I was thinking about mining the other day, and how it could be improved. I came up with different 'grades' of ore.
One of the most important things in mining, in my experience, is how much cargo you can carry. It's usually best to leave the titanium ore behind, when you can be carrying uranium, or regolith, or gold...
But what if some titanium ore was worth it? Say, three times as much value per ton. Or, some of the gold ore was extremely low grade, so that it was really only worth as much as a couple tons of titanium?
So, there would be several grades of ore. That doesn't take it quite far enough, though. I propose a 'refinining auton' or 'refining device' of some sort. Ore plus a little bit of fuel goes in, super-dense ingots come out. It would take more of the low-grade ore to produce an ingot than it would of the high grade ore. Ingots would take up less space and weight, allowing you to keep mining longer.
The drawback to this is that mining becomes an even simpler source of money. So, either:
A. Prices for ore have to go down.
B. Frequency of ore has to go down.
C. Make the low density ores drastically more common than higher density ores.
I personally would go for C, mostly because the fun part of mining comes when you see the little rocks fly out of the big rock. I think having even slightly more of the low grade ores than there are of what we currently have, with a price of about 1/3, would be more fun. Shooting asteroids without getting anything isn't as fun. More success = better.
