For lack of a better term, what's next for mining, including specialized FPS mining equipment?

I think the closest one that's coming soon is exactly as you said, specialized mining equipment. Right now we have one mining laser for ships, and that's all it can do. It does one thing, it does it well, but there's no variation there. We want to add more variation to rocks, and automatically we want to add more variation to the lasers you can equip. So if we add a rock that has a resistance that, let's say, goes over 90%, the current Prospector will not be able to scratch it. It cannot pump enough power into it in order to break that rock. The idea is to provide a laser that will lower the rock's resistance, and it will be able to then transfer enough power to break that rock. Obviously, it's going to come with some downsides. It's either going to cost more, if it's better, or it's going to cost the same, but then it induces a lot of instability into the rock, so it makes the process harder. You might have another laser that makes instability very low, but then it raises the resistance or raises some other parameters. Then it could make the time it takes for the rock to charge up and actually fracture correctly a lot longer. I think there's a list of 15 parameters we have right now between the rock and the laser that we can play with and combine in different combinations to create something interesting. But this is down the line for us. Also, we're looking into having something a bit more short-term. A laser is long-term: you make an investment, and that is the laser you have for that ship. We'll have something more short-term. Think about how the MedPen is for FPS, where, oh, this happened, so I react to it. I use the MedPen, I get a bit of health back and I'm good now, I can continue. Consider the same with the mining laser. We can have a thing where the rock is about to blow because you messed up. Or let's say you had a lag spike, because it can happen. It's a very common occurrence for the players. You had a lag spike and suddenly now you're in the red. We will have some consumables that you activate on the laser, they get injected into the rock, and it kind of diminishes some of that, or makes it decay a lot faster for, let's say, 30 seconds, or doubles the power of your laser for 20 seconds. So you're able to temporarily boost your mining capabilities using these consumables. The problem is you can only have so many equipped, and you have to choose which ones you equip based on what you expect you're going to find. So if you're going to mine this type of thing and you know it has these problems, bring consumables that are going to help you in that process.

Well, I think what I got from that is that we're not done with mining. We got ship mining, we got FPS mining. We're not just leaving them behind. We're going to continue developing this feature, continue building it out.

One other thing, I forgot to mention this. I would say maybe further down the line, but not by much: we're looking into refining. It's not mining, but it's what you do with the spoils from mining. So you take this raw ore. Right now you get this mixed material that doesn't pay that well because it's mixed with everything. You have impurities in there, inert material. You have diamonds mixed with gold, mixed with Quantanium. And you want to separate them, because if you have each of them clean, 100% purity, then you can sell it for way more. This is where refining comes in. You can go to a refining station and create a refining job that gets processed over time. Some of them might take five minutes. Some of them might take one week. These happen while you're not online. You can log out of the server or go do something else. The station will work for you. Obviously, you'll have to pay the station. And then after a bit of time, you take your product back, and hopefully you make a run to another station where you get to sell it before you get shut down and your cargo gets stolen, which is a different problem. But we're only doing the refining part. Other teams are doing the getting-your-cargo-stolen part.

Yeah, it all bleeds together with missions. So when you can refine, there might be someone who's after a certain refined resource. And then, of course, you've got things like interdiction to interrupt your journeys and steal your cargo. It's world design, isn't it? It all comes together and builds into something beautiful.