EVE New Citizens Q&A

If you are on the fence with this I offer my opinion and experience with using them.

While mining barges are fine they are very big slow moving targets and do often attract others (especially retrievers), insuring them goes a long way if you spend time in belts.

So are they worth it, I say yes, for further information keep on reading;

Both mining frigates offer double and triple the load of a Venture and this means less running back to the station to drop off ore, now with citadel's that offer reprocessing you can compress the whole load.


The Endurance has a 15,000 m3 ore hold and a 15,000 m3 load compresses down into just into 227 m3 and the compressed ore fits into the ore hold so you can leave your cargo hold for the occasional rat that wanders in and salvage and loot as the Endurance offers drones while the Prospect does not.

Endurance 15000 m3 ore holds 2,310,000 ISK @ 15.40 per unit. (Veldspar).

What the Endurance does with it's sizeable ore hold and drones the Prospect offers something the Endurance cannot, a covert ops cloak (the Endurance only offers prototype and improved cloak), while it may seem like it's not an important trade off the covert ops cloak gives you the ability to lurk around at full speed and find the perfect spot and immediately cloak and warp off in case of danger all without the need to decloak as with the Endurance, a huge advantage nowadays especially considering that people now gank just for the lulz and not worried about profit.

The Prospect offers 10,000 m3 and no drones, but can use a covert ops cloak huge +

I have had people pop in a belt and immediately cloak and move to a safe spot to observe or dock, if you are paying some attention and use some basic strategy you should never be in too much danger (hi sec), and if you use the Endurance for God sake do not "deploy" drones for AFK with rats, the rat you want to avoid won't be an NPC and those drones will not allow you to cloak up quickly in a pinch.


The drawbacks of mining frigates

It doesn't mine as much per cycle as the strip miners do on barges, while the strip miners cycle about 2:40 the miner II cycles at 1 min the ore mined will be much more with barges/exhumers, what this means is you'll take about double the time to fill you ore hold then a barge (in my experience), about 12 to 13 mins for a procurer and ~27 mins in an Endurance, while it may be sounding bad for ISK per hour you have to take into account that you also spend minutes slow boating to asteroids in barges, this is where mining frigates shine, a microwarp drive and you get around to the juiciest roids quickly saving you time including warp offs and in's.

Anyway I hope this helps you decide, also building your own ships (tech II mining frigates), will help you save ISK if you do decide to go this route.

Definitely agree, unfortunately even in high sec mining isn't welcomed and is a hated activity by crazed people.

I see a lot of the cloaky ones buzzing around in wormholes. Anyone who is still mining in hisec and has not yet discovered frigate mining in wormholes or gas mining is missing a trick.

Prospect is an amazing covops cyno ship.

I've trained into a Prospect on one of my alts. It's handy, but I'm already considering extracting the brain goo for that skill.

simple fact is that a Venture does everything I need at a fraction of the price.

now, hunting for booster gas sites in 0.0 and lowsec is where I could see myself wanting a Prospect or two.