In terms of ore and piracy I've worked it from a number of angles.
In the omega days of this release of the mining mod I participated in, to my amazement, the most profoundly successful experiment ever in the form of pirating miners who still treating the process like solo traders. I have no idea how much money we made in two week. Some couple billion I bet. Funny thing was that if any of those miners had a single bomber we ran away. Was funny.
Also had a Corsair I built from scratch. Again, miners didn't have any escorts. Ever. They were usually pretty juicy targets. Of course this was before the recent trend of firing up cruise the second you see anything (the natural adaptation to the solo mindset I suppose?) which wont be nearly as effective in the future.
So I decided to check it out from the other side. By starting a mining group in the most pirated infested sectors of space. Omega 11 with the D: group. Myself and a few others started in CSVs and worked our way up. When we mined we mined with a transport standing by and several escort ships. We kept an eye on system populations and whatever popped up on scanner.
We had our avenues of escape planned. If something nasty showed up the transport bugged out while the escorts intercepted.
But we were all smart and experienced pilots. So I imagine that helped.
But it convinved me that escorts within the context of mining do work. We scored plenty of kills, got a lot of fun combat out of it and shed tons of absolutely epic close calls. One of the richer experiences I've had in disco. Hessians, Corsairs, LOLIMG, Junkers, etc etc. Was tons of fun. We never lost a single transport despite killer odds.
Mining by yourself doesn't work. It was never supposed to. It doesn't make much money, you're a fat target. If you get ganked by a pirate transport in a mining ship I really have no sympathy for you. Get some buddies in mining ships to keep an eye out. Put out silly bounties on pirates. Telling me that escorts don't work tells me that you're either doing it wrong or, more likely, simply don't have any and are telling me based on assumption that they don't work.
I do think people want it easy. But I don't blame the "lazy no RP pirate", I don't blame anyone. It's just a system of a weak, undefended target and someone who can take advantage of him.
Also the only reason I point out Omega 7 is because the bases are closer to the mining fields than my guidelines dictated.
