Ships & Modules

How long does it take to buy an Orca? Seriously....

I've got all the skills for it, save one. 50,000,000 isk for the skill price alone is astronomical, but the price tag for one ORCA....Unspeakable.

I need to re-think money generation. Not having that much luck in the market place and mining is going to take a long long long long LONG time in High Sec space....

Thoughts from some veterans?

Guess the problem is what is the best solution to ISK generation. Mine it low sec? Try to make some amazing deals on the Market? GANK ships? 700,000,000 is a long road...

Not afraid to work at it, just want to know what's the best route to take.

Let's remove the whole concept of the orca from discussion and highlight the main question, making isk. Why you want an orca, don't really care, but you want to make the isk to get one ok. First off, you probably are not going to make it in highsec to any fast degree. You'll need to creep towards lowsec, nullsec, or Wspace. I would focus on these three areas assuming you are new.

1) exploration sites. Requires a covops and some hacking skills. Ran two a week ago, made 100 million, in a covops frigate, and level 4 skills. A faction pos mod dropped, I took it to Jita, and built it, sold it for 30 million a piece (bpc made 3).

2) gas mining in wormholes. It's faster than mining rock, can be done in a venture for under 2 million isk, and depending on gas, can pay out 10 to 100 million for 15 to 20 minutes of work.

3) planetary interaction. This is slow isk, and only requires a sub million isk hauler. Low skills on one guy, per month, can average 200 million, this is checking it once every 2 to 5 days, and haul once a month. Takes me 10 minutes to check my characters and reset extractors. It's slow isk though, and requires you to sell it, but after initial setup, it is essentially free (minus taxes).

Three options for you, one that is a type of mining but adventurous, another that is exploration and different, a 3rd that is consistent, requires no attention but is slow.

Do all three, you could pull in enough to buy your orca in a month.

High sec incursions are profitable.

Get a set of BPCs, mine and build it yourself. Nothing more satisfying than christening a ship you created through hard work.

I can help you mine up the ore to buy your Orca. Contact me in game if you wish.

Add in some mission running, either level 3's or 4's, if possible. As stated above, nullsec exploration, in an inexpensive T1 frigate, can pay nicely, even with less than perfect skills. Just don't fit a Sister's Probe Launcher! You don't want to lose 40 million if you get blown up. Run around NPC nullsec, run some relic and data sites, and sell your loot on the local market - Outer Ring and Syndicate were very good for me. Sister's Core Probes, eight of them, and a standard Core Probe Launcher should work well.

Go to the Eve University Wiki, and learn about overview setup before venturing out, and also read up on using D-Scan. Fit your ship with one each of the T1rigs for Data and Relic hacking, they're very cheap.

Have fun, and good luck!

700m in a month, whats that one mission a day, sometimes two if you get some bad ones?

I'd go back to the "Why do you want an orca?"

WIll it help you make isk?
What do you plan to use it for?

If it's not really going to help make more isk then hold off and focus on things that can help.

The question immediately after "Why does the OP want his Orca?" has to be "Does the OP understand what the Orca does?"

To clarify:
The Orca is a mining support ship. It is not, in and of itself, a mining vessel. It cannot fit mining modules and is therefore limited to a maximum yield of 5 unbonused mining drones.
Instead its role is to serve as a base for a mining operation and to buff miners in its fleet using warfare link modules (primarily the Mining Foreman modules).

If the OP intends to mount three strip miners and take advantage of the 50k m3 ore hold to mine AFK (or effectively AFK) then the Orca is not the ship he's looking for.

The most heavily used Mining Foreman link reduces the cycle time of the miners of associated ships - working on the basis of that link alone the Orca's benefits (with maximised skills and a very expensive Cybernetics [5] implant) are comparable to the Orca pilot being another miner in a fleet of three (two miners plus the Orca). If you're mining with one other person the Orca may offer other benefits but they are significantly less measurable. If the OP is mining alone, or with a single friend or alt, then the Orca is not the ship they need and the Skiff would be a better goal - Of course if the OP is mining as part of a substantial corp fleet there may well be others in that fleet more suited to training for and purchasing the Orca.