Science & Industry

You can use the mining tab in my sig to calculate some numbers but in general, orca hailing for three hulks will be your best bet.

3x Hulks and 1x Orca

The orca boosts and hauls.

Just make sure the hulks are within range of their roids without boosts, and as soon as the orca undocks, he runs a cycle of boosts and the hulks refresh their cycles since it only matters if you have boosts during the beginning of the cycle. The downtime from boosts, if properly managed, should be very minimal.

There is also the convenience factor to consider.

When you find you need a hauler, you may be better-off replacing the Orca with a freighter, if you can't dedicate a character to hauling. Or just put everyone in a Retriever / Mackinaw, though that is less convenient.

Also, it doesn't take very many miners to quickly fill an Orca's holds. An Orca in warp is no more useful than a mindlinked freighter pilot. Also why ideally you want to have a someone that is a fleet / wing booster that also has a mindlink while the Orca is unloading. Though some people claim they can unload in less than a strip cycle, not all miners will be sync'd.

When you enter warp to station, hit stop. Then when you come out of warp at the station, turn on boosts again...then cycle the miner's strips. Dock, and empty, come out....turn on boosts, cycle strips....warp to belt and turn on boosts again/pick up ore cans.

If you want to mine into a freight can, then that is an option but when you are warping with a slow ass freighter, you'll loose boosts. Is that worth the trouble of warping back and forth and losing boosts? Up to you.

that's pretty much the way to do it.

I'm getting ready to start my own solo mining operation with probably 3 Procurers and an Orca (with Shield Warfare, Laser Optimization and Laser Range fleet modules).

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me what would be more sensible (or efficient/lazy):


1. Have the Procurers haul for themselves and leave the Orca stationary to keep supplying mining range/efficiency boosts to the remaining ships in belt. (So I won't have to adjust Procurer/asteroid ranges whenever I have a full load of ore. Might also let me just ignore my Orca entirely for the duration of the mining operation).

2. Use the Orca to haul and re-adjust my ship ranges when I have to haul back to base with the Orca and (possibly) forego the Laser Range fleet module altogether? Maybe substitute it with an Armor Warfare module?

3. Cut into my profits and have a dedicated hauling account in addition to the Orca. (I actually intended to have my Orca skill into Freighters later on to haul from station to hub at the end of my mining operations).


I could see maybe using Retrievers to be more efficient with hauling for themselves/staying in the belts longer, but I like mining with a big tank.

I guess I'm just trying to figure out what would be more annoying: Having to re-adjust my mining ships every time I need to have my Orca haul a full load back to base or simply have the mining ships themselves haul back to base when they get a full load.


Thanks.

Turnaround at a POS is faster than at a station; docking and undocking takes more time than just warping up to a hangar and warping off again.

Also, after the summer expansion: Compression POS Module (for creating compressed ore to sell) or POS Refinery Module (if you need the minerals yourself).

Edit: then again, what would you do with that information? I'd be surprised if you folk even knew which side of the strip miner to point at the asteroid...

Must have slept on some rocks

My team uses the following
4 hulks 1 orca 1 freighter

but we also use a full maxed out skilled orca jockey with the mining foreman implant and all the hulk drivers use the high wall mining implants on top of that

we strip whole belts in less than a hour so we can make about 600-800 million isk a day in high sec

That's 5 pilots, and less efficient than running 4 hulks, orca with links, and the orca hauling once there is enough ore to make each trip to station/a pos