Science & Industry

Because I am terrible at math, I waited for the latest patch to see how the effect of the new command burst system would work (in real life so to speak).

At this point I've only tested ice mining, using a max skilled Orca pilot boosting with Mining Laser field enhancement & optimisation charges. The miner I used was max skilled with a plus 5 ice mining implant.

Pre I was getting cycle times of 51.8 per turret. Post that came down to 45.6. If my math is correct that is an approximate 12% improvement. At that rate each miner would mine just short of 158 blocks per hour.

Although I make my own charges, the Jita cost of those charges is approximately 4,900 & 2,000 respectively, so an hours boosting costs roughly 414,000. The cost per miner will depend on the number of miners.

Ice in my area has a sell price of 180,00 per block. Pre I would mine roughly 139 blocks worth just over 25M. Post that goes up to just short of 158 blocks worth roughly 28.4M. So I am making approximately 3,412,800.00 more per hour per miner less the cost of the charges.

Nothing to write home about but at least it's an increase rather than the other way around.

I will try ore mining shortly but I expect much the same small increase in return.

Your Orca can also fly a squad of ice harvester drones - depending on skills and rigs, they can come close to the yield of an exhumer.

I run T2 mining drones from a skiff with 1 T2 drone mining augmentor rig and drone interfacing 5. With no boost, the yield is about half as much as a T2 strip miner with T2 crystal. I typically fly 2 skiffs in fleet - one pilot has a foreman mindlink (15% boost - RIP). That pilot will be back in his Orca this coming weekend - should be interesting to see how that works out.

I suspect my game has been nerfed - 2 skiffs with T2 drones and mindlink under the old rules will almost certainly out-mine a skiff/orca combination under the new rules but I won't know for sure until I try. The massive ore hold on the Orca will eliminate the need to dock and unload.

I did some further testing yesterday with an Orca plus 4 Skiffs.

All ships had one ice harvesting drone each - no drone augmentor rigs on any ship .

All 5 characters are up to Level 4 Ice Drone Harvesting.

Positioned the Orca about 1000m from an ice roid as the travel time of the ice drones is quite slow & set all 5 drones on the one roid while the Skiffs munched away at others.

When not testing I will probably stick to combat drones on 1 ship to deal with belt rats.

My rough math tells me I ended up with almost a 20% increase in yield over my pre-Ascension rate but I will wait for final calculations for when I get into T2 drones in a week or so.

So my 4 ship mining fleet virtually ended up as a 5 ship fleet.