How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?

[C4]

Sorry for the bizillion questions - I couldn't find the answers in the manual.

I was wondering what I need to do to use robot miners on asteriods? If I do this, will the system need a Space Port so the minerals can be used my the empire?

I was also wondering what effects storms have on gameplay? They kind of seem to just sit there. Right now I don't see a reason why I would go through one.

TIA

[Danny]

No, you don't need a space port for remote miners.

Storms interfer with sensors, and targeting, amd in SEIII they disabled sheilds, however I'm not sure if that still happens in SEIV.

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I AM Canadian.

[Ferendra]

Hi there,

I was wondering about ship-design with robo-miners (etc.) I tried to build a small size
class ship with one robo-miner and ended up
with the ship costing more maintainance than
the mined minerals.
Next thing I tried working with satelites.
Works quite fine.
Any suggestions for shipdesigns yet ?

Greetings
Ferendra

[LintMan]

I discovered early on that a miner ship costs more in maintenance than it can mine, so I gave up on them until someone here (Saben?) discovered that you can mount the mining components in large satellites, so you build the satellites, load 'em in a satellite transport, and deploy them in the asteroid field. Apparently they work quickly enough that you can use them to fill your treasury and then retrieve them when full. He said it worked quite well.

In my current game, I intend to do this, but have only teched up to medium satellites (it's expensive research) so far, and they are too small.

Storms hide ships so in theory, you could park a spy ship or even a whole fleet in a storm in an enemy's system, and your enemy could be completely unaware of it's presence.

Since you don't get to see enemy ship movements on their turns, an enemy ship in
your system can just "disappear". Unless you have a view on all the surrounding systems or know the warp points are out of range, you can't be sure if it warped out or is still lurking in a storm. I don't know if the AI can be fooled if you tried this trick.

I also think there's high-end tech that lets you create/destroy storms.

Anyways, that's the only reasons I can think of to go into one.

[turanasaurus]

I've got the same problem as Ferendra. I can't come up with a remote miner ship design that will cover its own maintenance costs. I suppose you could use large satellites, but that takes a lot of research to get them, which means you can't remote mine until much later in the game. That doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a job for the drones (whenever they get added)?

[SirDarwin]

Well a escort class ship, having a bridge, crew quaters, life support, two engines and 1 robo miner has little maintinence. The only problem I see is that since you only get 600 units of production when the precentage is at 100%, it doesn't take you too long to mine out a asteroid or planet and then make in cost ineffective.