Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Okay, so with the introduction of the Porpoise we now have another small ship that can ice mine. This time via drones of all things.
The Prospect lost its probing bonus, though...

Design goals: Create a mining ship for gas miners.

Needs to do all the steps:

• Probe the gas - Not intended to be a combat probe ship, so no CPU bonus.
• huff the gas - 5 bonused hardpoints, because we never got any.
• transport the gas - like a bulkier miasmos.

So let me dust off the ship design I've always wanted:


[Canary]

6H
2M
1L

5 turret hardpoints,
20 MBPS, 20 m^3 drone bay
100'000 m^3 ore hold

Mass low enough to fit in frigate holes.
Paper thin EHP (think T1 industrials)
Agility profile: It's a big balloon, it should have a high top speed due to low mass, a plus for large gas sites, but should turn like a whale...


Bonuses per Mining Barge level:
5% reduction in Gas Cloud Harvesting duration.
5% bonus in Core and Combat Scanner Probe strength.

Role bonus:
75% bonus to Mining and Gas Cloud Harvesting yield per cycle.
100% bonus to drone Hitpoints (have the drones distract the rats from your paper thin body.)


So I was thinking, lore-wise, who could develop this thing and what it would look like.
I kept trying to get a series of big baloons into the ORE art style and it just never worked, but then I remembered that ORE doesn't do much gas cloud stuff. So it probably should come from the nullsec pirates.
The Intaki Syndicate would also be a marvelous contender. Make the thing look a bit organic.

Current design ideas for it include:
Lateral wedge gallente-y ship with 2 large gas bladders in the middle and 2 medium ones to each side.
Normal ''long'' ship design with 3 bladders of descending size jammed into the center body.
''Blowfish'' looking ship.
Manta-ray looking command unit (drone bay housed where its ''mouth'' would be) with 3-4 clusters of 3 bladders along its ''tail''.

And here I thought that the humble Venture was the gas-mining ship.
Have they changed it recently?


On a related note, I would like to see a change in how the gas mining skill works.
Just give a % bonus to mining rate or amount and adjust the amount a gas turret can bring in down some to balance.
Update the Venture to keep it where it's at as THE gas mining vessel.

Though I could see why you may want to add a smaller bonus to the Prospect.

Actually... I think that all versions should have the gas part as a ROLE bonus, and have the specialized parts (ore mining, ice mining, cloaking, built in stabs, etc.) be ship bonuses.

--Gadget

In a nutshell?
They don't fully utilize the fitting bonus from the Gas Cloud Harvester skill.
The most bonused ship for GCH is a Tier-1 equivalent.
Finally, while every other style of mining got 1 or more hulls to do the work, GCH is still stuck with only 1 bonused hull over 2 tech levels.

They don't have to.

It's there so that other ships can harvest gas.

That ore hold is a joke right?

Ventures + porpoise.

Sorted.