Because letting your lasers run for a full cycle is inefficient (asteroids will often be depleted with a great deal of time remaining in a cycle) you should never let your laser to perform a full run of 180 seconds for Strip Miners or 60 seconds for Mining Lasers. Instead you should reset your lasers between 80-120 seconds for Strip Miners and 48-55 seconds if you're using Mining Lasers. Even if you end up running more Mining Cycles in the end this is very important for overall efficiency.
Example :
A Retriever with :
-- 2 x Strip Miners
-- 20.000 m3 Cargo
-- 1230 m3 (the amount of ore each Strip Miner mines in a full 180 second cycle) )
First you must determine the Time required to fill up your cargo hold. To find that just follow the above brief and replace the values with your own.
2 * 1230 = 2460 --- the amount of ORE you'll get in 180 sec with 2x Strip Miners
20.000 / 2460 = 8.2 --- the approximate number of cycles required to fill the hold. (Note that this is not the number of cycles you need to set in the STEALTH-MINER settings.)
8.2 * 180 = 1476seconds - the time required to fill up your hold. (Approximately 25 minutes.)
Now, depending on how many cycles you want to run (9, 10, 11, 12 . . .)
If you set up the EVE bot to do 9 mining cycles for each run , you can determine the time you need for each cycle like this:
1476 sec / 9 = 164 seconds for each cycle. (So 164 is the number you put into the settings for Reset Lasers Every... sec. 9 is the number you'll need to put in for Mining Cycles until full cargo.) So the bot will reset your lasers every 164 seconds and will perform 9 mining cycles to fill the ship's hold.
So now you have the basic information you need in order to execute the perfect mining run.
- Reset Lasers Every: 164 sec
- Mining Cycles : 9
You can add to this the following rough guidelines (which you should refine):
- Target time : 4-5 seconds (based on ship targeting time and your targeting skills)
- Warp to Belt Time : 75-80 seconds (your ship handling skills and the orientation of the station and the belts will affect this)
With this setup each run will last around 27 minutes, including flight time to and from the station. This is quite efficient.
Of course you can fit Mining Laser Upgrades on your ship and increase your yields. Mining implants and skills also have an effect on this. So go ahead and calculate your own yield and use that to determine how many cycles you will need, as well as what your reset time should be. Mining Lasers will obviously need more cycles to recover as much ore as Strip Miners, but the basic formula remains the same.
ATTENTION: Retriever and Venture pilots !
If you use EVE mining ships like Venture or Retriever you should note that those ships are designed for beginners, so are limited in many ways, especially the lack of Capacitor energy. While mining with a Venture you can use Miners Tech 1 without problems, but if you intend to use Miners Tech 2 it's mandatory to fit on your ship in Medium and Low slots modules like: Capacitor Recharger, Capacitor Power Relay etc... to can boost capacitor and sustain the Lasers from your ship during mining session ! Otherwise, after few mining cycles, your ship capacitor will be empty and your lasers can not be activated. Retriever also need those modules to boost the ship capacitor energy and to sustain the Strip Miners.