Looks like you destroyed the ones that TOAA never finished investigating?

I captured a couple of the freebies no problem (they were already revealed)... so it looks like alien structures, after being claimed and invested in, but before being completed and revealed, are vulnerable to attack.

I wonder if you could destroy crashed alien ships in the same way?

Mark 3000 

I better make more SLBs....

You gotta remember though, those are basic shields. Not AES

Sure, a measly 375k shield power per module 

About equivalent to AES 596. I find that suitably impressive!

Mark 3000 

I better make more SLBs....

Also, thanks to TOAA for giving these away! I know it's not really worth it, but I'm going to have fun putting a base up all the same. And maybe Sir Emi will smile on me, and decide that a mining probe staffed with 25,000 specialists is worth more than a 2% bump to finding deposits 

I am now set up in 29,42. Friendly captains are welcome to stop buy and get fuel starting... well... whenever I have my station filled up with fuel 

Sargas, does a red star indicate you've taken over that system? I had a scout popping over to 31,41 to see if there was anything I wanted, but I used up all my personnel trying to staff the buildings on the one I took over 

This screwed me over a week ago, too. Hopefully, it will be resolved. It's one of the only things left on the patch list!

You're right Mata and Antilak, if you manually unload regularly, you can circumvent these problems. But the reason mining income is lower than COM and SOS income on average is that it is supposed to be PASSIVE income. IE, you should be able to profit from it in the background while you actively pursue other things, like missions. If I have to click through to each of my 13 different mining stations every single hour, I should make at least as much per station as I do on COMs or SOS... otherwise I would have invested those millions of solars on more ships instead of stations and advanced miners.

Agreed, too, that we won't probably see a mining overhaul any time soon. But we don't really need one... all we need is an adjustment to the auto-unload feature, which could easily be included in the final round of patches!

In the meantime, I will be hoping the supernova project never comes to fruition 

First off, let me say that I agree with most of what's been said here. We really need auto-unload to happen when a module is full. Also, it would be pretty helpful to have auto-unload for ships as well as stations, so a mining ship can park in orbit, auto-unload overnight, and then move on the next day.

I wouldn't mind the capacity of advanced miners going up with further research... although if we implement my idea of doing xp for different tasks, that could be a place for improvement too... for instance, when a mining ship with the appropriate promotion deploys a mining module, that module has a capacity of 110 or 150 instead of 100.

I think an easy fix that wouldn't require any programming changes would be a severe reduction in the QP costs of the pledge mining modules. A Universal Harvester would solve most of the issues, but at 200 QPs per, why would I want to pay 50 million solars for one? To get it up to 40 m3/hour you'd have to pay 1000 QPs. 250 million solars for something that can harvest as quickly as a mk L advanced miner, which I can build for just a few million solars? Please. It might also be a viable strategy to set up some probes and build a more permanent mining base, but again, a 200 QP price tag means those are out of reach for all but like 20 players, and the potential for the module to ever pay for itself is very low.

I DO think that the MOST IMPORTANT change would be to fix auto-unload to happen whenever a module is full, or every 6 hours, whichever happens first. Also to add it to ships. This is really important for the miners of the galaxy... if we want to be able to scale our productivity up with our technology as we grow in the same way that players do with COM ships fighting pirates, this is an absolute must-change.

Oh man you guys have good taste in games 

I love the Final Fantasy games. FF VII was the one I played most, but FF II and FFIII would have to be my all time favorites. Kafka - best video game villain of all time, for sure. 

I think that this would go hand-in-hand with my proposed idea for experience points.

For instance... how do you rate a miner? How much he mines? How much money he makes? What if he makes modules with his minings, and doesn't sell them? What if he only harvests diamonds and other rare stuff, but makes lots of money doing it? There are too many different ways to mine successfully to make a simple rating system. But if all mining activities give experience points (mine 1 iron - 1 xp... mine 1 diamond - 10 xp, for instance), then you can rate the best miners by total cumulative mining experience across the board.

Same for SOS. How would you rate a player on SOS missions? Bubbles completed? Money made? Who is rated more highly, someone who gets lots of pods but ignores fuel distress/medicine/mining missions? Or someone who collects every single pod but maybe doesn't make as much money? Give xp for every kind of pod depending on how far out it is, etc, and then you can have a concrete system for knowing who is the most successful at SOS missions!

You can rate explorers (exploration xp based on planets surveyed, perhaps with more xp the further out you go, and more xp for the first player ever to survey a planet ), pirate killers, and scientists in this way. 

Please make them really tough.  

MDL.... You have GOT to be f*cking kidding me...  

I'll make one out of spare Diamonds for you!   and you guessed what it will drop  

I'd like to kill it, drag it home, hollow it out, put engines in it, and fly it around 

Hey there, Fenix. Good to have a fellow writer around (bit of a writer myself  )

Aaaand now I'm hungry, with no cake to be seen. 

Would love to see this. 

Could just have a Sol Corp station in orbit around Mars that the duelers would dock with to register for the fight. Could use that station to hold wagers, too, to be sure that the loser paid up

I think to keep it fair, there should be an agreed upon power limit that both combatants would have to click on before the duel started, and then there could be a short timer. If the power of either side ever rises above the total agreed upon power limit, that side is disqualified immediately. Whether people use stations or planetary modules could be an additional setting both parties would have to agree to (I know a certain Raphael liked to use mk 1 stations as decoys back in the day, if my forum reading is any indication? and that would certainly be hard to limit )

Could even take this one step further and have tournaments! Everyone buys in with $1m solars, everyone enters a max 1 million power ship of their choice, and a few hours later, someone walks out with a fat purse full of coins!

Thanks for reviving this fun idea, Dragonfly 

SPQNR gives a VERY long window for inactives to come back.

We still don't condone pirating, though... (well, except for plundering the modules of long-inactive players... this isn't pirating, though, it's "recycling"  )