Am I directing my miners poorly?

[Atomik]

I have a modest fleet, which includes three low tier miners.

To get them to work, I need to string together, <mine here> <go to new sector>, .. etc. for standard miners, and r-miners need ridiculous <Mine> <Go to sector with resource depot(possibly multiple gates away)> <smelt> <return to original sector>, .. etc. Which only works until that single sector is our of mine-ables, at which point the ship shuts down.

This is a nuisance.

Is there a better way to tell these (apparently stupid) captains to mine?

[Frenk-n]

No, you need zo keep an eye on them. 

Otherwise it would be too easy...

Edited November 17, 2020 by Frenk-n

[Bingeling]

I have a miner that will survive (is not weak), and that has a captain. It has some jump range boost.

With my combat ship, I have scouted/cleared a few asteroid sectors with a good number of asteroids. For my own help, I tag these with the name of the miner. With my modest sized ships (100k+ mining cargo), about 4 sectors is nice.

I locate a resource depot nearby, the miners have R-Turrets. The miner need jump range between the mining systems and the resource depot. It helps if the resource depot is not a place I ever visit, as I may drag in hostiles.

Queue orders. Two systems only for brevity

1: Go to first mining system (single jump)
2: Mine
3: Go to depot
4: Do resource thing.
5: Go to second mining system
6: Mine
7: Go to depot
8: Do resource thing
9: Loop

With 4 systems I find that I rarely get the "There are no more asteroids in this..." and "We have nothing to refine". But I think the few occurrences may be where I either messed up the loop or the system is a tad weak. The key is to have enough systems that they respawn asteroids.  But those messages should not stop the loop.

On rare occasions, visit your ship screen, scan for idle miners. On ever rarer occasions, one of them has stopped for some reason.

I assume that with larger/more powerful mining ships, they need more systems in the loop. But 4 good ones works so far.