………… 350 ……………………………

Smooth Glacial Mass …... 75 ……………. 40 ………………. 1 ……………………………………………… 350 …

Thick Blue Ice ………….. 75 ……………. 40 ………………. 1 ……….. 350 ………………………………………..

White Glaze …………….. 50 ……………. 25 ………………. 1 …………………… 300 ……………………………

The refining math that I went over in section 2 applies to ice as well, so don’t worry about having to learn new formulas, it’s all the same.

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