Didn't dare lose my shield generator in my Type 6. Felt too vunerable
Not tried mining... What ship did you kit up to mine with? I assume you need lots of space to hold what you refine?
Mining is fun!
My mining setup is;
Cobra
Class-2 mining laser (medium hard point)
5 bin refinery
2x 16 capacity cargo racks
1x 4x capacity cargo rack
(36 cargo capacity)
Basically, the idea is to look through the galaxy map at different systems and find rings/clusters with "metallic" as the ring type, you don't want "metal rich", metallic only.
Fly towards an asteroid fire the mining laser and chunks will fall off it, select them as target to see what they are, to make money you want the following resources in the following order;
Platinum (you can sell for around 19k per ton)
Palladium (you can sell for around 14k per ton)
Gold (you can sell for just shy of 10k per ton)
My normal yield is around 12 platinum, 15 palladium and 9 gold - which when sold is worth around 528k and will take around 90-120 mins to get.
Tips;
1,> Each asteroid will drop around 8-12 fragments of resource, if each fragment isn't more than 10% of any of the above 3 materials, leave it and move on.
2,> When the asteroid drops a fragment, you have to be reasonably quick to collect it - as it's integrity will reduce until it disappears (after a few minutes)
3,> Keep your refinery bins free of junk, focus on the above 3 metals (otherwise you'll end up burning lots of time for the sake of 5-10k)
4,> Mine with the light behind you so you can see all the asteroids, it gets a bit disorientating after 10-15 mins and it's difficult to know which asteroids you've already mined and those which are still fresh
5,> The whole thing is generated each time you fly in, so if you deplete one ring - simply supercruise out and back in again to do it all again, keep going until you have a cargo hold full of the above 3 metals
Coelrind is a good place to start, but you can find good reserves of platinum and palladium all over if you look!