Asteroid mining with EVE and drones; employ the pirates and gun-runners

I despair. I have spent the last hour trying to write a serious article on how to make money mining.  I have tried to set out the important things you need to do to invest in mining and grow rich.  And now I read the following on the bloggersphere about EVE mining; and it is all so well stated and so obvious. 

This is how you make money mining: 

The lure of mining is one of the cardinal “shining paths” to wealth in EVE Online, and mining, done right, is geared towards making you the most money possible in the least amount of time.  EVE seeds new resources to be mined throughout the 5,000 star cluster every time new players make permanent accounts, so mining starts with prospecting - finding what needs to be done.

The basics of  EVE Online mining include watching the fringes of the universe; this is the place where EVE Online seeds new resources when new accounts are made; there’s some weighting of new materials in more established areas, but the feel of EVE, that of a gold rush town teetering on the bring of incivility at the edge of civilization is important. Consequently,  look to the fringes, and look for places that have security ratings of 0.3 to 0.8 or so.

Once you’ve found a spot to mine, there’s the temptation to process the ore yourself. While this is tempting, it’s usually not worth it: getting both mining and processing to respectable levels means you’re cutting out a lot of other things that are fun to do, and the processing gear is more expensive than the mining gear. Most mining conglomerates doing EVE online mining do it as a group activity, with two or three miners per processor, and often with a couple of dedicated combat types to do guard and patrol duty.

So it all boils down to: explore where others have not; find a place with moderate security and political risk; and get somebody else to do the hard work.  Finally it never hurst to hire the locals with guns to guard your operations.  At this link is a major-production guide to exploring for an mining a MOON. 

Amazing how much about the real world you can learn wondering around the virtual reality world.  For example, the take over game:

When you are looking to start mining, particularly if you are just getting started in the game in general, you will want to stick with the low-grade asteroids. Look around for the common ores and you”ll find that you might build up more quickly than you think. When you are starting out, you have a very low-quality mining laser, and you simply won”t be able to access the more valuable ores. As a miner, one of the bigger problems you”ll run into are pirates. The more valuable the ore gets, the more pirates will be lurking around, so make sure that you don”t reduce your shiny new ship to scrap by biting of more than you can chew!

As always there is the problem of transporting the ore and finding pretty ladies in hard hats to drive hte big trucks.  Witness one consultant providing advice:

To use drones you need: (a) a ship with a drone capacity of more than 0.00 m3; (b) the skills to use them. 

Now as an individual, you have to consider your career options and go out to sell your skills.  Here is some advice on that score:

Here are 3 ways to find a corporation:

1.  Through the EVE Forums, under Alliance and Corporation Recruitment Center. You can find corporations here, but also feel free to open a thread to advertise yourself: Let corporations come to you. Let them know exactly what you’re looking for: PVP, Carebear, Mining, Trading, or whatever you’re looking to do.
2.  Another great way to look for corporation is through a site called EVE Careers. Here, both players and corporations register and use the service to match-up. If you haven’t found the corporation on the EVE Forum, this is a great way to find one.
3.  Finally, there’s the in-game solution. Within the EVE Neocom (that’s the icon bar on the left top-to-bottom) under the Corporation tab is a way to find corporations. You can look within regions, for corps in Alliances or not, with Skill Points or not, etc.

This all begins to sound depressingly similar to real life.  Too similar for my liking.  Why fight the good fight at the office or in the field all day only to come home to do it all over again on the computer?  Unless you are a drone in the office or on the drill rig, and at night you want to soar with the CEO, COO, CIO, or other pirate?