Science & Industry

*shrug* retrievers are cheap.

why would you ever want to mine in that

30-40m/hr is actually terrible for a solo pilot. You do realize that, right? The waste would be for everyone to suddenly decide they want to put in twice the man-hours into getting anything done.

e: I forgot to mention something about how awful POS are, and how ****** stations can be(patch is fixing this). So here you go.

i'm too lazy to even point out the parts of that which are just incorrect.

25 day old character, 53.7m/hour in strong truesec ice anoms.

just throwing that out there.

Retrievers mine faster than covetors and hulks? I wasn't aware they changed that in the new patch~

e:


If this was directed towards what Masumi and I were talking about then I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say I don't think many hulls are made out of ice.

But that is more or less the reason I'm taking up mining.

depends on the fit, 3x mlu IIs is bigger than the covetor's hull bonus (but no i won't be pedantic and try and argue a retriever mines more based on that, neither of us are stupid enough to argue that point), but the difference is not sufficient so that it makes a **** of difference unless you have some one hauling for you, at which point it becomes very debatable which one truly mines faster.

you're correct again, they aren't made out of ice. however, i believe a lot of them were built pre... whatever expansion it was that rebalanced the barges. so i don't see the supply running out any time soon, especially if you love the ginger haired bastard child known as the procurer. besides, regular miners will still mine ore between anom spawns. even systems with 3 ice anomalies will have times when there are no ice anomalies active, and the miners will flock to the large grav sites once more.

Ok i think i see what your getting at here. Like you said ice prices are not effected by supply which makes the market for them basically not a market. Its a play thing for those with crazy enough to mine. By adding in these changes you will essentially begin bleeding off all the bulk ice on the market until it reaches a level in which the market itself becomes a "competitive virtual market" AKA supply comes in line with demand. That is great. I will say however that the changes themselves may be drastic enough to drop supply below if not well below demand thus driving prices through the roof. This will only be found out in time.

In my opinion its almost inevitable that supply will drop below demand simply because the way ice mining is structured right now its nearly impossible to know what the demand for ice is. (CCP could find that out but the amount of work and number crunching required would be too much to ask.)

When supply does drop below demand and we discover that the current amount of available ice is not enough for the pilots of eve would more ice then be added in kind of like the upcoming mineral changes?

To me this change seems like the very first step in a process to fine tune ice mining and make it more relevant. As it is right now there is no competition at all for ice mining. You warp to the belt mine ice dont even got to change your bookmark because its always there. This will make ice mining better fiscally and competitively but its going to need some fine tuning along the way. And unlike other aspects of eve if and when it needs fine tuning it wont be something that can be ignored until there is time for it because a lot of things all over eve could go disastrously wrong very fast and possibly alienate many players should the supply fall off enough.

Why would anyone fly a Covetor or Hulk when a Mackinaw has a far better tank and a huge ore bay meaning fewer trips back to station (with or without an Orca booster in the belt)?

Do you even harvest ice?

Erm... there are plenty of lowends in nullsec, it's just that nullsec miners only want to mine in grav sites, and they pick the two or three most lucrative sites to mine then ignore everything else (i.e.: the "hidden belts"). Mining in belts is a suicide wish. So it's not that there aren't enough low-ends to do meaningful production in nullsec.

The reason lowends are not mined in nullsec is because it's easier to import them as one freighter load of highly compressed minerals, rather than haul 40 freighter loads of lowends from mining systems to manufacturing systems (and that is assuming you can compress or refine the ore at the point of capture). You can verify this for yourself: head to any nullsec belt and run a survey scanner on the veldspar, scordite, pyroxeres and plagioclase. You'll see that there are mountains of the stuff out there which would keep any mining fleet busy for hours. The problem is that it's in belts that anyone can simply warp to without having to scan the system first, and then you have mountains of ore which you can't refine, so you can't do mineral compression. The best you can hope for is rorqual based ore compression which means having a rorqual in the system.

So what it comes down to is that the easy logistics of jump freighting a load of mineral compression modules down from Jita is far, far easier than acquiring those lowends locally. CCP could attempt to address this by making modules take up more volume than the minerals they were created from, which would mean things like the 425mm railgun take up 1500m3 of cargo space instead of 50m3.

While industry is broken, I don't see anyone in nullsec in a big rush to un-break mineral compression. Instead they whine about how hisec industry is too easy.

I have some ideas on how to fix industry in general, though they're not strictly related to ice harvesting.