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!

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

Before the Red Moon Rising expansion patch, Mercoxit was considered to be the most valuable ore, as it is the only asteroid which  refines into Morphite. Not only for that fact, but  also because you absolutely need mining crystals to harvest it, so essentially only true miners with good skills can mine it. Factor on top of that Mercoxit's ever so important volume, which made the task of getting any high quantities of it a royal pain; all those factors gave it a premium price. The Skiff solved that last problem, so well in fact, that the morphite prices sank to the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic over a few months time. Mind you, it is still a lucrative business, but not as much as before, and players who left before Red Moon Rising and are coming back now will probably ask themselves, Holy Mother of Destruction, what did you do to my ISK generating machine?

Nonetheless, we move forward with the new skill you ll need (yes, as in only one)

Skills you will need: Deep Core Mining 2

Training Deep Core Mining beyond level 2 is a waste of time, since the toxic and dangerous cloud that might erupt when mining Mercoxit (happened to me once in my life) has a range of 5KM only, and  since your lasers have a range of 15km, would you mind telling me what the hell you are doing so close? I didn't think so. 

There really is no point mining Mercoxit in anything else than a Skiff, but this guide would not be truly complete if you did not have all the information. There are two modules that allow you to mine Mercoxit:

Modulated Deep Core Miner II: 120 m3 base yield, 140 m3 with Tech 2 Crystal

Modulated Deep Core Strip Miner II: 250 m3 base yield, 437.5 m3 with Tech 2 Crystal

While a Modulated Deep Core Miner II can be used with any mining crystals, and be fitted on any ship, they are not as powerful as Modulated Deep Core Strip Miner II, which is a special kind of strip miner used for Mercoxit mining. The regular Modulated Strip Miner II cannot use Mercoxit crystals. While the Modulated Deep Core Strip Miner II can use any crystals, since its base yield is 110 lower than the Modulated Strip Miner II (250 vs360), there would be no point. 

What is particulary nice about the Skiff, is that it gets a 60% bonus to Mercoxit mining yield – per level. What this translates into in an ISK / hour ratio that will be covered at the end of  this section  (and  again  in  section  12), however you  may have already guessed  that with a 300% bonus at Exhumer 5, it will be a nice one especially for such a cheap ship, currently they go for around 20 mil ISK.

For the sake of uberness comparison, I will assume you are a maxed out Hulk pilot already with 250 * 1.25 * 1.25 * 1.15 * 1.15 * 4 * 1.05 * 1.375 * 1.05^2 = 3289.17 m3/cycle

Mercoxit has a volume of 40m3, so 3289.17 / 40 = 82.229 = 82 units of Mercoxit per cycle 

A Skiff fits one Modulated Deep Core Strip Miner II, so you would mine around 1640 units of Mercoxit per hour (20 cycles, like the other strip miners)

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

Yes it is, but it only becomes lucrative once you get Exhumer 5. Many pilots stop at Exhumer 4 since for Hulk  pilots, the  mere 3% bonus you get for the 20 days (or more) of  training it takes might not be worth it for them. However the 60% bonus you are missing if you don't train it plays a big role for the Skiff (we might even say the same for the Mackinaw).

Roughly, one unit of Mercoxit will refine into two units of Morphite, and at the time of release of this guide, one unit of Morphite goes for around 15,000 ISK / unit give or take a few ISK. So we do the math and end up at an ISK / hour ratio of 49,200,000 00 ISK / hour. It's definitely not bad, especially for such a cheap ship (20mil ISK in Jita at the time of release of this guide). 

Section 12 has a good comparative chart of the ISK / hour ratios you can get depending of what you mine and what you are flying. You will see that Mercoxit, although it isn't the flavor of the month anymore, doesn't do so bad at all! 

This ends our section on Mercoxit. As you noticed I did not talk about mining Mercoxit in a battleship, simply because you cannot do so without mining crystals, and anyone serious enough about mining that trained for crystals will also have done so for mining barges.

11. Mining Foreman Links – Gang Assist Modules

Gang Assist Modules were introduced in Red Moon Rising and did not work properly. The laser optimization link (which is probably the most popular of all three) was silently fixed in a patch to reduce the cycle time instead of giving an actual bonus to the yield. This turns out in our favor, as a bonus to cycle time actually translates in a bigger bonus to our yield.

Enough mathematical babble for the moment, here is a summary of the three available mining foreman links:

Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency: Decreases the capacitor need of mining lasers, gas harvesters and ice harvesters by 2%.

Mining Foreman Link – Laser Optimization: Decreases mining lasers, gas harvester and ice harvester cycle duration by 2%

Mining Foreman Link - Mining Laser Field Enhancement: Increases the range of the gang's mining lasers, gas harvesters and ice harvesters by 2%.

As you see, the links alone do not offer any worthy bonuses, but thanks to some skills, they are in fact very powerful modules in the hand of a skilled pilot.

With the new squadron / wing / fleet system brought in with the Revelations expansion patch, simply being ganged won't work anymore. You will need to create at least a squadron, and the pilot using the link must be the squadron commander. This was a big change, but the skill you will want to max out to maximize the effect of the links are also the ones you need to be squadron commander so far so good! 

Skills you will need: Leadership 5, Mining Foreman 5, Mining Director 1

These are the minimum skill requirements, but they do not all influence the effectiveness of the links. In fact, in this list, only Mining Director does. Remember the Mining Foreman Mindlink I talked about in section 6? It pays off now! Here is a table with the list of skills you want to max to level 5 to increase the effect of each link to its maximum:

Mining Director: Increases link effectiveness by 100% per level

Warfare Link Specialist: Increases link effectiveness by 10% per level

Mining Foreman Mindlink: Increases link effectiveness by 50%

Note that Warfare Link Specialist replaced the skill Squadron Command but everything works as before according to my records.

So at Mining Director 5, Warfare Link Specialist 5 and the Mining Foreman Mindlink plugged in, the effect of each link will be: 2% * 5 * 1.5 * 1.5 = 22.5%

There were many misunderstandings as to how the Mining Director skill worked. Simply put, the base effect of the link is multiplied by the level you trained Mining Director at, which explains the 5 multiplier in the equation, instead of putting a 6 to factor a 500% bonus as most people would do.

Now that we know what you can train to max the effect and what each link does, let us look at each in details and see how they truly affect miners.

11.1 Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency

Ok so we know your cycle time will be reduced by 22.5%, but how many extra cycles will that give us? Again, the math comes to the rescue: 500 sec * 1.25 * 0.75 * 0.75 * 0.95^2 * 0.775 = 245.90 sec

Roughly this means almost 15 cycles per hour, which is 4 extra cycles. Here is breakdown of the Mackinaw versus a Covetor, with and without the link and skill bonuses:

Without the skill and Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency bonuses:

Mackinaw: 44 units of ice per hour, 317.28 second cycle time, 11.34 / 11 cycles an hour.

Covetor: 30 units of ice per hour, 356.25 second cycle time, 10.11 / 10 cycles an hour

With the skill and Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency bonuses:

Mackinaw: 60 units of ice per hour, 245.90 second cycle time, 14.64 / 14 cycles an hour.

Covetor: 39 units of ice per hour, 276.09 second cycle time, 13.03 / 13 cycles an hour.

As you see the Mackinaw will roughly mine 16 extra ice units per hour. Hence we can all agree it is an important difference, which becomes even more important when a whole group of Mackinaw attacks an ice belt!

And now on to the good stuff!

11.2 Mining Foreman Link – Laser Optimization

As I mentioned at the beginning of the section, the laser optimization link will reduce your cycle time (it does not affect ice harvesters by the way) instead of giving a direct bonus to your yield. Which means that a 22.5% reduction in cycle time translates into a yield increase overtime by 1 / (1-0.225) = 1.29 (29%)!  Yes, it means a maxed command ship pilot will increase your yield by 29%! Yes, you are allowed to drool now. 

We could have treated this link as we did with the Ice Harvesting Link, meaning, calculate how many new cycles we get  per hour and  then compare  the difference. However since we always treated ore mining with yield bonuses, introducing a cycle time bonus could confuse many people, so as I have demonstrated, the 22.5% bonus to cycle time actually is a 29% bonus to your yield. This is how the bonus is factored in the  next equation 

Let us see how our pimped Hulk pilot from section 7 does now: 360 * 1.25 * 1.25 * 1.15 * 1.15 * 1.15 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.05^2 * 1.75 * 1.29 = 2347.48 m3/cycle. Using Omber, it means 2347.48 / 0.6 = 3912.47 = 3912 units of Omber / cycle (per strip)

Since you are fitted with 3 strip miners, you will be getting 11,736 units of Omber per cycle, or 234,720 units of Omber per hour. We already know this is a 29% increase over our pimped Hulk, so no surprises there. How about our retriever from the very beginning? Well, it is a 254.99% increase! Yes, you read right amazing how efficient we can become when we know how everything works!

But what really interests us is, how will this affect us in an ISK / hour ratio? Instead of spoiling it right away, section 13 will cover this in more details.

11.3 Making them work - Voltage = Current x Resistance

Revelation brought a new gang system which requires some understanding:

°         Fleet Commander

o       Wing 1

§         Wing Commander 1

·         Squadron 1

o       Squadron 1 Commander

§         Squadron 1 Members

·         Squadron 2

o       Squadron 2 Commander

§         Squadron 2 Members

o       Wing 2

§         Wing Commander 2

·         Squadron 1

o       Squadron 1 Commander

§         Volsyn (Set as fleet booster)*

·         Squadron 2

o       Squadron 2 Commander

§         Squadron 2 Members

To be a squadron commander you need Leadership V. After which, each level of Wing Commander (prerequisite: Leadership 5) allows for an extra squadron under your command. Finally, each level of Fleet Command (prerequisite: Wing Command 5) allows for an extra wing under your command.

To boost the people in your squadron, wing or fleet you must be either a commander or be set as the booster. If you are the fleet commander you will boost the whole fleet If you are a Wing Commander, you will boost everyone in your wing, etc. The fleet commander can set you as the squadron, wing or fleet booster you are in regardless of your leadership skills (as shown in the tree up there).

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