To expand, you may have to do the missions as a squad depending on the level your attempting; that is if your faction isn't high enough to see level 2 assignments, you can't initiate the assignment, but anyone that can see it, can accept for the whole squad.

The 3 main Alpha outposts are close with the highway system, so none of them has really gained any dominance.

Yes, the economy is 95% player based. Syndicate offers some ammo and modules from the market and you can repair items that drop off NPC's.

Some corps are almost fully self-suffcient, while others supply the market with raw materials, which still other corps buy and put back as modules. These are mostly independant producers, but large corps will occasionally buy and sell to fill gaps in production.

No, there are'nt custom rigs like eve... yet. The slots you see are the slots you get.

Each tile has from 1 to 255 'cycles' of resources in it. Each cycle has a base yeild. You can increase the yeild per cycle as well as decrease the time it takes for each cycle. Better yeild gives more material per tile, while faster cycles empties the tiles quicker. Faster cycles however also require more skill in accumulator, so your almost always better off increasing yield - this is also true on alpha because the number of cycles and the sizes of the fields are smaller, which means you have to move more often with faster cycles.

The mining game is played in the hanger with module and extension choices, and by keeping your miner safe from roaming NPC's.

There are different types of ammo, most just do different damages, but some will increase your optimal range. There is also small and Medium ammo, for the appropriate sized weapons.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 can drop off of higher level NPC's and of course of PVP killed players if they are equipt. Mostly, they are produced for intra corp use, but you can find them for purchase on the market. While it's possible to reverse engineer T1 items, you can't do so with T2-4, they must be prototyped. I've never seen a T4 item drop from an NPC, but I guess it's possible from a superior observer.

Yes, they are level 4 and 5.

The sequar has an 80U capacity and the Lithus has a 240U capacity. Packaged bots require up to 15U depending on class. Typically the next size bot will accept the prvious size in the cargo. So an assault can carry a packaged light bot.

Beta outposts I'll leave to the beta corps to describe.

Titan for example, has a base value of 750 units of ore per cycle. Each mining charge activates a cycle, and the base yeild * your bonus is added to your cargo at the start of the cycle. You can right click on the mining module and select information and it will tell you your cycle time and your % Yeild bonus. So a 50% bonus would be 750 + 375 = 1025 units of titan per cycle.

When you do a tile-based scan, the color and size of the square give you a rough estimate of the number of cycles available in that tile. How accurate it is depends on your geo extension level, but generally its Green, Yellow, Orange, Red. Sort of backwards, Red has the highest cycles and green is the lowest, from 255-1. Yellow will be the most common on alpha1, but again depending on your accuracy, it could be solid Red, but only have 200 cycles in stead of 255.

So the way to look at it is if a tile has 100 cycles of titan and you have no bonus, you'll only get 75,000 ore from it, but the faster your cycle time, the sooner you'll extract it.

Because of resources being mined faster then they can regenerate, the focus of mining should be more on yeild than cycles; but you'll want to increase cycle times some too.

Each cycle of the mining laser uses accumulator on the bot. This isn't an issue until you get to the Termis and Med Mining lasers, there are some excellent guides in the forums on how to get your bot Cap stable. On paper, increasing cycle time is always going to give you a better ore/hour, but if you have to keep shutting off lasers and moving, your true ore/hour benefits from better yeild.

This also ties into the semi-afk mining. Greater yeilds means your cargo fills faster, but faster cycle times means you have to relock sooner. So either way your going to need to keep an eye on the process.

Each Island has roaming NPC's, both on alpha's and beta's, but some spots get 0 traffic while others are well travelled. Typically alpha-1 Island's NPC's are less dangerous then Alpha-2, same with beta-1,2 but your as likely to get rolled by NPC's within sight of the outpost as you are 4000m away.

Tutorial mining area's will have very little ore in them, because they get mined so often, but they are a good way to get started.

There is also a very good getting started mining guide in the guides section.

Cheers

Early you had a chance to get T4 stuff from any 5 star mobs. Don't know if it's still possible.

Each mob has a chance to drop tiered stuff, it's kinda based on mob's level. F.e. 1 star mobs drop T1 only. 2 star - T1 and very rarely T2. T3 - T1 mostly, T2 from time to time, T3 very rarely, etc. Observers always drop T3-T4 stuff (depends if its alpha or beta observer).

Better so:

T1 and T2 Mobs only drop T1 Items
T3 drop T1 to T2 Items (not often)
T4 drop T1 to T3 Items (not often)
T5 drops T1 to T4 Items (not often)

Also once i've got T2 thingie from T2 mob so its very-very-very rare but possible