EVE General Discussion

This basically.

The capacity of an Orca is about three times the capacity of a Mackinaw. So given that the yield per hour of a fleet of 2 Hulks plus an Orca is greater than a fleet of 3 Hulks flown by the same pilots, you save on travel time by hauling in the Orca. When you haul the ore back and forth in the Orca, the Mackinaws can keep lasers pointed at rocks for 100% of the duration of the mining operation. In addition, an Orca plus two Mackinaws will provide sufficient storage capacity to clean out all of one ore from most hisec belts.



No tricky math involved here: without boosts, each cycle of a Strip Miner I on my Mackinaw is 180s. With boosts, each cycle is 120s. That's a reduction of 33% in cycle time. Another way of looking at it is that my Mackinaw gets 20 cycles per hour unboosted, 30 cycles per hour boosted (divide 3600 seconds per hour by the number of seconds per cycle, result is number of cycles per hour). That's a 50% increase in yield per hour. So based entirely on yield, two mining ships plus an orca is worth three mining ships flown by the same pilots. Even if you are flying Mackinaws you get a benefit from the third pilot onwards.

As an extra bonus, that small fleet gets an extra two Mackinaw's worth of storage capacity allowing for a longer lasers-on-rocks duty cycle. Then you add in the extra range from the mining links, and you end up being able to plan a better route through your field. Sure, fields in nullsec tend to cover hundreds of kilometres, but you can still benefit from 25km range over your base 15km range.

This is not dodgy forum mathematics, this is based on heading into space with a mining fleet and actually doing some mining (i.e.: I am using empirical evidence, not theoretical calculations).

Now scale up to 99 (or 199) hulks in your fleet with that one orca kicking out bonuses

Terrible ship Indeed, should just bin it

>.<

Think bigger.

Just for fun, lets play devils advocate.

The OP stated that he has been away for a while, based on this I will assume that all 4 pilots started as perfect miners, with at least one having Mining Foreman 5.

Using a Mack as the base ship, this makes 4*1.1 = 4.4.

The Orca was a secondary ship that was introduced to the fleet mainly to be a hauler, since back in the day a good hauler increased a fleets efficiency as much as the boost did.

Next we assume that the Orca was used for boosting as a secondary to mining, so the pilot did not spend the time to train Mining Director, Warfare Link Spec, or Capital Industrial to 5; since they are all fairly long skills. With those skills the Orca's bonus is 1.1 to yield and -12.54% reduced cycle, giving an effective fleet of 3*1.1/0.8746 = 3.77. Therefore an Orca is not worth keeping.

Next we take the leap that with an Orca, the OP switches to Hulks, which mine at 15.5% greater yield, 3.77*1.155= 4.36, still not worth an Orca.

So the OP is not necessarily wrong, just not as skilled as everyone assumes. My suggestion is to use your 4 Macks for the next few months and train up those last few skills, a max Orca and 3 Hulks gives an effective fleet of, 3*1.15*1.155/0.6568 = 6.07, well over a free pilot.

Most ships suck if you don't have them well trained. I wouldn't say that a basilisk sucks because if you only have 1 shield emission systems, 1 energy emission systems, 1 logistics, no energy system management, and no energy system operation that it would be more worthwhile to bring a perfectly skilled combat pilot. The comparison is just disingenuous.

The orca is a very flexible and useful ship outside of mining ops, and it is bordering OP in mining ops. The fact that it's a natural progression to train an orca pilot into a command ship fleet booster with a lot of base skill overlap makes it doubly nice.

It depresses me to know that it is entirely all-too-likely that there is actually someone out there with 100 accounts doing exactly this.

I know explorers spending months in w-space living out of nothing but their orca... yes.. its so useless..

I'm keeping mine two Orca's, and I don't even mine.

Here I was thinking that this would be a link to Orca kills on www.minerbumping.com

Left disappointed.

Unless, Sir Bozo, you actually mine with other people in a corp. All you need is one account and friends.