Make mineral scanners require actively scanning with the scanner vs simply targetting.
Make scanning utilize energy for the amount of time it takes to complete the scan.

the reasons behind this are both to give the graphics effect and device itself some purpose and because it makes sense logically to have it behave this way. Determining the elements of a roid would almost certainly use a spectrometer technique, where by your scanner beam is actually a laser that burns off a swath of the roid and takes a sampling of the light emitted to determine the makeup of the roid.

Built in scanner ships would then have to be reworked so that their "scanner" can be activated by the player as needed like they would if it was any other normal port device.

Also, i think making scanning more interactive both visually and functionally will benefit the mining trade once VO gets off the static roid setup we currently have and move to a dynamic roid system where static lists of roids and their general location wont be helpful anymore, elevating scanning to an actual necessity.

-1 No.

1) this is not a space simulator

2) we shouldn't make the game worse just to give some silly scanning animation a purpose

3) No.

-1

+1 to removing the pointless graphic effect

-1 this is a horrible idea. as if mining isnt already the forgotten red headed step child in VO