Science & Industry

Doesn't a Mackinaw tank better than a retriever? (amongst other things) And my alt was CREATED for "peasent" work.

It's just a cyno slave that mines on the side... that is the only reason for the account....

Since I am just using him to mine when he is doing nothing more useful... I suppose isk per hour is not really important to me with him...

I will fit it with the strongest tank I can.... hell maybe even go down to a skiff....

Went with a Procurer until I get the isk for a skiff.

Here is the fit

High: modulated strip miner II

Medium: Medium shield booster II
Invulnerability Field I
EM shield resist I (passive)
Thermal shield resist I (passive)

Low: Damage control I
Power Diagnostic System I

Rigs: 3x Capacitor Control Circuit I

This build nets me about 38,000 defensive points and is cap stable even with a medium shield booster.

A much better tank than my pitiful previous Covetor.. but when I got it ganked I was not aware of the changes made to the mining barges... I always learn things the hard way I guess.....

Good sir I think you need some help.
Having a medium shield booster isn't really much of a help against ganks because they don't last long enough. The only thing that's going to save you is to have as much hp as possible for them to chew through.

Drop the medium shield booster II and replace it with a medium shield extender. If you want to keep the power diagnostic system it's not too bad because it does provide shield buffer and recharge, but the rigs absolutely have to go. Get some shield extender 1 rigs. Having 3 shield extender rigs will give you ~52% additional shield buffer between you and a gank.

But lets look at why active tanking a procurer is a poor choice over buffer fitting it. The procurer has 6,000 hp's base, so if you add the 1050 for a medium shield extender II and 52% from the rigs you'll end up with 10716 base shield before resists. That extra shield would take 52.4 cycles to recover using your shield booster,which means the encounter would have to take over 2 minutes and 37 seconds for the shield booster to break even against the buffer tanks. Consider most ganks are done in under 20 seconds the benefit you're getting is slim.

Something that I didn't figure in was that each level of mining barge gives the procurer an extra 5% shield per level, which means that as you train mining barge up the buffer tank becomes more efficient. With your current fit if you had 5 mining barge skill and 5 shield management skill you would have 9375 shields. If you used the 3 shield extender rigs and medium shield bosster you would have 16743, or a difference of 7368 shield. At the 90 hp/3 second rate of return on the medium shield booster an encounter would have to last just over 4 minutes before the booster beat the buffer tank.

I applaud you on your choice of mining barge though. Once the shield booster is removed the ship is very cap stable even at low skill levels. Make sure to train for shield hardeners also though, when you move into the skiff you will need to have 2 shield resistance amps instead of the em/themal hardeners, along with some good fitting skills, to make it all fit.

good luck

objection.

orcas only have two low slots, so he wasn't fitting 3 cargo expanders.

you're clearly a liar.

My alt runs 108k (lowest resist) on the skiff with 1 MLU, which is a bit above the trimarked 96k or so I get out of a megathron.

I would say that 6 catalysts will bring you down, and that is close to what is regularly fielded, ie NOL manage a 5 man grouping most days - 61k is within the reach of a procurer too.

There isn't any need/want to put a booster on a skiff - no belt npc grouping can push the shield below 99%, the booster only pays back for engagements (compared to an extender) that are longer than it takes for concord to show up.

As a general rule you will mainly get suicide ganked if you have fitted an ineffective tank eg NO DC II and a civilian shield booster and small extender etc. Expect to be ship scanned, and if your tank leaves much to be desired, to be turned into scrap metal and maybe get podded on top!
It's not difficult. You can still fit an MLU and have enough tank but don't go over the top on yield if you're flying a Hulk or Mackinaw. If you're flying a Retriever it's less likely for someone except learner gankers to want to gank you as it doesn't look that good on a killboard. So with a bit of due care as to location and an eye on 'local' you can fly with an excessive yield fitting in a Retriever.

Fly safe,

Nope I'm not a troll just been away from the game for a while and occasionally fail to read all forum posts before I act.... sorry.

That being said I get it.... make the skiff a passive shield tank... kinda like a Nighthawk... drop the CCC rigs put in shield extenders and drop the medium booster and replace with a medium shield extender...

Makes sense and I won't have to worry about needing to activate a booster which makes sense for a semi afk miner that is used while missioning or otherwise with my main.

Speaking about Skiff vs Procurer. The main advantage skiff has is speed. EHP wise they end up roughly the same and the 3 000 m3 more space is not really meaningful in my opinion so they both are pretty tight ore bay wise.

So if you are already going for the Skiff then use that speed advantage - it will help you more than few k of extra ehp will. So fit a powergrid rig and put 10 MN afterburner on it - orbiting a rock at ~600 m/s will make you harder to gank than the extra ehp from a shield extender rig do. Not to mention it will make you exceptionally hard to bump in any meaningful way.

that's not a cargo expander, that's cargo rigs.
expanders are low slot modules.

also, cargo rigs give an armour penalty which is negligible at best, on an orca, even a cargo rigged orca can hit 230k+ ehp.