Science & Industry

Taking out an Orca in high sec with out agro would require a significant investment from any suciders because of the raw HP and Orca can have.

The Hulk however can be sucide ganked fairly easily. You can deter people from doing this by fitting a good tank on your hulk and also providing remote reps from another ship however this is fairly intensive and will not generate a good ISK/hr investment. Another option would be to have an insta locking support ship with ECM that could prevent any gankers who go GCC from destroying the hulk. Yet again this is fairly pointless unless you were guarding a fleet of Hulks. Which I suppose is an option.

If you had 10 or more hulks in a belt insta locking ECM or DPS is a good defence and can protect from suciders but not 100% of the time more so if they attack with multiple gankers at once.

It's generally a waste of time and effort to standby a dedicated logistics ship for any gank attempts. You won't have the time to switch, even if you have it stored in the Orca's SMB.
On the flip-side, if you're almost guaranteed of bad company showing up at a known time/location, then yes, it's worth the effort.

You'd do better by :
a) Properly tanking all barges/exhumers (as best as possible within its limitations). Your goal is to survive sloppy attempts and make gankers spend more effort/resources to draw blood.
This means buffer tanks (high EHP), not active tanks (anything with shield boosters).
b) Keeping alert and warp away when you see several signature gank boats (Thrasher/Catalyst/Talos/Tornado) landing close.
c) Don't forget to maximize the tank on the Orca with proper shield tank + DCU + T2 Bulkheads. When miners forget this - tissue paper Orca goes boom.

Lastly, if you're bent on doing some sort of logistics work, T1 logis boats Osprey/Exequror makes nice starter standalone logis for shield/armor respectively.
You wont need much tank on those for the above purpose and they can be built as glass cannons. Skills needed are self explanatory.

P.S A note on repping mining barge/exhumers, they're better with a shield tank. In addition, shield repping starts immediately at the beginning of the cycle,
Armor repping starts at the end of the cycle and this is a weakness for the above circumstance.

P.P.S Also read the new devblog on mining barge changes.

Get a cheap ship, maybe a griffin. Fit it with an ECM Burst and rigs that increase the ECM range. If you see a Gank squad drop, burst them. If you get the timing right, (between the first gankers shooting and the second locking up) you will jam part of the Hit squad. Alternatively, burst them while they drop. ECM Burst is an area of effect, it should efOh, and farm your sec status back up, because you will draw a GCC for jamming those helpless rocks. Try to learn the timing on Sisi before trying it at home.

Get a shield repping logi.

Have orca with power transfers on it.

Have hulks built for balanced/high resist.
Have hulks over heat when gankers show.

Orca powers logi, and logi reps hulks.

Done right it can rep a couple thousand dps!

Waste of time to do this in small groups.
Five hulks minimum.

It is uneconomic and totally ineffective to have another account running to provide 'combat support' and will not save your mining ships once gankers have arrived on top of your mining vessel. I have written a large piece of text detailing what I personally believe to be best policy in the 'Safe Mining' OP in this section if you wish to read that. The basic idea being that you watch local channel in a quiet system. Investigate everyone that enters the system reading through their bio & corp details. As a rule gankers stick out like something distasteful on the sole of your shoe. Usually either their corp details mention PvP or pirating directly. More often they will be in NPC corps so you can't wardec them. They aren't called gutless cowards for nothing.

Btw if your Orca pilot is skilled up in 'links' then its worth sticking the shield link on to give extra resists instead of the mining capacitor one. Gives a decent extra bit of resist and EHP to the Hulk and a lot more to the Orca. Although a 160,000+ EHP Orca is unlikely to go down even in 0.5 .

I'm not sure how you can call kamikazes cowards. It may be hard to believe, but some people don't do it "maliciously" to harvest your tears. Personally, i see hisec as the african savannah. you guys are zebras and i'm a cheetah. There is no good or bad, right or wrong, just predator and prey.

Yea, ok Predator, put down that pizza and get some fresh air.

Low and null are not like the savannah, unless there's an army of gazelles and zebras with machine guns out on the plains. It isn't a Pixar or Disney film, as hard as that may be for the intellectually challenged to understand. low and null are active warzones in which everyone is both predator and prey. The analogy is a simple one. Herds of nearly defenseless prey graze while staying alert. It's pure hunting. A killer vs. a runner.

People with THIS kind of kill board should probably shut the **** up and avoid talking like a tough guy. Seriously, 13 kills in just over a year? That's pathetic.

In the last few days it's been hard to get a gank because the miners are finally, at long last, getting smarter. I think that's a good thing for everyone. It makes the stalk much more fun. Despite what p*ssies like you think and say, its actually fairly easy to avoid getting ganked if you LEARN HOW THE GAME MECHANICS WORK. Instead of spending time writing treatises on the unfairness of it all, how about you spend that time studying game mechanics?

Finally, I came IN from null sec to set up my hunting alts. You're just now going out. We'll meet again. I promise.

If I was you I would train up a scanning and use your skills to find grav sites. Then just keep an eye out on d-scan for probes.

Please show one single killmail where gankers shoot an orca assisting in mining without agro...