*********************************MINOR SPOILERS IN EVERY CHAPTER*********************************

Now, at this moment 'Ten-Toes' Tony over at the dealership has FIVE classes of dedicated mining ships, from your basic c*ntrels all the way to the Model E, aka "My daddy told me to get a real job".

So why would anyone willingly choose to fly around in decommissioned construction equipment? Cause there's a lot more to damn this job than cramming rocks in excavators!

• Want to shred some pirates - four hard-points is enough to mount a dedicated weapon.
  
• Earn some bounties - your hold can easily fit a lifepod, with or without a manipulator arm.
  
• Pull salvage back to Enchilada - side mounted manipulator will keep your ship way out of thruster range.
  
• Good ol' fashioned mining - you have 50 tons of modular storage and a cargo hold big enough to swallow entire asteroids.

Ol' Oscar (OCP-209) can do it all and do it well, if you know how to fly it. That said, there are some things it flat out cannot do:

• Neither high nor low stress hardpoints can be used to mount a claim beacon. This is not on the list of mandatory equipment and if you find a really good spot, oftentimes you can re-visit it with another ship and set the beacon.
  
• Same goes for cargo containers of both sizes, so you are limited to the 50k processed mineral storage and your cargo hold. That said, there is enough space to earn at least 700-800k per dive, depending on how rich the rocks are in your area.
  
• While fairly spry for its weight class, its still a hefty ship, so think twice before trying to race with it.

Good news first - you got 50k tons of variable storage, which is less than the total fixed storage of other ships, but be honest - when was the last time you actually brought back 10 tons of Iron? No wasted storage on the Oscar.

Then, you got the largest cargo hold of any ship in the rings - 795 m2, which is almost double what a Cothon has. In a rich beryllium/wolfram area, you can make up to a million creds on mining alone.

Now, the excavator is a mixed blessing. Having your entire cargo hold split open makes it easier to cram smaller salvage objects into it, such as mining drones, lifepods and cargo containers. But one wrong move, and all your cargo goes spilling back out into the void. Also, the fact that it opens on the starboard side frustrates a lot of greenbeard captains.

To their credit, autopilot manufactures tried to remedy this with a 'quality of life' feature of sorts - the 'autopilot assist for ships with variable geometry'. This is nerdspeak for rotating your entire ship 90 degrees counter clockwise, each time you open up the cargo hold. It does allow you to align the cargo opening with the 'forward' direction on your autopilot, but it will also make it far easier to fling ore into space, so I wouldn't recommend using it.

The trick to mining with Oscar is to fly sideways. The moment you spot an asteroid you want to cook, position your mouse cursor in front of the ship and hold down the left mouse button. Then, using the mouse, rotate your ship until the asteroid is on the port side. Finally, press 'D' on your keyboard. This moves your ship towards the asteroid and captured ore chunks to the back of the cargo hold.

At this point, there are two things you can do. The first is to channel your inner space hippo and swallow the asteroid whole, into your cargo hold. Your excavator doors are really tough, allowing you to even 'bite off' a chunk of the bigger rocks. Then, as you fly around, the asteroid will break down into smaller ore pieces within the cargo bay.

This essentially allows you to mine without droids or weapons, but it also 'clogs' up your MPU with rubbish ore chunks. See, each MPU has a certain processing capacity. For instance, the Magic Schoolbus (Mitsudaya-Strabus MSU) handles 100 kg of ore per second. This means that a 5 ton ore chunk will always take 50 seconds to digest. Depending on the mineral/water composition of the ore chunk, you can get either get 4.5 tons of Vanadium or 50 kgs of iron. Do the math. Furthermore, once the processed cargo storage is full, you will have to rely on storing ore chunks in your cargo hold, so you might as well fill it with the more valuable ones.

A far better way in my opinion is to break down the asteroids into ore chunks and pull the valuable ones in with drones and Mr. Grabby (AR-1500 Manipulator). To do this, I strongly recommend to mount your mining weapon on the starboard side. You can aim it the same way you rotate the ship, by holding down the left mouse button in front of the ship. This way, the asteroids will break up infront of your cargo bay opening, making it easier for the Haul Drone AI to push them in. Also, it helps to set up you computer to ignore low value ores and all iron chunks, as they takes the longest to be processed by the MPU.

As a general rule, avoid rotating your ship to quickly - use your mouse to do it rather than the keyboard. Always keep an eye on your cargo, before you open the excavator. What you want to do is give a brief pulse to your port thruster (press D) just before you open the bay doors, cause this will help push the ore deeper into the cargo hold.

Lastly, sometimes you will still screw up and end up spilling cargo. Just remember: ♥♥♥♥ Happens, Don't Panic. Rotate your ship till the cargo is on your starboard side, open up the cargo hold and let Drones+Mr.Grabby do their job.

Imma let you on a well kept Enchilada station secret - couple blocs rimwards from the Vilcy headquaters, just beside "Rashid's Reconstituted Rations", there is a little pub called the "Platonic Porpoise", ran by a former Oscar pilot. This bar has two long running traditions: saying "Microwaves ain't ♥♥♥♥' at the bar gets you a free shot of gin; saying "MPU" gets you a bar stool to the face. Because nothing turns a cultured group of ringas into an eye gouging, ♥♥♥♥ flinging, dong-stabbing monkey mob, as quickly as mentioning MPU's and OCP-209 in the same sentence.

Oscar has a circular cargo hold, which means that most conventional MPUs are installed at the 'bottom', with their opening facing port. This is a necessary compromise, since the entire starboard half of the cargo hold rotates around the port side.

This setup makes it more challenging to get a ore chunk into the MPU, compared to the bottle shaped holds of other mining ships. For this reason, many captains advocate installing the Rasputin ( Rusatom-Antonoff MPU), which heats the entire cargo hold at once. Unfortunately, this 'convenience' comes at a steep cost - its incredibly slow, only processing 20kg/s, and wastes 60% of the mineral mass. This means you will need a whopping 125k tons of mineral to fill up Oscars 50k ton processed cargo hold. Gathering more minerals also means wasting more fuel.

So instead, let me teach you how to get ore into the opening of other MPUs. And the absolute best thing you can do to accomplish that is... NOTHING. Seriously, just keep flinging ore into your cargo hold and some of it will end up in the MPU as you fly around. The fuller the cargo hold, the more often this will happen. Give it a try.

If you really can't wait to get your nuggets cooked, don't spin the ship around. Instead, move in a roughly square pattern. First, press "S" to move back, which will push all the ore to the top of your cargo hold. Then press "W+D", which will push ore to the port side and park it just outside the MPU enclosure. Finally, press "W" or "W+A" to push the ore into MPU enclosure. Rinse and repeat. The key is smooth gentle movements and practice makes perfect. That being said, I prefer to just let the ore fall in on its own, without any effort on my part.

If I managed to sway you, please consider installing the Magic Schoolbus (Mitsudaya-Starbus MSU). It has the fastest processing speed by far (100kg/s) and a 90% efficiency for minerals. It shortens the overall time you need to fill up your storage, saving more fuel in the long run than you would recover with other MPU models.

This one's going to be brief:
- If you are building a racing craft, you want the USV-R for greater sight range.
- If you plan to mine and have newbie crew, choose USV-D, as it will greatly help your geologists id the ore chunks.
- If you plan to mine and have at least 2 trained geologists, go for the GOAT (USV-GOT), cause each time you loose a beryllium chunk, it hurts like the first time...

Bounty hunting is the most exciting way to stack cash out in the rings - there ain't nothing like the feeling of pressing a button and watching the sunlight shine through the holes in someone-else's hull!

But believe it or not, the hardest part in privateering isn't blowing stuff up - its bringing it back. The moment a pirate captain is outgunned, they turn around and haul ass! And if your ship can't catch up to them, then all you did is waste the ammo.

This means that you need a ship with descent acceleration and handling, to quickly match the velocity of the would be derelict and not head-butt an asteroid on your way there. And as much as I love Oscar, it isn't built for any of this stuff. Its heavy and only has 1 main thruster. Still, there's a lot you can do to remedy the issue.

The first thing you want is to keep your final weight as low as possible, to take the load of the thrusters. Easiest way to do this is through consumables. For instance, I almost never use more than 7000 tons of drones per dive. So that's 3 tons less than you can cram in a military storage. Also, most captains bring waaaaay too much kinetic ammo. A single mag lets you fire a railgun non-stop for a whole minute, so you shouldn't need more than a dual mag. Lastly, fuel is incredibly heavy, so don't fill up all the way, just cause you can.

Then, there is a couple more tricks:

• Ultracapacitors and military turbines are heavy AF. Instead, see if you can get by with a twin turbine, sinle ultracapacitor and an MBOP (NDAPS)
  
• The moment you can afford it, switch to a Nakamura reactor. They have a much better weight/heat ratio.

So now that your ship has shed a couple of pounds, lets talk about speed, because in space speed doesn't matter. You heard me - top top of the line racing craft can get to 100 m/s just as well as Fat Carl with a crate of bean burritos. Acceleration is the name of the game - how fast can you slow down/speed up and change you direction.

Since Oscar only got the one main torch, its tempting to go for something with a lot of thrust, such as the Ernest (ERS-DFMHD-2205). And while it will certainly has the 'zoom', it also eats fuel like Fat Carl eats burritos! Which means you will need a lot of fuel, if you want to mine, chase salvage and visit a few locations in the same run. But the more fuel you bring, the heavier your ship, the slower it accelerates.

The sweetspot combo I settled on is using the Elon's Sparky torch(Z-Axial Pinch fusion torch) with the Rakshasa (RA-K69V) racing thrusters. Now, Sparky gets a bad rap for only having 30 minutes of burn time, but if you think about it, that's waaaay more than you need in a single dive. Also, its gimballed, which helps rotate Oscars fat ass. But most importantly, its fuel consumption is tiny, which leads to a tiny fuel reserve for your return trip. You essentially get to use up your entire fuel tank during the dive.

The downside of sparky is the relatively low thrust, which is where Rashasa's come in. As far as thrusters go, they are fuel hungry, but boy do they burn! They will rotate your ship fast and significantly boost your forward acceleration. Just remember to rotate 180 degrees, each time you want to slow down.

Lastly, there's one more thing that affects your total thrust - your autopilot! Most people assume that a racing autopilot such as Ernie (ER-42) is the way to go, but that isn't technically true. You see, Ernie cancels out opposing thrusters to conserve fuel. What this means for Oscar is that the autopilot will rotate it faster, but will also fire less thrusters when you want to speed up and slow down! This is why I would recommend you stick to Nancy(NDCI), which lacks this feature and is a more practical overall, since it shows firing solutions for you guns too.

If you want to offset Nancy's slower rotation speed in an emergency, do it manually! Start the rotation with an 'A' or 'D' key and click your left mouse key in front of the ship, when you want it to stop rotating. This takes a bit of practice, but is noticeably faster.

With this setup, I find that 120-140k tons of fuel is enough for most dives and let me achieve almost 9 m/s acceleration with an empty cargo hold. Your ship will get slower as you fill it up with ore, but your fuel and nanobots will drain, which helps offset it somewhat.

Alright, alright - so you turned your diabetic whale of ship into something halfway agile, now what? Lets talk about some common salvage scenarios and how to handle them.

If you have something small floating through space, like a broken mining companion, then you gather it the same way you would an ore chunk - fly close to the object, rotate your ship until the object is on your starboard side and pick it up with Mr. Grabby (AR-1500 Manipulator). Oscar's cargo bay opening can fit anything smaller than a ship, so just let the Grabby toss it in and your done!

Now, suppose you found a derelict ship, which clearly won't fit into your cargo hold. Your only option is to tug it along with Grabby and the hardest thing here is keeping it away from your thrusters, cause they can and will cause the derelict's reactor to melt down. Watching nukes blow up in space is fun, till you realize your literally burning money and your retinas!

Luckily, Oscar has your back here. You see, this ship is longer than it is wider, with both hardpoints on its starboard side. So if you mount Grabby in slot 3, the derelict will end up in between your port side thrusters and out of the way of your main torch.

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to fly around while tugging salvage, you just got to do it gently. Make sure your rotate slow and smooth, so that the derelict doesn't drift into the path of your starboard thrusters. Same goes for speeding up and slowing down.

The hardest thing to do while hauling salvage is astrogating. Make sure you follow these exact steps:

• Open up the astrogation tab and select your destination.
  
• Note down the destinations BEARING.
  
• Close the astrogation tab and gently rotate the ship, until your ORIENTATION matches the BEARING from step 2.
  
• Open the astrogation tab, select your destination again, lower the autopilot to 10 m/s and click on plot a course.
  
• Slowly accelerate, until you match the astrogation velocity. If there are asteroids in the way, destroy them with a front mounted weapon.

Now, I got one more tip for ya, which they won't tell you about in flight school. Sometimes, you will want something that is running away from you. If its a large object, like a ship, your best bet is to punch some holes in it, wait for the fuel to run out, then let it crash into an asteroid.

But if its something small, like a cargo container, give it a shot from a kinetic weapon first. If you aim well, it will send the object into a spin, making unable to use its thrusters effectively. Is this legal? Hell no! But the rings are wide and money has no smell...

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to defeat a ship in combat - you either puncture its fuel tank and wait for the fuel to leak out, or your overheat its reactor and watch the fireworks. Since only the first method leaves you with a ship to salvage, that's the one we will focus on.

To puncture hull, you need a weapon that deals kinetic damage, which is what mass drivers are for. And among then, the railgun is a clear winner for combat, due to its high DPS and a higher value of armor penetration. A single burst will cause a nice big fuel leak on just about any ship. After this, most of your enemies will turn around and try to flee. Once they do, fire a second burst to disable their main torch and rear thrusters, making it harder for them to flee!

Lastly, Oscar has a hidden ace up its sleeve - an analog, independently powered HUD (OCP-209). Some may find it clunky and it is missing certain common features (most notably, it does not display the bearing and orientation of the ship). However, it is absolutely immune to microwave damage. A microwave burst will still damage your ship, but it won't shutdown you onboard computer, which is a huge boon in the middle of a fight!

If you insist on using a digital HUD, my advice is to find a quiet spot in the rings, switch off your computer in the engineering tab and practice flying and shooting without it.

The unique feature of Oscar is its dual high-stress hardpoints, but there is only three pieces of hardware that require them at present:
- Mr. Grabby (AR-1500 Manipulator)
- Die flammenwerfer (EINAT Kzinti Lesson MkII)
- Imma firing my AAAARRGH (NANI)

The last two are fun, but seriously overkill for just about any reason, so lets focus on Mr. Grabby here. It is the only thing capable of towing ships, capturing valuable bits of space junk (such as haywire mining bots) and for yeeting ore chunks into your cargo hold. In short, don't leave home without it. From a salvage point of view, it should be placed in hardpoint 3, since smaller ships will end up in-between your two starboard exhausts/

Now, the bread n lacto-paste of any ring dive is mining and where a smaller, nimble ship can capture ore chunks with its excavator, a hefty sumbich like this one needs drones. Here, Oscar has a big advantage over other ships, due to its huge cargo bay entrance, which makes it much easier for haul drones to toss the ore in. A drone system can go in any slot.

Right, we can finally talk about the boom-sticks! And no matter how hard you try, yer gun will be good for mining or fighting, not both. So thats why were gonna have two of them!

As discussed in the previous section, there is noting better for turning a reactor into a colander, than the railgun (MPI Railgun MkI). Like all mass drivers, it deals high kinetic damage and works well at long range. Unlike the rest of them, it has higher level of armor piercing and a much higher DPS (Gotta luv the dakka). As a bonus, it is very good at breaking up large asteroids in your path, when traveling at high speed, since Oscar ain't particularly dodgy. For this reason you want it in slot 1 or 2, at the front of your ship.

Lastly, we need something to cook the asteroids down to tasty ore chunks. A lot of new captains find it hard to mine with Oscar, due to its starboard side cargo hold entrance. For them, I highly recommend installing the MSG emitter (MWG microwave emitter) in slot 4. This way, you can position your ship with the asteroid on your starboard side, turn on the emitter which will proceed auto target all the asteroid bits in range, then let drones and Mr. Grabby pull the ore into your hold.

While novice friendly, the MSG has two disadvantages. Firstly, it has a minimum and a maximum activation range, refusing to cook rocks which are too near or too far from it. Secondly, it needs to be tuned to high power in order to break down asteroids at a decent space and some of that energy gets transferred to the ore bits, which makes them harder for drones to handle.

Hence, for senior captains, I would recommend replacing it with a mining laser, tuned to lower power/high frequency. Here, your two options are the wobbly boy (CL-200AP pulse mining laser) and the stiff (CL-600P pulse mining laser). They both break down rocks faster, with less kinetic energy imparted to the ore, but required greater piloting skills to operate. Personally, I like to use the wobbly boy tuned for high frequency and medium power.

Having a mining tool in slot 4 and Mr Grabby in slot 3 makes Oscar somewhat unbalanced on its starboard side, so to offset that a bit, I like to mount the heavier drones on slot 1 and the lighter railgun on slot 2.

Oscar lets you cram a whopping 8 crew members into the Hab! Now, some of the patchwork ringas will argue that any more than four is redundant, since only the most educated/experienced crew members skills are applied, which is true. UPDATE: They all benefit you since the latest update, so the more the merrier!

More crew means more event variety during dives, which is currently the main reason to keep playing, once you done pimping out your rust bucket. Also, you may end up loosing crew members in some events and having a trained replacement will come in handy. Finally, a more educated crew member will help train the less educated ones, which brings me to the next point.

Having a double crew doesn't have to break the bank. What you need to do is exclusively hire crayon munching noobs! There are 4 levels for education and experience in ΔV:

Self-taught > Basic > High > Master
No-experience > Beginner > Journeyman > Expert

Selft-taugh/No-experience is what you want. If you are starting out, just hire one of each and let them learn on the job. If you already have an experienced crew, they will help train the 'second shift'.

Your crew work a lot better and rarely ask for a raise if they are happy, so make sure to set them up in good hotels during downtime between dives. Oscar here can help a fair bit, since its rotating crew Hab has some semblance of gravity. Not having to pee into a vacuum tube does wonder for staff morale!

If you are with me thus far, then you know the importance of keeping your ships as light as possible, while maintaining functionality.

• Left HS Hardpoint - AR-1500 Manipulator
  
• Left HS Hardpoint - CL200-AP Pulse Mining Laser tuned to medium power, max frequency
  
• Front Left LS Hardpoint - Haul Drones
  
• Front Right LS Hardpoint - MPI Mk1 Railgun, tuned to max power
  
• Kinetic Ammunition - Single magazine. This allows for a full minute of continuous railgun fire, which is a lot, so long as you don't go spraying it round.
  
• Nanodrone storage - military. I find that around 7000 drones is enough to fill my processed storage and cargo hold, so just don't fill it up all the way before a dive.
  
• Propellan Tanks - Interplanetary, filled up to 120-140k tons of fuel.
  
• Reaction Control System - RA-K69V, tuned to max thrust.
  
• Main Propulsion - Z-axial Pinch fusion torch, tuned to max thrust.
  
• Reactor Core - Nakamura Dynamics Yama-SSR12.
  
• Ultracapacitor Array - Ultracapacitor (Single)
  
• Powerplant - Twin turbine.
  
• Auxiliary power system - NDAPS.
  
• Cargo Bay - Mitsudaya-Starbus MSU
  
• Autopilot - NDCI
  
• Heads-Up Display - OCP-209
  
• Reconnaissance Craft - Obonto USV-GOT