Group Mining Operation Roles in 3.19

Doing some mining testing in 3.19 (video: https://youtu.be/uwOgxJfRDAw), we found that you can "buy" a full load of empty bags for a cargo ship by stripping the bags from a mole or prospector with a tractor, loading them into a cargo ship, flying the miner back into a hangar, repairing to replace those bags for 10k each, and repeating until your cargo ship is full. (Edit: I only tested repairing Prospector bags, it's possible that MOLE bags are a different price to repair/replace). It's also possible to refine bags that were mined by another mining ship, so you can freely swap empty for full bags into your cargo ship to prolong your mining expedition, and handle the refining with a different mining ship or at a later time without worrying about ownership of the bags.(Per SCL - https://youtu.be/RfUvFVXJOwE?t=2696 - the devs are actively working on getting mining bags to be refineable from a cargo hold but that's not implemented in 3.19.0).

The idea is that there are multiple distinct roles in a mining operation - often these roles are combined (for example, a solo miner is their own scout, support, miner, extractor, refiner, and hauler). With larger groups, it could make sense to separate roles, not necessarily for pure efficiency, but for fun. If you have a "hub" caterpillar or other cargo ship full of empty bags, you could use a pit crew to swap the bags off of the mining ships, so those players can keep mining without having to do the trek back to the refinery on their own. Or, if you have modules and heads optimized for either cracking or extracting, you could have one set of miners focused on cracking rocks, while others hoover them up (taking advantage of inert materials filter advantages) and haul them back to your mining hub ship. For a smaller group, with only one or two miners and a cargo ship full of bags, you might simply want to fill up one cargo ship's worth of bags, then all trek back to the refinery to start jobs or even just log off with the hub ship & bags stored, and deal with the refining later.

The current limitation is that you can only refine out of a mining ship, and that mining ship owner is the one who will be the sole owner of the commodities and also needs to own the hauling ship to deliver the orders into and sell to TDD. But because bags can be freely swapped between ships and extra bags purchased via repairing, it's really only something you need to worry about once that cargo ship is full. If you wanted to keep mining indefinitely, you could have the cargo ship stay with the miners, and have the player you want to own the refining jobs shuttle bags back to the refinery. Or, you could bring the full hub ship back to the refinery, and do the "unload into a mining ship" dance all at once and swap bags & start refinery orders.

Not everyone wants to be an expert in cracking rocks, or flying, or even deal with ASOPs and elevators, so I'm happy that we will be able to split roles up and let people do what they want to do the most. I personally would be happy to turn my brain off and haul bags between a hub and refinery and leave the rock finding and cracking to the experts. And I ended up having a lot of fun just trying to get as fast as possible at swapping, storing, and sorting bags. Definitely not perfect yet but I'm really excited about doing mining in a group where everyone doesn't have to do the entire loop on their own.

Shout out to the StarJump Fleetviewer for not just having all of the ships, but a bunch of options for things like text, backgrounds, engine flares, lasers, asteroids, and explosions, to make a cool little scene and something way better looking than if I were just doodling :)