Is there a walk through for the process of asteroid mining?
Do drones need constant babysitting?
Or do drones mine on their own? (automated).
How many drones can one person control during a duty shift?
When using the laser drill, how do you get the ore into the ship?
Do asteroid miners sell ore or do they the refined product?
If they sell the refined product, how do they refine it?
Can you mine a small planetoid, then sell the thing as a planetoid hull?
I haven't read any of the references, so I'm making stuff up. But this is my take.
Asteroid mining is not some guy in a vacc suit anchored to an asteroid with a laser, cart, and a shovel.
Rather, it's someone managing machines (drones?) that do the mining.
There's clearly a limit as to how many machines a single person can manage, but the trope of a "lone miner" should be viable.
This can manifest by the machines breaking down, so while you could have a 100 drones out their mining for you, their natural failure rate (for assorted reasons such as asteroid mining flat out being dangerous which is why we have drones do the work in the first place), you would likely have more drones out of service than not. The trick is reaching a point of equilibrium where you don't have a bunch of down drones stacked up waiting for maintenance and not producing, as this is what the miner spends most of their time doing -- managing and maintaining drones.
Managing also consists of monitoring and assaying ore to make sure you're still getting actual rich ore instead of gravel, the drones don't know the difference. You tell them to dig, and they go "yipyipyip" and off their merry way. They'd mine sand if you told them to.
So, in the end, there's simply jsut so many drones a miner can manage and maintain. As TL rises, this count can rise (as the the drones get more reliable, the drones require less management, etc.)
The miners produce raw ore. Those with a large ship can perform rough refinement, but the ore should go to a much larger processing center. The miner isn't going to have a large smelter on board (it's just one or two guys). At best, the miner might have some sort of high tech stamp mill to break larger rock up in to smaller ones.
Miners are also limited by cargo space. When the hold is full, they pretty much have to shut down the entire operation, recall the drones, load everything up, and head back to unload. This tanks time and energy to do, but the miner isn't going to leave the equipment out there. He could just leave it shut down on site, but there's the chance someone may come and steal the drones. You can't let them run unattended.
Some miners in more dense belt areas might subscribe to a service that comes out to them to transfer the ore, like those deep ocean fishing factory ships used to service commercial fisherman. But in this case, these ships are mere transports, vs monster factory ships that carry the processing with them. In a dense area, the refinement centers can be quite large receiving vast amounts of ore from the local miners and processing it on site.
Miners would not carve out a planetoid hull. A planetoid hull is carved for a purpose that does not necessarily follow ore lines, and a miner would not want to spend time digging dead rock that's not returning ore. Finally, a planetoid hull is likely just plain too big of a project for a single miner to take on.
Obviously, there can be mining partnerships, larger scale operations with a few more crew, more drones, partnership owned ships to move the ore while the operations crew stays on sight. All sorts of ways it can be scaled.
But I think the goal is to provide the lone miner, or two person team, with a viable career path.
Another route also is rather than a miner, it's a prospector. Shuttling from rock to rock, digging samples, quantifying quality, getting mining claims and then selling the entire claim rather than do the work themselves. These are essentially very small mining operations, a few drones to grab samples, get some ore back to the on board assaying station for evaluation, leave some "I got here first" beacons to document pending claims, and then head back and cash in.
The real trick I think is how to manage the abundance. I'm guessing there's a LOT of "precious metals" out there to the point they're "less precious". But who knows.
