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Assigned Mining ships are a little different to assigned Trading Ships in that instead of following their Manager's "Trading operational range", they will harvest what their station needs in the closest possible zones to the station [within the same system]. This may mean travelling into hostile sectors or zones to gather resources for prolonged periods of time.
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- Placing the station such that safer mining locations will be closer than hostile ones (not always possible/desirable).
- Not assigning the related Mine ship to the Manager, leaving supply to NPCs or manual trading and mining.
- Placing the station in a system where required materials are sold in various rare stations (spoiler link).
- An alternative to 1 through the HoL DLC is to place a Warehouse somewhere with assigned minersuseful relative to the desired harvestable ware (s). Then assign miners, serup the Warehouse to need the ware(s), then use your traders to buy from it and sell to the station needing the ware (s).
The rationale behind the "Trading operational range" setting not applying to Mining ships is to ensure that production lines don't stall due to a lack of resources since every system has every harvestable resource in at least one zone (spoiler link).
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