What if I show up and want to mine something and somebody else is already there? Does the law protect them if they're there first? Can I get rid of them and move in?

Well, yeah. I mean, this goes back to some of the stuff that we talked about regarding land claims and all of that. At least in the short term, no. It won't matter. But in the future, if somebody actually owns that property, then yeah, it would matter.

So initially, that will not be the case. As for now, we'll be finding various mineable rocks on the surface of planets. And it'll be not necessarily first come, first served, but whoever comes there can extract at the same time. It's going to be interesting with multiple players trying to pump a lot of power into the same rock and making sure they don't go overboard. So that automatically creates interesting gameplay, where you might have certain deposits that require more people to pump power into them in order to extract anything, because one ship might not reach the required power level. And then you need multiple people. But it might be that two people come along, they don't know each other, and they found the same rock. And they might just peacefully each extract their share out of it and then go on their way.