Some beginner insight to AI mining/salvaging

[alioth]

After I watched my first AI miners crawl around the universe like slugs I saw that you cannot give the AI ships player ship design to fly but the AI needs a dedicated AI design.

 

I just started around iron and titanium but I am sure those learnings I made are also valid closer to the core.

 

[*]Velocity Bypass upgrade is mandatory on all AI ships or their max speed will be tied to the ships max speed or a fraction of it if the ships have orders like mine or salvage

[*]Thrust is irrelevant if you have this upgrade installed. I would even say that you should have low thrust for the AI or it will accelerate too fast for the turrets to keep up (I used around 40-70)

[*]Only use thrusters for breaking speed - and aim for 300+ which means you will use a lot of thrusters (most of them directional forward/rear facing)

[*]Go for wide turret coverage (not front or top only concentration) as the AI ignores your turret placement

[*]Do not add inertial dampeners. They will mess up the AI braking (it thinks it has that brake speed but it will brake with thruster back firing which disables the dampeners. Bug?) Result: it will bump into things or overshoot

[*]Add enough lateral thrusters for the ship to reasonably move sideways at a few m/s. Often i thought my AI ship lost orders as it was sitting still... in reality it wanted to move sideways and after adding side thrusters it continued to work with no problem clearing the obstacle sideways

 

With this in mind I created two ships that I share here

[*]This is a cheap 6 crew Titanium starter AI ship that can keep up with you easily and reaches 1000 m/s+ on longer distances http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1316538219

[*]This is a 20 crew Titanium ship with 3 slots (you can add some +turret upgrades besides the speed bypass). It has a similar but sleeker design

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1316529881

 

If they are not caught in combat they perform really well and even if danger is close you can recall them and the AI ships reach boost speed flying to your ship.

 

I wonder if you experts have any more tips?

 

Edit:added two more points to the list

 

 

[Ravien]

Some great tips there!

 

Once you reach trinium space, create mining carriers. With some custom built fighters from a high efficiency mining turret, it will eat asteroids up so fast.

[Nachtu]

I wonder if you experts have any more tips?

 

Nope. That pretty much covers it.

 

I never realized using the Velocity Bypass chip could be so useful, how dumb of me.

 

Thx for the tips!

[Fenrir]

Another good thing: Make a Nose on the tip of the ship and place the turrets around it.

From my experience the ship nearly never faces away so with this setup most of the time 75% of your turrets can fire.