<snip>
>
>
>     A civvy-to-civvy application could be in belt mining  (That's it,
>     you're
>     getting blame^H^H^H^H^Hcredit in the next Parental Advisory game - the
>     Collinson system).  Captain Agro Vation skippers the _Ping Pong Balls
>     With Texta Colour_ mining support ship, which flies around to active
>     miners, delivering life support and mining supplies, removing life
>     support wastes, processing mined ore, etc (all for a fee and markup,
>     naturlich) - all that transfer would require either a mutant UNREP
>     system or docking.  That way the miners can stay on station longer, no
>     one off their mining ship has to smell the insides of said ship, etc.
>
>
> That's actually dead brilliant. I'm surprised nobody has made one of
> these before. Letting outsystem miners stay on their claim would be a
> great benefit.
>  
> <snip>

I think this is a case of cross-fertilisation - I got the original idea
from my experiences playing the MMO EVE Online (sardonically described
as "Everyone Versus Everyone").

Mining operations in EVE drive home the importance of logistics -
frinstance, the mob I was in would often grab 6-10 of us and go at a
belt (for reasons of game design, mined-out belts tended to respawn daily).
EVE ship fitting (due to playability concerns as an MMO) consisted of
dropping certain modules into your ship, subject to space, power and CPU
constraints.
There's two types of specialist mining ships:
    Mining barges / hulks - Larger ships, focused on mining, large
throughput, large ore storage bays on board, often give bonuses to
mining results.
    Mining frigates - Cheap and cheerful, still giving bonuses to mining
results, fairly easy to learn to drive (unlike barges).
In addition, generic ships often got refitted for mining.

Neither of my characters ended up able to drive mining barges, so they
tended to spend as much time driving a cargo ship as a mining frigate.

One of the barge drivers would sing out they were getting full, so I'd
finish my current mining cycle, warp back to the station, change from my
mining frigate to a cargo vessel, warp back out to the barge in question
and come alongside as they jettisoned (via container) their current
accumulation of mined ore.  I'd load that up and scoot back to the
station to dump it in my hangar there, then warp back out to the next
barge, mosh, rinse, repeat.

The smaller ships had to offload more often, so I'd usually have a
flurry of activity bouncing back and forth between the station and the
smaller ships.  Due to Dread God Finagle (Murphy's boss), they would
_always_ seem to fill up while I was busy emptying out the bigger boys -
this generally necessitated creative repositioning of mined ore so the
Giant Frikkin' Mining Lasers could keep cycling while minimising the
chance of someone else pinching the ore.

On the larger mining runs (usually 8+ of us), I wouldn't bother staging
my mining frigate to whereever we were mining, as I was a better help to
overall throughput flying the hauler (both my characters had the skills
to fly cargo haulers well, with maxed-out cargo space, warp speed and
warp range - the latter two sped up in-system transit).

When we were done, I'd palm off the accumulated ore to someone with good
refining skills, who would feed it through the station's refining kit,
and then divvy up the refined metals among us before we lived the Beat
Feet Manifesto and headed back to our base at the time.  This was a
countermeasure against a given ship getting rolled (or blown up - see
"suicide ganking") for the refined metals in its hold.

And this was in "high security" space - what the TAS would call "Green
Zone".  Heading out to null-security space (such as down a wormhole) -
what the TAS would gleefully assign a Red zone to - was a whole
different kettle of fish.

Alex