Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Because with faster than light communications and sufficient bandwidth why shouldn't they? Teams of engineers in Milton Keynes and Northampton are quite capable of having not insignificant impacts on Formula 1 races in Japan or Canada - with detailed telemetry from fleetmates' shields why do we have to knock on their windows to tell them how to make adjustments?

On-grid boosting will most likely encourage blobbing, while off-grid boosting allows for the encouragement of small, split engagement groups (it doesn't encourage it in itself of course), why would you split your fleet between two objectives if it means one half loses boosts?
I do feel that there are changes which should be made to leadership - but on-grid only isn't the answer IMHO.

And restricting boosts to on-grid wouldn't fix the Rorqual - "you don't put it in a belt because that would be stupid".
The only places the Rorqual as it is would ever see the belts regularly are deep, deep blue space... you might as well give them highsec access as it's the only way the ship will see greater on-grid use.

The lockdown effect of the Industrial Core is part of the issue - the lockdown period is in keeping with Siege and Triage, the ships which use those abilities though are generally recognised as requiring a support fleet. The Rorq is almost never going to be deployed with a support fleet... and because its Ship Maint is limited to Industrial Ships it can't even carry one on standby...
The Rorq's shield reps and tractor beams might be more attractive if the Industrial Core behaved more like Bastion - with a shorter time commitment (and, as previously suggested, tweaks to the effectiveness of tank and remote reps). The Rorqual looks like it should be a powerful tool on-grid, those remote reps and the accompanying capital tank, the tractor beams which enable even those outlying rocks to be grabbed... But in practice it's "stupid".

I wonder too if easing (not too much) the Ship Maint restrictions might not be a bad idea - if the ship could carry T1 frigates that the miners could reship to, perhaps that would be a good start?


I would suggest that the first thing to try would be to convert the Industrial Core from a Siege template to a Bastion template. Reduce the time commitment on the transformation and see what effect that has.
If that alone means the Rorqual is more frequently deployed in belt then perhaps that's the only answer we need at this point. If it ends up leading to Battle-Rorqs clone-jumping huge fleets of Procurers into the front-lines on a regular basis then perhaps that too suggests that the change was in the right direction... though maybe something else needs attention or perhaps it's just gone a little further than we'd like.

I do love the idea of a capital mining ship with huge frickin' strip miners pulling in great chunks of rock but it'd obviously need some special measures to sit in a belt or anom without being hotdropped all the time. If the rorq's transformation mode could turn it into something resistant to hotdrops or some such, then it'd have a chance, as well as giving a bit of a mining boost to compensate for being locked into place. A built-in cyno jammer sounds like a great option, and I think an agility/level bonus would be handy too, to help it get out of harms way quicker. Having a bunch of these in a belt makes them resistant to subcaps as well, they'd be a powerful fleet to combat.

I had the idea that mining bonuses could be moved from rorqs and orcas, and put onto drilling platforms in the new structure system. Far better than simply having a rorq afk on an alt, sitting at a pos all the time.

If capitals are allowed into highsec there's no need for 2 mining command vessels either (especially since they're basically two tiers, and tiers are bad), so either the orca or rorq could be made into the mining ship, and the other stays as a mobile mining support platform with bonuses, big ore bay, SMA etc.