I'm not a terribly professional miner yet (level 10 prospector) but I do use a mining tool that gets fairly deep finds; to be exact an F-102 tier 5, which gets an average depth of around 490m. If I could find one I'd use an F-104. It occurs to me to wonder when it becomes worthwhile to put amps on the finder? :huh: I presume a rank noob would be wasting his time, but am I good enough yet to start using amps? I realise risk (and hopefully reward) will be higher.
IMHO the question is in what situation is it worth using amps? I would answer that with when you get more Markup out of your finds than you use up with the MU on Amp decay. The last time I mined on Arkadia that would have been close to impossible no matter what skill level you have but there has been a change to the ressource distribution in the meantime so dunno what it´s like now. However from what I heard the MUs are still crapy in most areas so you might not want to loose more of it in amp MU for now.
Do you mean amping or using enhancers? The benefit of using an amplifier isn't related to the skills you have. (there are some minimal skill requirements for amplifiers though). An amplifier becomes interesting when the increased revenue from an amplifier (in tt + markup) is higher then the increased cost (in tt + markup) from the amplifier. So it's basically the area that you mine and the resources that you find that make an amplifier worthwile or not.
If your using a 102 teir 5 then you've got a pretty good machine. The bigger finders work ok for deeper stuff but truly 75-80% of all finds are basic materials like lyst or oil, so getting more expensive finders with all kinds of amps on them just raises your losses by adding more decay per drop. I specialize in normal average mining, my 102 has a enhancer on it and is tier 1, so I'm not wasting anything. Mining what I do, and where I do, my ROI (return on investment) per trip is around 50-60%. that's not bad it minimizes loss and gives you a shot for a good profit if even one trip a day has a decent hit. You'd be surprised, not that many things are really deep, only some rare finds and they don't drop any more big hits than any others, so decay and loss get pretty expensive using the big machines, but of course, many people use them either because they don't know any better or they are purposely looking for rare stuff, either way it's up to them.
Amp'ing your finder will increase your claim sizes fractionally up unto the maximum multiplier possible on the biggest amp. Trying to match the increased cost of decay to the markup of the resources you are mining has always seemed silly to me, since any miner no matter the finder he uses will always find a range of resources with varied market values anyway. Simple use the biggest amp you can afford to. Understand the increased decay cost and cross your fingers. No matter the market value of the materials you are finding, the multiplied difference between a size XIV claim and a size XIX claim is considerable enough to justify the cost of decay. Though that senario in extremely rare and requires a great deal of luck. Which claim would you rather mine? Even if it was TT food. Both of my small towers were found with low level amps.
There is a good point somewhere in here. A fairly large proportion, in value, of my finds have been yulerium - which (presumably because there is no BP using it yet) has next to no MU. So it's either TT it or keep it until its value goes up...
Amps are worth using if you find a good high markup area. The high markup ores allows you to afford higher markup amps that are usually better models. For e.g, if area has 150% average markup you can easily afford to pay say 130% for amps. If area has average markup of 110% paying 130 % for amps is not a good idea.
