Miner

The Miner is a useful small multipurpose spacecraft . It allow some interaction with the outside, and allow ships to upgrade themselves in size.

## Game Vehicle

### Uses

The Miner is a passive, Pod-sized, piloted spacecraft. It is light, fast and agile, able to either Mine, Salvage, or to Build a ship's hull. They move swiftly and have lateral thrusters for rotation

Like the Shuttle, a Miner can be killed and it has an oxygen tank for the crew member inside it.

Unlike the Shuttle, a Miner can't be drafted nor controlled and is fully dependent on its pilot automation, it is only possible to press the Return Home button for it to quickly come back to its Pod Hangar.

Because of the above-mentionned property, crew members can't die of oxygen in a Miner, he would come back to replenish O² if needed before it happen.

### Pod Hangar

Miners need a Pod Hangar to dock to when idle. This is needed for crew to enter it and pilot it. They are also the only way for Miners to be built.

#### Cost

A Miner require the following to be built within a Pod Hangar:

 Electronics Component

### Mining

Miners are fitted with 4 mining lasers on their lower plates. Theses red lasers are able to cut and gather raw ores from asteroids.

The speed at which a Miner cut the ore depend on the ore itself and on its current pilot.

Ores have a mining time based on the formula = *(20 x mining difficulty) x (100 / Pilot's Working speed)*

Higher the mining difficulty is, like for Hyperium, longer the total mining time will be.

Higher the pilot's Working speed is, faster the gathering will be.

Skills being not fully implemented, beside the level 1 Mining required for Miners piloting, it seems high Mining levels have no impact on the lenght of the mining cycle.

### Hull Building

The Miner has two inventory, one for ores, another one, unshown, for hull blocks.

Once a Miner is docked to its Pod Hangar, it will try to store a full Hull Block inside itself, taking what is in the Pod Hangar inventory. This way, it is most of the time ready-to-task for any hull extension operation.

Miners are fitted with 4 additionnal buildings lasers on their upper plates. Theses lasers are able either to build or to cut Hull Blocks

In building mode, theses green lasers allow for placement and link of Hull blocks to already built ones. The pilot will, in random order, build the ship part he is tasked to by Edit mode.

### Hull Salvage

Theses 4 upper lasers are also used for cutting, meaning they can remove existing hull blocks.

This is done by Salvaging. When scrapping Hull parts to retrieve Hull Scraps, the pilot will destroy the Hull of the targeted Derelict, and then try to retrieve scraps from it.

Another use of red lasers cutting properties is for dismantling of a claimed ship when the Player desire to remove excessive Hull.

Note that even claimed Hull retrieve only scraps on removal.

### Airlock

When gathering resources through Salvage or Mining, the Miner will deliver its content in an available Airlock on the ship.

## Trivia

* Miner inventory can store Hull Blocks by 0.1 increments, thus you do not lose any resources constructing 0.1 ship Hull upgrades.
* When deconstructing hull, the Miner will build the walls first, then deconstruct the floating chunk. If not done this way, the ship would hull breach.
* The Miner currently have the fastest base speed in the game with 5 tiles/sec
* 20, the value of the mining formula, have been spotted within game files as "base mining time" for all ores. The coherence between tests and this value led some players to create the formula written in this page.