Quote from: TopMiningMiner on June 11, 2019, 05:16:53 PM

No idea what I'm doing, however I got excited and preordered an Apollo last night! Woke up this morning and realized I probably should have waited to order until after I had read through this thread. lol

You picked a good product, in my opinion, to get started. The price per hash-rate is higher than other miners, but in exchange you get compact physical size, somewhat lower noise level, ease of management, and energy efficiency. Assuming this is your first mining hardware, you could have done worse.

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Q1: Solo Mining vs Pool Mining

Your assertions are correct, but the choice to solo vs. pool are really a personal choice. The way I look at it, it's a decision between taking a chance and "winning big" in the solo mining lottery (the reward for finding an LTC block will far outweigh the cost of electricity and hardware for a long time, yet odds are against you "winning" anything), or taking the conservative pool route, and slowly "earning" back your investment. If you can dismiss the hardware costs, personally I find solo mining more exciting -- making money is nice, but it accumulates so slowly at this scale that it gets dull rather quickly.

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Q2: What would be the optimal way to Solo mine with the Apollo?

The Apollo does not currently work as a full node. I won't speculate too much about how it will work when the FutureBit folk get it all sorted out, but I can almost guarantee the intention is that it will be a "node" and a "miner" at the same time (technically, they're the same thing, but that's another discussion). ASICs use specialty chips which would be useless if it didn't mine.

If you want to solo mine with the lowest barrier to entry, the way to go would be to find a mining pool which allows solo mining. "Solo mining pools" (despite the contradiction) are a sort of hybrid between pure solo mining and pool mining. The pool does the 'hard work' of setting up the hardware so all you have to to is point your miner at the pool (just like regular pool mining), and in exchange takes a small fee from the larger block reward.

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Q3: Moon Landers?

A few people have had success running one or more Moonlanders from the USB port on the Apollo, but it's a more involved process than just managing the Apollo by itself. You'll probably need a separate powered USB hub, and you'll definitely need to "get your hands dirty" in the command line interface. I'd suggest playing around with just the Apollo first, before jumping into USB miners. There's plenty to learn from the Apollo, first, and then you can better decide which direction you want to go.