After having achieved Rank 1 with the Aisling Duval faction through the completion of 5 assignments, I decided to take my foot off the gas a bit while I waited for the next set of work to roll over. Merits earned through doing whatever the faction deems important, which is almost everything done within their domain, can continue outside of these weekly assignments, but I had also outfitted my ship(s) and my wallet was feeling a bit light, so I opted instead to go out and try a few new things.

I wasn’t so poor that I shied away from buying a new ship, the Cobra Mk III. I had been watching some videos which explain features of the game and the Cobra Mk III was well spoken of as a capable yet affordable upgrade for new-ish Commanders. I had the Mandalay, but my goal will be to have one ship to do X, one ship to do Y, and to not have to worry about fitting and refitting a single ship for different duties depending on what I want to do in that session. I had some cash left over after the purchase to boost up the capabilities of the Cobra but at the end of the day I was well below 100,000 credits, so it was back to mission running I went.

My goal, though, was to try laser mining. There are two types of ship mining in Elite Dangerous: laser and core. Laser mining is what it sounds like: fit a ship with mining lasers, go out, shoot rocks. Core mining is a bit more complex, involving identifying suitable rocks and then launching several explosive charges into the target. I decided that the Cobra would be the “mining ship” for the time being, but I had to outfit it before I could consider it.

It took a while to get my ass in gear. I knew I needed mining lasers, so I bought 2 (I eventually sold one because 2 was overkill at this point in my career). I knew I needed collector limpets to go after the ores that I’d blast off an asteroid. Problem is, there are only so many slots in the ship where I could install this stuff, and the stock Cobra is pretty well filled in the places I needed to work. I ended up removing the weapons and the docking computer, selling off one of the three cargo bays and purchasing a single, larger cargo bay instead. Then I added the collector limpet controller and went out to the nearest asteroid field.

Not knowing what I didn’t know, I got out to the asteroid field, shot a rock and deployed my collector, but couldn’t do anything with it because I needed an on-board refinery in order to accept the ore. I was also shooting in the dark because I didn’t know if the rock I had picked even had materials to collect, or what they were. After reviewing the video I was using as my baseline I realized that not only did I need a refinery, but I needed a prospector limpet controller and also a surface scanner. Back to the station, back to the outfitters, and what followed was a bunch of hard decisions on what I could remove from the Cobra to make it all fit. In the end, the Cobra became a dedicated mining ship because it really couldn’t do much else with the way it got configured. At that point it was getting late in the evening, so I hopped out to a nearby planet with rings and started the process. Here it is:

1. At a suitable distance, fire a surface scanner probe into the planetary rings. This will illuminate “hotspots” which can be targeted and the dominant ore type identified.
2. Once in the hotspot area, find a rock and launch a prospector limpet at it. When the limpet is targeted, it will provide a material composition for the rock and the current percent of materials overall (so you know when the rock is “done”).
3. Launch a collector limpet.
4. Start shooting with the mining lasers. Remember to open the cargo scoop because the collector will be bringing the loose ore back to the scoop.
5. Repeat step 4 until the rock is depleted or the collector limpet runs out of time and self-destructs, at which point refer to step 3.

The collector drops off the ore into the refinery and when enough have been collected, a unit of condensed material is transferred to the cargo bay. Simple! Except there was one more snag and that’s the cargo-limpet-material hopscotch. Limpets take up cargo space and I left the station with a full compliment. I used one or two as prospectors, and one as a collector, meaning I could take on three units of condensed materials, but no more. The solution would seem to be to keep prospecting and replacing collector limpets as needed, but eventually I was down to the wire and had to make a decision to either leave the site with limpets unused, or jettison some to make room for the materials. In the end, I chose the latter.

Also, I picked a refinery which had five hoppers which, for my cramped Cobra, is overkill; I could barely fill one hopper as I could only send out one collector at a time due to the capacity of the collector controller, so even if I didn’t have enough cargo space I could always leave materials in the refinery bins, giving me five extra units of condensed material. Still, it was getting late, and I had tossed the remaining limpets out the airlock anyway, so it was back to town to sell what I had.

It’s not much, but it was honest work. It actually wasn’t that much work, either. I was alone in the belt and wasn’t bothered by NPCs until I got interdicted on my way back to the station, so the act of mining was very, very low rent. Considering I had left the station with only 132,528 CR, this represents my official “first million” with this character (previous characters were well above that).

Selling this material actually earned me merits with my faction, so that was nice. Earlier in the day when I had been out and about, I decided to scan a ship for the lulz and was immediately bombarded with notifications that I had been promoted to Rank 5!

Previously I had been patiently sitting at Rank 1, waiting for the assignment turnover to continue earning merits, but I guess that scan was the first addition of merits after I had been promoted to Rank 1. That’s kind of weird, because I had over 14,000 merits before I reached Rank 1. I guess moving from 0 to 1 is an absolute, and further progression only happens after that when new merits are earned.