@ Arga
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand what you're saying. Yes, I view Beta-access as granted because my corp has been fighting & holding land on Beta since we came in-game and joined Vindictive alliance.
But you need to on the other hand, understand the point where I'm coming from; CIR has spent the better part of the last 6 months tweaking and fine-tuning every point of our internal corp industry in order to match up to M2S. Now, we know what happened with that so no need to go there; but what I'm saying is that because of this, our industrial production quite easily outputs in 48 hours what most other corps output in 2-3 weeks.
I've tried it all, believe me. I've personally gone to every Alpha-corp I could get my hands on, offered them a carte-blanche guarantee that we'd buy everything they could mine up. We did, and all of those Alpha corps couldn't mine up enough to cover a quarter of our production at the time.
Therefore, it is infinitely easier for us to mine it up ourselves with 5-10 guys doing it in shifts with 20-30 accounts mining, have the simpler commodities refined on Alpha & hauled into production and/or moved into local production of non-essentials. The market, and all Alpha corps, quite simply do not possess the mining capacity to supply our production with Alpha-ores.
For example, after the assault-patch we separated an inactive factory account that is maxxed out, mined up the resources and set 30 lines burning. Today we have DEVs posting how assaults will be made less uber - that still means we're going to end up having to rip out the CT's or burn them out. 300 assaults from 30 lines, in a few days. Where are the Alpha corps that can supply me with the resources for that, nevermind the materials to produce fittings for those bots?
It probably is a waste of time to mine on Alpha, but again you need to understand - we have been sitting every day, 8-12 hours, on Novastrov mining with anywhere between 15-30 rivelers in full T4 fits & T4 Nexus support for a long time. There just AREN'T that many ore fields left that are rich enough to warrant exploiting them on an industrial level. Nobody is roaming us since M2S got wiped, and nobody roamed us except M2S before they got wiped.
@ Mongolia Jones
I'd actually pay more attention to what you posted if you "elite PVPers" didn't completely stop roaming of any kind since the "incident". It's refreshing to see what a little bit of honest mining will do to develop respect for the T4 you scoffed at and threw away like candy before.
@ Mara Kaid
Since ECORP died, you've been living in some parallel universe that only exists on the forums and in general chat. You - and everybody else in your corp, regardless of what you spout on the forums - know full well that for the ~10 hours we're online, you're not even attempting to roam our island. You roamed us on Domhalarn for a full 10 days, which was so "successful" that your EU pilots quit the game/swapped to playing at 5-6 AM.
What is even harder to believe, is that after being forced to kowtow to FOOM and AET and pretending youre going to "help them get established" when they brought those 30-40 to fight your laughable 8 elite pirates for Laosura; youre still persisting in keeping up this charade where you are some sort of uber-ninja pirate who kills so many people nobody can dare to move 500m from the outpost on Beta.
Its past time you woke up and faced reality.
@ On Topic
I still dont see a reason to use Beta for mining non-Epriton materials, the risk vs reward - theorycrafting-wise - is so off-balanced that its more sensible to mine them on Alpha.