The way I see it:

Theres two types of people in sto:

The mugs with more real world money than sense who gamble hundreds of bucks, tossing mirror ships, ect on the market cheap to buy more keys to fill the 'one more box and I'll win!' mentality, filling the coffers and prompting yet another strike on their finances in a few months time

and..

The ones who realise its a long-odded waste of resources, who then save up to buy what they want with ec, while also hoovering up the cheap items that in theory cost 1.3m+ ec each to get for far less

As others have said, option 2 is better as on sto, there are mugs aplenty to take your place

Wow, so much misinformation about gambling.

You have probably 0.02% of getting the lockbox ship, no matter how many you open, you always end up with the same probability per box. If you open 100 boxes, you still have 0.02% per box that you open to get the ship, you don't end up with a higher probability.

If there was a finite number of lockbox and a finite number of lockbox ships, your odds of getting the jackpot would increase with each box you open.
That is not the case.

There is no predetermination of what is in the box, every time you open it, the RNG pulls your prize from a table determined by cryptic/pwe, it could end up with the same prize in every box, or a different one, it's all random.

It works exactly like a slot machine, everytime you put your money and crank the machine, you end up with a random chance of winning the jackpot, or another prize, or nothing, no matter how much money or how many hours you put in a slot machine, the outcome is RANDOM.

More info regarding odds and gambling: http://wizardofodds.com/
Note: You cannot Beat the system, in the long run you will always lose versus randomness, the only way to win is to play skill base games or not gamble at all.

P.S. I assume 0.02%, it may be more, but I doubt it, at the very least it is not higher that 3%

Thanks for keeping the game running, shagnastie.

99% of gamblers lose, why do u think the house always wins

Welcome to the realities of gambling, just because you spent that kind of money doesn't entitle you to a reward or an explanation. Do you even know how many ruined lives it takes to keep the lights on in Vegas?
Better to not gamble, take the mining claims and mine a bunch of dilithium, sell it for zen, buy the keys, it won't hurt to use a few now since you gone this far to get enough Lobis to buy the Dreadnaught and you might get lucky and win the Escort Carrier but probably not, sell the rest of the keys for EC and consider it a lesson learned. The key are just not worth spending real world money on unless you have so much money that you afford to throw it away.