The mining barque is designed to do one thing exceptionally well – break asteroids down and extract the exposed minerals. The mining barque itself does not possess the expensive sensors needed to effectively identify hidden resource deposits, as it is designed to be as cheap as possible to construct and maintain, something which is not possible for ships outfitted with the advanced, yet delicate advanced mining sensors. As such, mining operations frequently pair the mining barques with dedicated prospector ships such as the AEA-500, to provide the mineral detection capability lacking in the mining barques. These prospector ships would scan the fields, detect deposits and signal the mining barques to move in and commence extraction.

Mining barques are ungainly ships designed around a large, spherical cargo storage, with a wedge shaped cockpit at one end, an engine cluster at the other and a belt of heavy equipment compartments containing large mechanical arms to grab chunks of mineral and transfer them into the storage compartment. Crushing equipment inside the cargo are pulverize the oversized chunks of rock and mineral in order to maximise storage efficiency, although the barque itself lacks any processing capability beyond this. Once the storage is full, the barques can quickly unload the cargo into larger freighters to allow transport to waiting ore refineries and factories. Life aboard a mining barque is spartan, and the crews need frequent changing in order to maintain operational efficiency. For this reason, some companies utilize worker droids to crew the storage area and operate the mechanical arms, although they are less dexterous than organic life forms and take more time to collect the resources from open space. These companies are willing to accept the trade off of reduced collection efficiency versus to cost of hiring more crews to man the ships around the clock.