Miner

The Miner is a fighter ship that collects metal from asteroids.

Note: Heatsink and Primer Tech do not apply for mining ships.

Mining
The Miner will always target the closest asteroid and attack it. Note that although the two mining beams actually do 0.5 damage each, they mine 1 metal each per hit, and do 2.5 damage each vs. fighters. It will target asteroids for the first 16 seconds after being created, afterwards it changes its target to the closes enemy. It can "collect" metal by attacking enemy ships. Freeze tech might help in this case.

Optimal resource gathering upgrades:
Related: Random_Statistics!, Mining Data

Attack-speed: regarded as one of the best upgrades.

Range: Try to get one if you do not have rof rof mods, this allows miner to shoot twice per pass over a single asteroid. May be bad on front asteroids map on multiplayer.

Cloak: very useful in Flank and Skirmish missions to avoid agro. Also great on pve where you might lack of asteroids and on pvp for long-time runs when there are no ateroids. This will allow miner to at least mine from enemies once. Slow but Sure. Also on pvp cloaked miners may mesh targeting of projective-based ships.

Self-Destruct: combined with the plasma-mastery makes their mindless deaths more useful. NOTE : if the miner dies when mining and if the owner has plasma tech, the plasma will HOME to the asteroid, damaging it by 40. Be sure to not let them die during mining.

Engine upgrades decrease the mining output by up to 50%. Do not focus on this upgrade. Except maybe if the asteroids are very far away from the fighter bay. 20% range upgrade can alleviate this decrease by some extent.

A practical test had shown a small bit of mining advantage of a blue 40% rof Miner over the red 40% range 20% rof one. This means a double-attack-speed mod Miner will outclass the "mining pack standard" 20rof 20 range one.

Fighter Bay placement matters
Because every ship spawns facing north and the fact that the game uses a square grid(1) the placement of the fighter bay matters.

Therefore, based on my own research, the bare placement of the Fighter Bay can increase or decrease the metal outcome by over 10%.

The best place is on the bottom left corner of an asteroid.

The worst place is directly beneath or above an asteroid. The constellation of asteroids can dramatically increase or decrease the metal outcome. The research was conducted on the most common case of a single asteroid.

Best case: If you manage to make the miner circle a single asteroid, and thus using his maximum attack potential. This can be achieved if two or more asteroids are not lined up but kind of, making the miner change its path... a picture is needed to explain this.

A possible fix for this problem would be to face spawning ships towards their target.

Metal output for miner with 2x Rate of Fire and 1x Range, ordered clockwise starting with square over the asteroid, order are 26, 26, 26, 24, 24, 24, 24, 24.