Science & Industry

I use 3 Covetors + Orca myself. Yield is descent (140m3/minute less then a Hulk, or roughly 1.5M less per hour using Veldspar). Yes its less yield but:
a) Less cost. 140M Less then a hulk.
b) Not worth ganking. Ship is so cheap and dosen't drop anything of value.
c) Takes 2 hours to recoup ship + fittings if you are ganked.

Basically the ship is not worth ganking, and if you are ganked who cares. It's cheap. Low-cost and low interest is your tank. Hell if you incure the ship it might take 1 hour of mining.

Fitting:
[high]
MSMII + T2 mining crystal
MSMII + T2 mining crystal
MSMII + T2 mining crystal
[low]
MLUII
MLUII

[rig]
Medium drone mining augmentor I
5x mining drones II
5 hobgoblins II

Yield:
1403M3/minute (no drones, no boosts no implant)
1747M3/minute (drones, no boosts, no implant)
2312/m3/minute (drones, boosts without mindlink, no implant)
* Increase values by 3% or 5% based on mining implant.
** mining foreman mindlink will increase yields by roughly 20%
*** Anyone who says not to use mining drones is an idiot. Drones will account for about 3.5M isk/hour per toon.

You can use a retriever instead if you are lazy. Wont post a fitting for it (use EFT). You can be lazy with it because of the big cargohold but since you'll be having to switch roids often it really dosen't save you much time. Infact getting start a retriever will hold you over while doing the covetor training.

As for skills mining laser upgraades IV, skills for all 4 T2 mining crystals and whatever skillls are needed to fit the above fitting (mining drones II drone interfacing IV, mining barges, etc). The biggest training time will be on nullsec mining crystals, with arkonor T2 taking forever.





No. no no nononononononooooo...... Use a retriever or a mackinaw if you're not going to use an Orca.

If you're really going to do it right you need an orca with boosting skills. To give you an idea (using the above data)
6 covetors 3,144,600/5 hours = 577,914,588isk
1 orca + 5 covetors : 34,68,000m3/5 hours = 637,349,040isk

Orca boosting: 59,434,460 isk/5 hours
Basically 12Misk more per hour, and that dosen't even count the time lost to hauling. With hauling time lost you're looking at over 15M isk/hour. This also dosen't count if you are using a mining foreman mindlink, which with its 20% roughly additional yeild so now you're up to roughly 17M isk/hour with an orca (assuming veldspar mining).


1747M3/minute (drones, no boosts, no implant)
2312/m3/minute (drones, boosts without mindlink, no implant)





Well with covetors its basically every cycle, or about 2 minutes. With a mackinaw or retriever its less isk but they have cargoholds big enough for about 6 cycles (around 10 minutes). But the problem is highsec astroids basically only last 2 cycles these days, so you'll be clicking every 2 - 4 minutes anyways. Decide what you want, good profits but time consuming, or ok profits with a little less time consuming.

Additionally you can look into ice mining. Requires clicking every 15 minutes but the isk/hour is awful. Were talking 5M - 10M isk/hour per ship. But you can do it totally AFK.






Covetor with max skills set for max yield, Mining drones II, and orca with max boosts and mining foreman mind link:

2729 m3/minute : 31,596,744 using veldspar

Hulk would be
2973 m3/minute: 32,782,676 using veldspar

* These values don't include the 3% or 5% mining implants. Guess around 1.5M isk extra / hour.

1) mackinaws, or hulks. hulks will net you more isk/hour however with so many accounts flicking between them to constantly unload cargo and having 3 lasers may cause you a bit of a head ache.

the fit i use for my hulk that gives 11k ehp sitting in a station with modules off is;

t2 strips in the highs

t2 invuln, small meta 4 shield extender, EM hardener, and a survey scanner (kinda useless in fleets but there's not really enough cpu left for other useful things)

mlus in all the lows.

and core defence field extenders in the rigs.

for the mack, you'll need a cpu rig rather than a 2nd extender rig.

2) jetcan mining? absolutely not. at 3 accounts with max skills an orca will net you more ore/hour than a third exhumer. hence your first 2 pilots should be in exhumers, then the third pilot should be an orca (with implant, else this advice works for "at 4 accounts") and then every account after the third (or 4th without implant) should be another exhumer. hence, you should be dumping directly in to the orca's corp (soon to be fleet) bay.
it takes ~6-7 months to train a perfect orca booster (sans fitting skills etc) trust me, i'm doing it right now, she'll be sitting in the orca on dec 23rd, will be a bit longer for her to train the last few ranks of cap industrial ships to get the last few drops out of those gang links though, but i did include the siege warfare skills for the ehp boost.

3) for hulks, you'll be moving ore every cycle, you'll be pulling in over 5k m3 of ore per cycle, and with a booster your cycles are every uh... ****, i forget, about 2 mins i think, so you have 2 mins to cycle through all of your accounts and move ore and target new rocks. that's why the mackinaws might be better, you can leave them longer before their cargo is full and the yield difference isn't that big. macks will just need you to check the asteroids every so often, and as long as you aren't crossing lasers you should be fine (easiest way to do that is to have 1 ship focusing on 1 ore type)

4) my spreadsheet says a hulk with max bonuses can pull in 5.9 jetcans per hour, call it 5 to account for asteroids popping and you tabbing through so many accounts. now let's call it 5m per jetcan on the conservative side, so 25m/hour/exhumer pilot. 5 accounts, 100m/hour. 9 accounts, 200m/hour. etc. (remember, one of the accounts is your orca)
if while you are training for an orca you just have a character hauling ore, the hulks will pull in 3.9 (3.8 without the implant) cans per hour if there's a character with mining foreman skills and mining foreman implant. hence, that orca is giving you 10m/hour/exhumer from ganglinks. also, this is without mining drones.

you only need the links to be active at the start of the cycle to get the cycle time bonus, and at the end for the range bonus, and yield bonus. if you dock and unload as soon as the ships start a new cycle then you lose 0 of the benefits of the links.

this is false. the procurer can vastly out-tank the hulk.

if you're serious about null sec mining, go with a hulk/mack and rorq setup. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need combat ships to tank null sec rats. the hulk can do this while still fitting 2 x MLU II's. You'll want to look into using faction shield hardeners and boosters. I've run a setup with Gisti-B's and had no problem with tanking multiple BS and BC spawns. While this increases the cost of the hulk, it isn't usually a problem in a decently setup null area. With eyes on local and intel channels, you should have plenty of time to safe up if neuts appear. Fwiw, i would never use faction gear in hi-sec; it's not needed and just begs to get ganked.

I mention a rorq because although you want to start in hi sec, if you want to move to null, you'll need a lot of additional training to get from orca to decent rorq pilot. so if you plan on purchasing a good orca char, realize you're gonna have a lot of time until you can get to null in a rorq.

nice details. i was not aware.

There are a lot of answers to your questions, depending on where/how you're mining and set up.

Here are some answers to your questions:
1) How much clicking do you want to do? If you don't want to do as much clicking, go with Mackinaws. Otherwise, go with Hulks. Be sure to put a decent tank on your hulks to survive suicide gankers and/or rats.
2) With that many miners, you better be using an Orca. Preferably a maxed out boosting Orca with a Mining Foreman implant.
3) This coincides with #1- if you want to be passive and not click much, use Mackinaws/Retrievers. The hulk has over 20% better output than a mack, but it does require more clicking. If you're using near-max hulk pilots, then you need to move the ore out of the ore hold every cycle with a Hulk.
4) If you have a max orca mining scordite in empire in a Hulk, you can make upwards of 35-37mil an hour. That's assuming you have the hulk mining under perfect conditions with a booster/hauler.


A few notes:
-Mining drones are an easy way to gain an extra 5-10% output if you're a maxed (orca boosted) miner. (it's roughly 5% actual amount if you have a max rorq. On paper it looks like they give more, but travel time + rock size matter)
-You really should be mining in Grav belts in 0.0 sov space. Go look up information on grav belts from Industrial Upgrades in 0.0. That's the safest place to mine at the moment.
-If you move to 0.0, you do need to worry about logistics of moving the minerals. You should stick to station systems to get comfortable and have a place to refine the ore. Hire someone from your alliance to jump the minerals to empire for you. Once you get off the ground and get a Rorqual, move to a quieter system and put up a POS- compress ore at the POS and use array modules to store the ore.
-If you're using 5+ accounts, download ISBoxer. Totally worth it. (Google it).

My setup:
-7 Maxed hulk pilots. I use drones about half the time, depending on how much I need to move (if at all). If there aren't any rocks within 10km of my mining point, I don't use drones. It takes them way too long to get back to me in case i need to warp out, and the travel time makes the output garbage.
-Maxed Rorq pilot. My cycle times are 104 seconds on the hulk. With 95-100% uptime (which isn't hard to do), I'm averaging about 40 mil an hour per miner. I use the Rorq at a POS to compress ore.
-Maxed Orca pilot to haul. If for whatever reason the Rorq isn't there, I can also use the Orca to boost, which nerfs my income to about 35 mil/hr per miner.
-I usually have one of my miners in a tanked skiff to tank the 0.0 rats. Skiffs have ridiculous tank. The one miner in the skiff gets about 25% less output than being in a hulk.

Thanks for your valuable input in regards to this topic.

You didn't care so much that you had to make a post in the topic about how much you didn't care, and then instructed him to "lrn2eve". Brilliant.

Bored already. Someone with no content posts something useless. Caring why? lrn2keepurhandzofftehkeyboard

Good info. If OP is micromanaging, this will work great. If OP doesn't want to micro manage, miners missing out on a single cycle aren't going to lose too much productivity. Distance from rocks could be an issue though.

Yes, grav sites tend to have larger roids. At least high-sec grav sites often have roids 2-4 times as big as high-sec belts. Something similar may be the case in 0.0. That drastically reduces the problem with the huge-bonus-few-strippers Mackinaws and Skiffs. Maybe it removes the problem completely.