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I might be misunderstanding, I'm tired today, but anyway. Maybe it's profitable later on for an established miner but from what I witness, newbs can't get started without either external assistance or doing a significant amount of bashing first to be able to afford scoops, tethers and refinery fees. And you think this is not only (at least) not an issue but similar to other aspects of the game? Because that second part is demonstrably wrong. A new character can easily learn their skills and go hunting - yes, their marks generation will be low at first, but there's no entry cost. I suppose older players could buy them better gear but there's not much point. And, as far as hacking goes, we literally cannot assist them outside of buying them hacking specific artifacts. The issue isn't instant gratification, it's about the fact that requiring asking for assistance or bashing as a barrier to ship stuff, which ship stuff is a significant draw for new players, isn't a good setup.

Ok. Maybe I was a bit salty when I made the original post. I mean, it's a free to play game. You don't NEED artifacts or a better ship than the interceptor. Until you meet a cosmpiercer or hard incursion by accident.  Or spend 4 hours scouring the sector for Helium11.  But you are sure going to want them once you do.  And while I agree the new one is unimpressive for what it costs, I'd still buy the entry-level one if I had the credits. Just because I'm frustrated.  There's no similar need or want for the other two specs.  You can basically do nothing once you've bought them. You may or may not make any money. But you aren't spending time. And you aren't constantly spending marks.  Sure to make money as a factory owner, you are probably making things. But the way we are set up now, you don't have to. You could let other people do it.  As a refinery owner, what even is there to do?

I think the way the economy is set up is wrong.  You may think that's harsh, and you may not agree. That's fine.  But as @Slander notes above- there were and are a lot of people who've got into the game thinking they could just go out and do ship stuff. And you really can't.  I've heard more than one say "You've got to have money to make money" and then they leave.   

Right now, as a rookie player, you get your ship, scrape together a few marks for some tethers, scoops and probes and you go out and scoop some gas. You're excited! You haul that back to a station somewhere. Payday!  You poke at some obscure commands and queue up your gas. And, you promptly start to lose money.  You look at the queue and it shows umpteen million seconds, which makes no sense to anyone, ever.  Now you are confused, and sad. You log off and come back the next day.  You have some materials! yay! You haul them somewhere and after another struggle with some obscure commands you finally manage to sell them and you discover you've made enough to buy yourself a beer. 

I think that you should get paid. Haul something to a refinery. Get paid.  

(unrelated note, why on earth can I not insert an image with the image button?)

I also think that scoops and tethers that limit all the ships to hauling the same amount of materials is not the way to go. There's no reason to buy a freighter or anything for cargo capacity, despite all the work put into giving ships different cargo capacities, as there's nothing to use it for.  When you scoop gas, it should go in the hold.  When you grab an asteroid, same. You should not be limited by one kind of gas at a time or one asteroid at a time, but only by cargo capacity.  Hell, you could introduce mining ships that compress the gas to hold more, or haul multiple asteroids if tethers are still going to be a thing.  (think the ice hauler in the Expanse). I just think the current system is unnecessarily limiting. Encourage people to buy bigger ships. (and pay me).

Cervantes said:

I mean, I hate to sound like that guy, but that's a few hours of clearing ixsei, tops.

You're not wrong at all, but I also don't consider that point relevant. Yea, you can easily grind 25k in Ixsei in a couple hours, I do it regularly - but a lot of people (the majority, I'd say) don't like bashing. And I've seen a number who want to be able to do space/economy stuff without needing to bash - some of them aren't active any more and made it clear it was because of stuff like this.