Mining turrets become "inefficient" when AI ships are mining off-sector

[jonasmuex]

I recently noticed this after building some powerful mining turrets. My mining ship which has 14 of these mounted can down a Trinium rock in seconds, but when the mining ship is left to mine (ordered) and I leave the sector, resource gain gets VERY slow, almost as if the mining turrets are not working or become 100x less powerful when I leave the sector. But when I come back, the mining ship is mining fast again, literally destroying the rocks. I have a video here (

) to demonstrate what I am talking about. This also happens when playing on my friend's server, not just singleplayer. I'm not sure if this is a bug or was an intended mechanic, but if it is a bug, I hope that it gets fixed in subsequent updates.

Feels kind of a letdown when you build powerful mining turrets just to be rendered useless on an AI mining ship.

Could it be a thing about mining turrets that consume energy when put on an AI mining ship?

 

Version: R8782

OS: Win 7

CPU: i5-4590

GPU: GTX970 strix

[nDervish]

This is a known issue with out of sector mining (and salvaging).  I strongly suspect that the underlying cause is that activity in non-player-occupied sectors doesn't update as frequently (to save on processing time), but mining/salvage yields aren't increased to compensate.

 

For example, with totally made-up numbers, your uber-miner may be collecting 1000 minerals each time it fires its lasers, but it fires them 10 times a second (for 10k minerals/sec) when you're in the sector and only once every 5 seconds (for an average of 200 minerals/sec) when you're not there personally.  The way to fix this would be for the out-of-sector processing code to figure out "if a player was here, the lasers would have fired 50 times in the 5 seconds that have passed, so calculate mineral gain from 50 shots instead of from one shot", but that doesn't appear to be in place yet.