Make mining its own department.

[Dauntasa]

Anyways, if you want to visit old mining there is nothing stopping you.

except for the fact that there are no minerals out there, so you can't actually mine

And yeah, you see miners fucking around with other stuff on the station, in much the same way that you see literally any job fucking around with stuff on the station. I don't consider that "miners interacting with the station" I consider it "miners completely ignoring their job and running around like assistants with industrial armour". Miners interacting with the station, to me, means miners mining and then sending the things they mine to the station, something that I see no more now than I ever have.

Plus killing a miner if he was your objective was the easiest thing in the universe back when they were on their own station. Literally all you had to do was get to the mining station and then wait. Either he would die on his own exploring space or he'd pop back to the mining station and you could immediately shoot him in the face while he was fucking around with the fabricator. Being a miner required you to be wary because you were on your own, with no one else to help you but your fellow miners. Finding a husk out in the asteroid field was one of the tensest and most interesting things that ever happened to me in this game.