better use satelites (big) for robo-mining.
Otherwise the maintanance costs will eat up
most of your mined resources.
There are also some interesting threads here at the forum. Best try *search* with it.
If you put one satellite layer and one mine layer on your transports you can put as many satellites and mines as the transports can hold just about anywhere. If you want to use satellites in combat however you need more satellite bays because you can only launch as many satellites as you have bays per turn in combat. You can launch as many satellites as you want outside of combat however with only one bay.