Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Don't go stumbling through a metallic ring alone. Even mining in a wing, if you don't have a dedicated asteroid scout ship among you, I still have a much better alternative for mining Palladium:You can mine these again, and again, and again (it takes two hours for an asteroid to replenish after depletion).Now you may quickly understand how that's supposted to work and just get going, if not I'm gonna walk you through how to mine these locations.First of all you will need a ship fit for the job. From the ships and modules available at Jaques I would recommend this Type-6 shielded variant ). Pay attention to the power plants and priorities.If you have a ship of similar or more capacity with, use that instead (store your essential exploration modules,).Next you will need cartographic data of the systems you are going to mine in (see the list). You aren't here to explore those and they are all within 20 ly (you cannot sell them to Jaques and will lose data on ship destruction), so you can simply open the galaxy map while docked and buy the data (set the filter for local cartographic data):Then you can stock up on limpets and jump to one of the listed systems. Note that if you had manually discovery scanned the system yourself, bodies may still be "unknown" to you (as your system scan may be incomplete opposed to the data you could buy all at once). In that case you can get the first cluster of the respective belt from the list targeted via the system map ("A" being at the arrival star/most inner belt, "B" being the second star/further out etc). And beyond that you can filter your navigation panel for asteroid clusters only:You've dropped into one of the listed clusters - note that they will always have the exact same configuration (because they are all B clusters) with the exact same 12 asteroids. Open up the linked B image for reference and find the giant asteroid near the navigation marker that has a tiny asteroid right next to it. Those are number 11 and 12 on the image. Now you can align your view to have 11 in front of 12, with 5 still showing behind them, and rotate to match the rest. Asteroid 2 (which can have 40/54%) will be top left and asteroid 7 (which always has 28%) will be top right. After doing this a few times you will soon recognise them from any drop in angle without lining up your view.If you are having trouble navigating in the cluster, because it is too dark, you can either crank up your gamma in the graphics options or zoom out the scanner to see asteroid locations on it:Now all that's left to do is tagging the asteroid you want to mine with a prospector (to confirm the content and getting more fragments out of it) and depleting it (I like to have collectors and lasers on the same fire button). You will be able to mine the same rock with the same content again after two hours.Plot yourself a nice little round trip (with bookmarks) including the highest Palladium content asteroids that ends with a full hold of Palladium sold to Jaques.update: A few notes on using the recommended Type-6 and emergencies.First of all you will notice that utilities and distributor turn off upon deploying the lasers. So you will have to allocate 4 pips to weapons before deploying them for the fastest mining rate. Put them back into engines for travelling.My second fire button has the prospector and the first one has lasers and collectors. I use dedicated buttons for heat sinks and chaff, but you can create a second fire group for them.The heat sinks are there to prevent you from overheating (which can easily happen if you boost and charge your FSD in a cluster close to a star). Make sure to use them when needed, as heat damage can cause you to lose cargo.Chaff is a precaution should you ever come under attack. It's two modules, because that allows you to keep yourself permanently covered by alternating them.Considering the amount of Palladium you are collecting you can drop a few tons to satisfy a common pirate. Should the pirate belong to the pilots federation (hollow mark), do inform them that dropped Palladium, even if sold to the right market, does not count towards the goal.In case trouble makers turn up that are only out to blow up miners you may want to consider the shielded variant and using reinforced alloy bulkheads. Furthermore a complete trip (100 x Pd = 1,329,800 cr) pays your insurance almost 10 times, so don't worry too much about a lost ship.