Moon Mining

Moon Mining by Moon Master Jaxan Brax

Introduction

Just like in real life, planets in Eve also have natural satellites (moons). Pieces of a moon can be drilled and fractured for exceptionally valuable ore.

A special player-operated space station called a Refinery (Athanor or Tatara) fitted with a STANDUP Moondrill is required. The station manager initiates an extraction procedure on the Moondrill which bores into the nearby moon and removes a chunk of material out of its crust. The extraction time set by the manager is measured in days and hours and dictates the volume of raw ore pulled from the crust at a rate of 20,000 m³ per hour although the in-game graphic of the moon chunk remains unchanged, effectively modifying the density of the chunk were real-life physics applied in-game. Once in space, powerful tractor beams grab hold of the chunk and slowly pull it towards the Refinery until it is within a safe distance for fracturing. With the moon chunk in position powerful lasers from the Moondrill itself fire upon the pulled chunk, fracturing it into a small asteroid field to be mined by capsuleers. In this way capsuleers need not wait for naturally-occurring ore fields to spawn in space and can dictate (to a degree) when and what asteroids will spawn in their system for them to mine and reprocess.

Unlike real life, though, all moons in Eve have infinite resources; no matter how many times a chunk is pulled and fractured from a moon, the resulting ore and minerals can never be depleted.

Identifying, Naming, and Selecting Moons

The first step to moon mining is gathering raw data about the system's moons in order to make informed decisions as to where to devote time, energy, hole control, and fuel towards anchoring a Refinery and maintaining an operational moondrill on moons in question.

A capsuleer must survey a moon using no more than a simple Venture fitted with a Survey Probe Launcher armed with Survey Probes. The pilot points their ship at the moon being surveyed and waits for the probe to return the results. Preferably this procedure is preformed in the first-person piloting perspective to ensure the probe impacts the moon's surface as the probes will disappear and despawn should they be launched into empty space. Since it takes a certain amount of time (depending on the Survey skill) for the survey results to return, a pilot can fire and forget a probe at one moon and move onto the next, etc.