Pilot Archive

Yes it can be done and with the new PYR it's even easier to accomplish.

Tricks of the Trade:

1. Load up the Y-8 normally, but with only the mining laser in Weapon2 and the Tractor Beam in Weapon0 and no other weapons in those other Weapon slots. That will put your gun in the pilot’s seat and the tractor beam in the upper turret slot. You can load in a missile launcher. If you have other weapons loaded the tractor beam will not draw in chunks, from my experience.


2. In the Ctrl 0 - keymap area you need to go to the ship tab and find the ‘Fire Tractor Beam’ hotkey and bind it to a key. I bind mine to the letter P. That will allow you to have the tractor beam continuously firing while you pilot the ship and blast up the asteroid and asteroid chunk into the smaller pieces.


3. Once you get to the asteroid turn on the tractor beam. Leave the pilots chair and go to the upper turret and fire it a few times. That will turn off your tractor beam. Return to the pilots chair.

Now with all that out of the way you are ready to start mining like you would with a Starship.

Let me guess you're all wondering why you have to do step 3.I ran into this by accident way back when I first got my Y-8. I only had the tractor beam and mining laser in my Y-8 when I went out mining for the first time in it. At first the tractor beam wouldn’t do anything. You’d see the beam hit the chunk, but it wouldn’t draw it in. I went to the turret and fired it a few times and of course you are looking at nothing and can’t move the sight around. Peeved I went back to the pilot’s seat and fired up the tractor beam again and went to work. This time everything worked fine and I was able to draw in chunks without a problem. I got about 20K worth of resources in about 4 hours. Not the greatest, but at least I didn’t have to run back and forth from the asteroid and the Space Station to unload. Now that the higher yields are in place I can totally fill my 33K cargo hold with multiple resources in about 2.5 hours easy.

Note: You have to repeat step 3 every time you hyperspace to a new zone or land/launch.

Well that's my experience with the Y-8. Hope it helps for those that would like to use the Y-8 for mining.

*** Corrected the gun slots that the mining laser and tractor beam are in ***

Message Edited by Jhahadir on 10-24-2005 05:34 PM

I found a different way to solo in the Y8. Well if you wanna get technical, its not soloing, but i did it by myself. Running both of my toons on the same PC, I Parked the Y8 500m out, upside down to the astroid so the top turrent when looking straight up would be centered on the astroid. I left my alt sitting in the pilots seat to get around the rediculous pilot requirment, then went at it with the other toon. Took me about 30 minutes to get my 36k cargohold to 10%.about thattime the toon I was gunning with went LD. Not sure why I was booted. I would have thought the toon in the pilots seat would get booted first cause I dident switch over to it the whole time I was there. Oviously my method isnt perfect, but i will try to find a way to perfect it.

Is this a Y-8 that was generated prior to pub 24? My pilot-controlled gun is definitely #2, and #0 is the top turret.

Blah, I just got on and took a look at my Y-8 and people are right, the tractor goes in Gun Slot 0 and the mining laser in 2. Sorry about that.

so this is different then the Bwing then where the tractor beam coming from all the weapon mounts infact makes it easier to grab chunks due to the wider spread.

Just for interests sake, if you happen to macro the mining process so you only have to deal with te asteroid bandits when they spawn, it won't work with the Y-8, as /following an asteroid chunk does not put it in the field of fire of the pilot's mining laser... Only good for hands on mining, which is fine if you have the time

Am I doing something wrong?

I equipped the mining laser in slot 2, and the tractor beam in slot 0. Mining the asteroid is easy, but when I pressed "P" to use the beam, it seemed like it was shooting sideways, even after I went and manually adjusted it to point forward.

Hmm, nice trick. And running into things by accident is how most workarounds are created in IT.