Back to the basics! So many of this did this before scripts. Since ships have a higher chance of being destroyed when weighted down with materials. This sort of mining rig is such a time saver in the beginning.
I have played a little SE, and I find that the amount of mining you have to do to build all that is enormous. I would rather convert the lander to fly, all be it with a little difficulty, find a cobalt deposit and then make a vertical miner. Since most of the thrust is needed to fight gravity, a vertical miner is most efficient and one with 4 small grid drills can be built pretty quickly and used with or without scripts.
A mining rig should give you +100x more mats than you put into it, but I find it's much more satisfying to get a good mining ship and get ore that way.
I found starting in space makes it easier to collect minerals and snowball pretty quickly. Depending if your are on your own or on a server, you can build beasts of miners eating up whole asteroids at a time and an industrial complex behind it to convert them. Also there are very fun automation things you can do even before the last update giving drones more power, there already were mining scripts out there you could use to have them doing the work for you. That i mostly though found rather inefficient compared to teammate with 20+ drillheads on his ship just scouting astros and mining them one at a time. Even without any mining mods you can accomplish a lot pretty quickly. Key is to get to large grid mining asap. There are tutorial vids how to refurniture so to speak your starting ship on pvp servers which i followed to the letter and was able to get stuff done in a short amount of time i did not before knowing how to do so.
