Shipwright Archive
Thread: Space mining for 45 mins with no results- YUK
It would have helped if SOE had posted an official guide on the web site, with some screen shots to helpplayers know what graphical feedback they were looking for. I had the same problem you are having; there were a couple of issues. (The third issue is that you can use, equip, and fire a mining laser without having the ROTW expansion, but only ROTW players get any results.)
The first is just seeing what you are trying to find. You do not want to make strafing runs. Park about 200-300 m away from the asteroid. Turn off your engines, you aren't going anywhere for a few seconds at least. Fire away with your mining laser. The graphic I get is dust and fragments flying off with each shot; those are not the fragments you are looking for. Eventually after several shots a large piece will break off. If you set your radar range to a short distance, this piece shows up on radar. On my screen in space, it always has blue brackets around it. This piece will fly off at a good clip; now you need those engines! Chase this large piece (graphically it is about the same scale as an enemy fighter to separate from that 'dust' effect when firing the laser) and blast it with the mining laser (again this takes several shots with the mark 1). This large piece will break up into about 3-4 small pieces, though again they are all blue-bracketed. These small pieces are really moving. Shooting these small pieces puts some asteroidal resource in your hold, you may see a short on screen blip about x % of the hold filled. The command "/target ast" will target these small pieces, asteroidal chunks. You have to catch these small chucks fast.
Now there are other times when it's not a graphic problem. I don't know if it is a bug, or intended feature, or both, but sometimes you just don't get any results. There may be issues with the asteroid generating another chunk when a prior chunk is still floating around, or maybe each asteroid has a set number or limit of resources to generate before it respawns. All I know is, I had one situation where I was only wasting time on asteroids 1 and 2,but asteroid 3 in the same system popped chunks without any problem. If you are beating your head against the wall on one of the asteroids, try another one.