⚖️ Balance Change
Mining hulls now have their own class of equipment, sitting above anything a Frigate can carry and below Cruiser, and locked to Extractors exactly the way the top mining lasers already are. Nine pieces to begin with. Three shields.
Three shields. Rockguard Barrier, Seamwarden Shield, Bedrock Aegis, running from 425 to 500 capacity, built to shrug off rock splinters and pirate potshots in equal measure.
Three reactors. The Corebore Reactor, the Deepseam Powerplant and the Motherlode Core, from 4,800 to 6,000 energy, tuned for the long sustained draw a full rack of cutters demands rather than the burst a warship wants.
Three Cargo units. The Tailings Bay, the Oreslinger Hold and the Prospector’s Deep Hold.
Blueprints for the shields are with Sabre Shield Systems. The reactors and the holds are at the Blueprint Store. All nine are crafted from what a miner already pulls out of a belt, so the gear is made of the work that earns it.
🚀 New Feature – Mining Booster
There is a new kind of device for mining ships, and it does not cut anything. The Chaff Tractor, the Sluicerunner Array and the Deepmaw Intake all do the same job at three different scales. They sit in a System slot and they catch what your beam throws off. Fragments and splinters, the loose rock that used to drift away while you were busy cutting the next seam.
Every cycle brings back a little more than the beam actually took out. Three ore per cycle from the Chaff Tractor, five from the Sluicerunner Array, eight from the Deepmaw Intake. Flat amounts, not percentages, and that choice matters more than it sounds.
Here is why. The richest ores in the galaxy come out of the rock slowly. Kelvolrite is the most valuable thing you can mine and a cutting cycle yields one unit of it. Common gravel worth a fraction as much comes out ten at a time. A percentage bonus would therefore have paid you least on exactly the seams worth working, and most on the rubbish. A flat bonus does the opposite.
The same eight units is worth over sixteen hundred credits of Kelvolrite or a hundred and sixty of gravel. The bonus applies to every laser you have cutting, so a three laser Extractor running a Deepmaw is bringing back twenty four extra ore every cycle. The Chaff Tractor asks nothing of your Systems rating at all, so any Extractor captain can fit one today. The other two want Systems 10 and Systems 20, which you will have to earn. An Extractor has two System slots and no rule against filling both with boosters. Whether giving up your autopilot to do it is clever or foolish is between you and the length of your next trip home.
✨ Improvement – System Skill Active!
The Systems skill has been sitting in your captain’s record doing nothing since the day you registered, and the panel was honest enough to admit it. That entry used to read “this skill currently has no active levelling source”. It does not read that any more.
Systems now climbs four ways.
Cross into a new system under autopilot and your flight computer learns something.
Complete a planetary expedition and come back to the ship with something to show for it.
Strip a derelict until there is nothing left of it.
Cut rock with a mining booster fitted.