Player Features and Ideas Discussion

After looking over the stats of the Prospect, I started brainstorming on how to support a small stealth operation with Mining Foreman Links. Best ideas I can come up with at the moment involve Strategic Cruisers and possibly Command Ships. At least there are a few options in there for good cloaking support, but nothing fits right.

So does the Prospect now give us a good excuse to consider a T2 Orca to support it?

Some general thoughts about such a ship...

• Require Industrial Command Ships V, and possibly a new skill beyond that.
• Fit a covert ops cloaking device. Preferably add a 4th high slot for it.
• Nerf the normal cargo hold into the ground. Maybe even 1,000 m3 or smaller. This should be a specialized mining support ship, not competition for the DST and Blockade Runners.
• Increase the size of the ore hold and/or add ore compression options.
• Increase drone bandwidth to 100 or 125 and increase drone bay to 150 or larger.
• Buff the power grid, to make it easier for MWD and Links to be on-line together.
• Ship skill bonus to ore hold rather than cargo hold.

Or maybe go a completely different route and do something similar to a Strategic Cruiser?

Why not? But more importantly, something tailored for Mining Foreman Links to support a group of Prospects. If that is a T2 Orca, so be it. If it is a new class of Strategic Cruiser from ORE, that could work too.

That would solve ore hauling, but not Mining Foreman Links. I'm much more interested in finding a way to deliver those to a small group of Prospects. I can't see if that would best be done by "improving" on the Orca, or having a cruiser-class support ship for mining.

t2 orca == rorqual

You're right, of course, that you don't HAVE to have mining links. But I found it amusing that there are covert ways to provide links for all other situations, and now that we have a covert miner we don't have a tailored way to provide links for that.


Until a few days ago, t2 mining == barge. Things change.

I honestly don't know if the answer is something above or below the Orca. But now that we have cloaked mining, cloaked mining support is the next logical step.

Thanks. I think you just made the case for the cruiser side of my point.

Larger ore hold + deployable mobile ore compression unit? CCP seems to be going ape over those new mobile structures.

Also, I like the idea of an ORE covert ops cruiser designed to provide links and additional ore/gas storage. Seems right in line with their new stuff, and more likely to make CCP's radar than a covert Orca. Give it the ability to use covert cynos and bridges (but not generate the bridge itself, still need a BLOPS for that), so a BLOPS could either target the booster ship in remote/hostile space and jump in the covert miners, or use a covops as an endpoint and jump in the whole mining crew. Would work well with the BLOPS following them in as security and a way home, too.

Side note, the reason they don't have covert battleships is because of the DPS potential, not because there's something inherently wrong with ships of that size being covert (just DPS of that magnitude being covert). ORE ships, as a rule, don't really do the whole DPS thing, so covert is a lot less of a problem with them.

So you want an orca that can covert ops cloak...in essence ninja into a low sec, null sec, or wh cloak and provide links, are you suggesting you get to cloak and run the links too?

Except it would be so easy to decloak it makes it utterly useless so I say go for it.

I'm not sure I agree with this vision of what a T2 Orca should look like (the cloak...) but I would like to see a T2 Orca, one that needs to be exposed in belts/anoms and that is worth fielding and fighting to protect.