Science & Industry

How many ppl would it take to clear an Ice belt and how long

so in the history of EVE no one has cleared out a ice belt?

I don't have my client open but from what I recall ice roids have around 60k - 80k worth of blocks each, and assuming 25 roids in a system means you would need to complete 1,750,000 cycles in a 24 hour period (assuming 70k blocks in each roid).

This comes to 76,086 cycles needed per hour. Maxed out hulk + orca boost + mindlink will yield about 71 blocks per hour.

So you would need 1071 maxed hulks, mining for 23 hours to kill a belt.

From what I've read ice belt roids will respawn 20% of their missing ice at down time, so if this is accurate you could break this up over 5 days mining 23 hours per day and only need around 216 miners.

This also doesn't count haulers.

Planning something like that would mean you would have more gankers showing up then miners.

I have never even seen a single rock of ice get popped in any belt, let alone several rocks. Ice belts have many many rocks. The smallest ice rock has over 20,000 units of ice. A maxed yield hulk with ice mining rig can pull in I think 69 blocks per hour.The ice regenerates every downtime.

It would take 12-14 max yield HULKs mining 23 hours straight to pop a single small 20,000 ice rock. Some ice rocks are much bigger than 20,000 units. Say in a average belt there are 50 ice rocks. they range from 20,000 units to 100,000 units per rock. Average of say 50,000 units times 50 rocks. thats 2,500,000 units of ice in an average belt. It would take about 1600 ships mining 69 blocks per hour each a full 23 hours to clear the belt. Or over 36,000 ships to clear the ice belt in about an hour. I do not think there is even a node in the tranquility array that could support that level of activity. Jita can support over 2000 players before time dilatation kicks in and that is with most players docked in station. not out mining.

That is a huge amount of work if it was even possible. And for what? The belt would be back full at the next down time. Maybe if clearing the belt would cause it to respawn in a different system. But even then, good luck getting more than a couple hundred ships to show up. no matter how many friends you have.

First 11 Ice roids in deni reveal approx 677,000 blocks of ice, out of a total 170 or so ice roids in the belt.

677,000 ice blocks is 225,666 cycles of ice miners

which at max orca skilled max hulk (implants and everything at a 121.7 second cycle) boosted still takes a total of 457,725.9 minutes

7,629hours or 332 max skilled hulk miners mining in one, 23 hour day. and thats just for the first 11 asteroids

677,000/3=225,666 cycles *121.7 seconds per cycle /3600 = 7,629 hours /23 hours in an eve day = 332 miners per day or 332 days for one miner


assuming an average of 61,000 ice blocks per asteroid, 170 asteroids per belt,

that leaves us with a belt wide total of 10,370,000 ice blocks
which will take a total of 3,456,667 cycles

or 116,854.5 hours of solo mining
--> which is 5080.6 eve days (23 hours per day)
--> or 13.919 years (not including leap years)
----> this is assuming that there is 0 growth at downtimes. and no expansions that take longer then 1 hour to deploy

or 5,081 max skilled and implanted hulk pilots with max orca boosts (but not counting the number of orca pilots) to clear a belt in one 23 hour eve day


20,000/3=6,666 cycles /*140.5 /3600= 225.4 hours of mining / 23 = 9.8
(10 max skilled miners mining 23 hour one day to kill a 20k unit ice roid)


833,334 cycles -> 28,171 hours -> 1,225 max skilled miners per 23 hour day. or 28,171 miners in one hour.