Ships & Modules

For years now, we have been held hostage. Not by the Goonswarm, not by Hulkageddon, and not by gunminers or drone region dwellers. No, we have been held hostage by none other than ORE. This is my call to wake you up, you poor miner, Stockholm syndrome sufferer. As you sit in your Hulk, or your Covetor, I ask you, Why do you? We have been conditioned now to the point that we simply ask for ships to be buffed or nerfed, somehow contented to our lot we have thrown in with this wretched organization. I call to you all, open your eyes before this cannot be righted. I too have been blind these years, and only a recent reading of a manifesto opened them by accident.

ORE has been calling our shots for far too long. Think of this from the perspective of a warrior, would they fly a ship that attacks once every three minutes, and cannot defend itself outside of drones? The most you could do in such a ship is rat in high security space. And, is that not what we are being forced to do? Instead of innovating, the Ore company has pushed us to be careless targets. Even the most amazingly fit Hulk cannot take but a few decently fit destroyers, or a decently piloted tier three battle-cruiser. Instead of faster cycle times, we are committed to staying still for three minutes, or five in the case of ice. The Mackinaw is the pinnacle of this horrid design, with miners being forced to stay the course for upwards of 8 minutes for the least skilled of us, and to end early simply wastes all of that time. I call on you, our mother factions, to right this! Innovate! I know my own mother faction, the Gallente pride ourselves on freedom, and we must show them the chains that have been put on us by ORE! Much like the Blockade Runner was born, so must a new breed of ship.

Am I calling for mining battle ships, or mining cloaking ships? Of course not. One only need apply the logic of warfare. Let me make this clear with an example. We Gallente excel at one thing above all else. Drones. Even the rogue drones can be traced somewhat back to ill-thought-out experiments by us. We could easily embrace that aspect, creating a mining ship built for drone usage. We have shown in the past we Gallente can take ORE designs and make them truly powerful, one only need a bit of intelligence to restructure the current Myrmidon hull into a true drone mining platform. All mother factions must get into this game, as more weight will fall on us to keep the empire running.

One only needs look as far as the Primae to see that ORE cares not for us miners. They have the ability to design ships with low signature radius, decent cargo room, yet their ‘answer’ for our mining needs is the Orca, which itself is hard to defend a true onslaught. Perhaps just as worse, the longer cycle on Strip Miners force us to become indistinguishable from the bots plaguing us.

The older miners among us tell our younger crowd one single survival tip. Stay aligned. If there is any real threat, stay aligned. We are not warriors, yet we are being forced to become them as we continue to submit to the almighty ORE and fly ships that cannot maneuver or escape. This is the time all miners should stand up, and declare for once the gankers and greifers are unfortunately right in their cause, but for a different reason. The Hulk and Mackinaw should die with hulkageddon. We need real mining ships, now more than ever, and now is the time that it would be most beneficial for our factions to get with us on that.

tl; dr

He wants a hulk that uses mining drones like their strip miners. Or strippers. It was a tad confusing.

Your post is wrong on so many levels, but I'll just address this one. The Ore ships are optimum for 0.0 space, not high sec. They are much safer in 0.0 than highsec. If you want to get away from the ganker who hides amongst the crowds of neutrals in high sec, join a 0.0 corp. With the new changes, lots of them are looking for miners.

They can gate camp and keep the attackers out in the first place, concord protects the attackers until they are at point blank range in the belt.

Null has local, and you can see if there are any non-blues.
Local in high sec is pretty much useless for determining when there is a threatening party in your system

I'd vote for mining sentry drones.

ADDRESS UNKNOWN

RETURN MAIL TO SENDER

But if there's defenders, wouldn't they have scrams?

What fun would a mining ship with a tank or even worse guns be? It's not any fun trying to kill something that might have a chance to fight back or escape. That just goes against the "gank" style of most PVP in Eve. CCP looks at PVE players as lambs for the PVP players. It's all about subscription numbers and there is just something about killing something that can't fight back that appeals to human nature. Maybe it's just stress relief after getting smacked around in real life. It's better than them doing it in real life! The only thing you can do is always take precautions and know you will lose ships.

IMO, the Tech III cruisers have shown the way things should go - modular mining/industrial ships, too, anyone?

That would be a fun idea.