It was mentioned on a recent 10 for the Chairman that the new MISC 'Prospector' will possibly be able to carry cargo containers full of mined material to a Hull class ship. Could a Hull class ship possibly have the ability to carry a 'Prospector' in like a 'piggy back mode' so that 1 or 2 people could carry out a mining operation with just a Hull and the 'Prospector'? Or will the Prospector have the ability to take jump points on its own?asked by Smoke Stak
TL;DRThe Prospector can take jump points on its own and hand ore containers to bigger ships; whether it could be carried by a Hull is uncertain, possibly only very large Hulls and still early.
Ok, the Prospector will definitely have the ability to take jump points on it's own, it's designed as sort of a more personal mining ship. We have the RSI Orion, which is industrial scale which is kind of like the Reclaimer is industrial scale but the Prospector's more sort of in the size range of a Freelancer. It's specifically got mining equipment for essentially laser drilling and tractor beaming up various sort of minerals and materials or ore and stuff you can find on the surface of planetoids or say off asteroids and stuff like that.You sort of pack up these, whatever you want to call them, ore containers and they all fill up and those containers can be handed off to a bigger ship like... think of it as a container sort of paradigm where you see someone's mining coal and they load it into basically train trucks and then the train goes off to like the coast and then they load it into a big container ship or a big coal ship and it goes across the ocean.So, those kind of things will be available, I'm not 100% sure on whether the Prospector could potentially be attached to the Hull, if it was it would only be the very bigger Hulls, we've talked about them potentially being able to ship, almost like a car carrier you see, but it's still early. We're going to be showing the Prospector, this week actually and so hopefully you guys like it.It definitely feels very MISC, it's kind of cool and I think it's going to be pretty interesting gameplay. So, I'm kind of interested in seeing people use that as going and doing non-combat oriented stuff but of course, then they'll be taking the material somewhere to sell, then you can either hand it off or take them yourself. Maybe there will be pirates after you trying to jack you for the ore that you've got and then maybe you can have someone help and protect you. I think there's a lot of cool immersion gameplay that'll come from that. So, that's the answer on that one.