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Are you comparing a T2 Skiff without mining drones with a faction fitted orca here? Remember that the numbers CCP have put forward are max rigged faction/officer fitted fits. Not sensible T2 fits.

I think you missed the idea I was trying to get across.

An Orca will have ONE ice mining drone to mine with.

A skiff, will have 2 lasers PLUS an ice mining drone.

Now unless my math is really bad - An Orca will never pull more ice than a Skiff in the same time period.

I dunno, maybe others aren't thinking about using these new drones on exhumers for the faster "full load" times - But I will be.

I do have to ask.
Do you know what the final stats of the new ice mining drone will be?
Not to be rude but I would say it is a bit early to assume anything just yet.
The ice mining drone might have prety damn good base harvesting time.
And combined with the orcas base 25% time reduction AND its total 50% time reduction from the industrial command ship skill it might mine around 2 blocks by the time the skiffs 2 ice harvesters finish a cycle each.
Now for sure when you combine a skiff with both ice harvesters and an ice mining drone I do belive that it might be a bit faster. but the Orca is most likely very close.
Ofcourse it will be slower the further away form the asteroid the Orca is.
But you can keep it as close as possible to ensure you get best possible mining time.
And again it is in no way shape or form suposed to outclass the main mining barge ships.
Cause im sure ccp dosent want them to become obselete, exept with the rorqual but hey it is expensive as heck and super risky to activate that siege to accuire that 18k a min mining rate lol.

If the rigs aren't stacking penalised then that's a bug happening and shouldn't be calculated on.

Which is precisely why I've suggested allowing the Orca to use the Industrial Cores, with slight modifications to their effects (half or less fuel usage, burst strength bonus and drone bonuses).

IMO the Orca is best used as a support platform that stays on station in the belt with the miners. Using one IMO means you've got a hauler alt available to haul (compressed) ore to station.

what about mining boosts and those belts that are 1300km wide?

some of the roids are 100km apart which means we will have to boost a miner and they warp to it.
on the drone miners, especially the rorqual, we siege and strip a roid, then wait 5 minutes to move to a new roid to siege again.

any chance to shrink those fields since we dont have system wide boosts anymore?

this is a good idea! drone nav computers to increase the yield from having my mining drones move faster! dident think about it att first lol

BTW you what i think would be cool now that mining drones is something that can be considered? MLU low slot moduels that affect drones. we have drone damage amps so why not make drone mining upgrades?

Unlike Combat Drones, Mining Drones don't have Microwarpdrives. They won't benefit from Drone Navigation Computers.

The long and the short of it is that we don't know, but right now from what's in the blog post I'd say either no, that's factored into the statement about the Orca's yield, or yes but with an unbonussed drone it's not a significant amount more. Looking at the bonuses on the Orca and working backwards it looks like that single mining drone will run about 175m3/m with max skills and not counting travel time. That is assuming that I've done my math right though. With maxed riggs for Ice Drone mining I'm showing an Orca with an effective drone count of 9.23 from that one Ice Mining Drone. This is also assuming there are no drone-mining low slot modules. If there are then that would probably shrink the Ice Drone base yield to somewhere below 100.



Possibly, but we don't know for sure. Not all rigs have stacking penalties, but either way if they do or don't that means that's what they're balanced around.



But most of the gankers are engaged in for-profit ganking or at least break even ganks, because that's the easiest form of ganking to maintain. Plus you get less of a reaction when the industrialist looks at what you lost and immediately starts laughing about how much ISK you lost to deny him a few minutes or hours of mining. The few people who do tend to take a 'gank whatever' approach tend to only target cheap ships or pods that can be killed with a single 2m ISK Catalyst.

As for the assertion that people commonly gank empty freighters, the killmails say otherwise. Of all the Freighter losses in High Sec for October 16th only *three* were empty (A Bowhead and two Fenrirs), and all appear to have been lost to war-decs given the faction ships on the killmails and apparent lack of concord response. All others had cargo and all but one of the probable gank targets dropped at least 800m (the one exception was a CODE gank that was carrying fuel blocks and nothing else, and loot fairy said no )

More to the point, the more ships that it takes to kill something the harder it is to gank that target at all. The reason your example there is a Retriever is because it's fairly easy to gank and even reasonably easy to gank profitably if you find one fitted right (or wrong, depending on your perspective). Orcas, on the other hand, are more often bumped than ganked because you need a large number of people to gank one on the cheap, or a still significant number of more expensive ships to gank one with minimal people.



You can just put the Orca pilot in an NPC corp. It has zero impact on his profits, mining yield, or ability to boost, or you can just throw him into a separate holding corp so you can move him around if you need him to be able to have access to a private Citadel.

Either way the impact on an Orca's tank is going to be pretty minimal since they're primarily shield tanked and have more than enough EHP with just mids and a DCU to be extremely gank-resistant.

I guess CCP is just going to ignore all the feedback that the orca will be broken in high sec.

1. It needs to lose way more hull ehp
2. the lower mass will be interesting, 2500 m/s orcas when bumped will be used for some crazy shenanigans
3. dedicated bays are very strong, maybe not too strong on the orca, because it removes the need to fit cargo expanders and the disadvantages that come with that