I would like some way to set a mining beacon on, or close to, a specific asteroid so that after I make a station trip I can return to that hard to find asteroid in the massive field that has the rare minerals...

If you think this makes it too easy, then I propose 2 drawbacks for it...

First.. you can only set ONE beacon at a time.. so the sector will not get filled with beacons (also maybe have them time-out after 300 seconds)

Secondly... Everyone can see your beacon.. so you are advertising the asteroid you want to return to.. increasing the chance of competition...

"Too powerful"?

Nonsense... this suggestion would work just fine if only you could see the beacon, and it lasted indefinitely. There definitely should be a limit to the number of beacons, though.

Trying to remain oriented in an asteroid field, especially with such a stripped down interface to work with as what we have, is virtually impossible for most people, and damned inconvenient for the few who can do it. There's no real reason to go out and explore, after you've found a couple decent spots, unless there's some way to know you can come back later and resume work - a single ship's hold of good ore is nice, but not worth potential personal risk when you can get the same amount of money/experience just by mining cheap stuff next to a station, without having to take a lot of time just to find your good asteroid again.

What would be even better would be if the ship's computer remembered what asteroids had in them, so once you scanned them, you could see their contents, without having to close to < 500 meters.

Well, I am a software developer, and was thinking about the difficulty of updating the sector daemon to remember what players see what beacons, and all the headache that causes, and figured to make it easier on the developers, all beacons beong globally visible to whoever is in the sector. But to make it so that you can only have one avtive beacon per player so as to not clutter the sector with flashing blips.

Regardless of the details... A beacon is almost a necessity, and any decent miner would have a way to get back to the "motherload"

I don't know if it's possible, or would allow some manner of cheating(like, say, going over the intended max. number of beacons), but I was thinking if possible some of the work could be offloaded to the client computers.

Basically, this idea is only really useful if you can have multiple beacons - unless a miner wants to super-specialize, he's going to want to be able to mark more than one asteroid. Also, your blinking dots could be a real nuisance in populated areas, especially if you don't know or care what half of them denote, so it only really makes sense to have them show for the originator.

I too had this same thought at first, and I see no reason that some sort of mapping system could be developed for the individual miner that wishes to remember where his "spot" was, but, I found it farely easy to just be observent, and look for the really hot rock. Of course when more people are mining there will be a lot more hot rocks out there and that may get confusing. I like the idea of having the mapping info client side, would make it easier for the server, besides, it's not like your marking it for everyone to use, your marking it for yourself.

Another note, Why make the asteriods in the radars grey? with the window being transparent and no way to adjust the alpha value, they all just seem to blend into the background star scape half the time. Perhaps another color?

OK... making it client-side would offload all the work to the local machine.. you would only be able to see your own beacons (this is just fine), and sure.. have as many as you like... This makes it simple, and effective for the people who want this feature, and does not clutter the radar of people who do not...

Client-side is how I'd want it to be.

For the time being I just drop a cargo crate next to the roid.

Good roid -> start mining -> get first crate -> jettison -> get the rest -> fly to station -> unload -> look for jettisoned crate.

It's really not that hard.

It is difficult to use that system if there's 1000 crates of cargo left jettisoned in the sector from other miners who are just after the XP and don't want the goods.

I think this would/will be fixed if/when we get custom nav waypoints.