It concerns me that mining is going to be hard to do(if even possible, in a practical sense) on your own.

There are several problems I foresee.

First, the whole ability to play a solo char is threatened, and made a great deal less fun, if specialties such as mining are limited to groups.

Second, it may be hard for everyone to find a group that can coordinate effectively enough to make mining possible without the miner dying, ESPECIALLY with the current agro model that as soon as you kill a bot that's attacking you, another immediately takes its place. The miner would, in aggressive zones, be under constant attack, as would the guarding ships. How are the guarding ships supposed to defend themselves properly if they're constantly having to peel guardians off the miner's back?

Also, if mining is a leveling skill, then I can easily see exclusion being a problem. Due to the agro model outlined above, the defending ships can only bring a certain number of miners with them before they're swamped. This means that the miners will end up having to compete with each other to get into mining groups, and subsequently, lower level(having levels at all in the classic sense always creates a barrier which can only be breached with endless leveling) miners will either have to put up with groups of low level or possibly incompetent fighters, or eke out a living solo, which, if the outline in the progress page is accurate, is not an option easily pursued.

Mining is not solo only, there are just advantages to mine in groups.

I'm sure that, when mining becomes established, there will be quite a few guilds springing up (if they do not exist at the moment) whose members can be hired by miners, solo or otherwise for protection.
For example: Grizzled miner Toothless Joe, decides to go mining for rare ores and puts out a message on a channel such as Mining or Mercenary stating how much he is prepared to offer etc. Obviously the experience and the number of members active at the time will affect the price. A solo miner like Joe may only be able to afford a small group of one or two medium experienced mercenaries. However a mining guild may be in a position to afford the full services of a top of the range mercenary guild, maybe even form some sort of alliance. Which will be beneficial to both parties if crafting becomes available.

This has got me thinking about channels and message boards I'm going to do search and see what comes up.

Mine in a sector where you don't have "Kill on sight" status with the local station/defbots?

There ARE roids in protected space, and even roids in sectors with no bots at all.

Yes, in fact you could just mine stuff from asteroids next to a station where there aren't any bots.

But the problem you mention with the aggro model is definitely a big concern for mining that needs a solution. More defenders just bring in more bots.

We could introduce some kind of "bot charmer" gizmo which makes you appear to bots as if you're another mining bot and they will leave you alone (unless you get too close). Or we could make them always do that, and change their behavior more drastically.

What if bots don't attack unarmed ships except when they get all confused from ion storms?

Maybe just having a mining beam makes them identify you as another bot and not attack?

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7321

Check here. I've incorporated Andy and Demonen's ideas.