I hear a lot of people talking about mining as a means to be able to do missions or support a PvP habit. I’ve always viewed missions that way. It’s a necessary evil for mining. You could concievably mine without ever running a mission [check out the macro mining isk-boys] but as a complete miner, you will conceivably need to refine some ore at some point. Then it’s nice to have a better than 6.7 standing with an NPC corporation. How do you get that if you are a dedicated miner?

To be sure, you can use connections to get a little bit closer, but at some point you’ll need to actually run a mission to even get started. Given that a large portion of mining training has not been in combat related skills, doing missions for standings can be a slow process. I’ve approached this rather in the same way that Dee Carson talks about training your learning skills. I do a mission now and then as time allows or when I’m done for the day with all of my mining trips.

I have skills to mine well in an Osprey, so that allows me to also pilot a Caracal. The tank is shield tank is also something that I’ve trained based on needing to survive in belts. Drones as well. The only thing missing is the weapons skills. I evaluated missiles v. gunnery skills and opted to go with the missles. This was based in part on the desire to possibly use a Drake or even Raven later on down the road as well as the ability to do mission specific damage.

So I mostly run level 1 and 2 missions for standings. Occasionally there is a level 3 agent that offers courier misssions that I can run for a bit more standings. Finally there is one other use for running missions, the LP store. There are some great mining implants that can be had from those stores. Not much else that a miner needs from the LP stores.