Tue Jan 20, 2004 8:55 am by Switchblade
certain asteroid fields on your map will be marked as "mineable zones". if you click the tag that looks like a pair of crossed pickaxes, these fields will turn brown if they are mineable.
what you can mine in that field is usually described in the field discription (click the field, and then the ? emblem).
to mine, fly into a mineable zone, and start shooting the small floating asteroids- the ones that bounce off you, rather than the other way round. you'll know you've got a viable target if the targeting cursor changes. one hit with any weapon will cause the rock to explode.
here's the tricky part - patience. most asteroid fields have already been heavily mined, and only a small number of the rocks contain any loot. whenever a rock is destroyed, the game randomly determines wether or not its going to drop the pertinent raw material, which you then tractor in. some fields are more abundant than others, delivering the goods more often. others are heftily depleted, and will take ages to scrounge together a small amount.
once your cargo hold is full, or you get bored, take what you've got and sell it wherever you like.
early on in the game, I think the best mining operation you can run is to mine the Silverton field in Colorado (near Pueblo Station), and then sell the resulting silver on California minor. it's fairly safe, as the silverton field is not heavily populated by pirates.
later on, I prefer mining diamonds in the Dresden system, and selling the result on New Tokyo. You'll have to fight off Red Hessians every so often, but the upshot is that, unlike the Omega 11 system, you don't need to worry about being fried by radiation, and of course, with mining, it doesn't cost anything except time, so the profit's the same.
it is, of course, a lot quicker and easier, just to buy diamonds from somewhere like Solarius, but your net profit from trading will be lower than your net from mining.
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"preacher, don't the bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?"
"Very specific. But it gets fuzzy in the area of kneecaps..."