Currently I have an Adder and just purchased the 8 slot cargo. That first mining mission was a disaster and I ran out of time. Currently doing another one now, jumped to a belt of asteroids, 4 sector's labled 1 through 4.
I did find the right material and I've now half completed my mission. Although now I'm stuck, it seems I've depleted the supply from these 4 areas (each one only contained a handful of asteroids), and now I've no idea where to find any more. I have no unknown sources in my navigation panel, and nothing there that points to another asteroid field I can identify.
And on the limpets you shoot at the asteroids, if each one takes up cargo space, I'd end up filling my cargo with just limpets for hitting asteroids and mining them. If they are one time use and I take one with me, then after hitting one asteroid, I'd then just have to mine the rest to find its contents?
Mining in such a small ship is probably not worth it.
You're obviously mining the small clusters of asteroids that show up in the navigation list and that are small clusters of a few rocks fairly close to the star, ignore them, I'd advise removing them from the list entirely. Find a planet that has rings around it and head into the ring, they are made of millions if not billions (possibly even trillions, I dunno, it's a lot though
) of ice or rocks to mine, you should be using a detailed surface scanner that will allow you to scan the entire ring and will then highlight hot spots of various materials so you can increase your chances of getting what you want, no harm in simply dropping into a ring and prospecting though, it just wont be anywhere near as efficient.
Other tips are:
Do not launch a collection limpet if you have a fragment targeted, it will collect that fragment and then destruct. Collector limpets that are launched without a target selected will simply collect any valid fragment or material until it expires.
Don't fly out of range of your limpets.
You can hide particular types of mined fragments from your contact list, which your limpets will then ignore so you wont end up getting frustrated at them picking up anything and everything which will quickly cause issues with smaller refineries due to the low bin count and you'll not waste time picking up low value stuff.
Try and mine asteroids from the point of centre spin (imagine the asteroid has a mail slot like a station and you are aiming at the slot) so fragments don't get thrown everywhere, it'll speed things up when collecting fragments.
Once you have depleted (full pips to weapons and mine as fast as possible) an asteroid position your ship so it is above the string of fragments, not too close to them, you'll get the idea after a few tries but ideally you want a string of fragments that you can position so they look like they are perpendicular to the cargo hatch (always on the bottom of the ship), it'll speed up limpet retrieval of fragments massively as they will only need to travel back and forth rather than around your ship.
Once your cargo is full you can continue to fill the refinery bins to 100%, they'll churn out the contents when you clear some cargo space.
