Science & Industry

Cargo bays seem to be a bit small to hold various mining crystals. Although the Mack and Skiff have less turrets, so need to carry fewer crystals.

From what I can tell (and my math skills are horrendous), the Mack and Skiff will both achieve 30 cycles/hr (counting ship roles and skill bonuses but not the rigs). That is down a bit for the Mack which makes ice mining an unprofitable venture. Either those rigs better kick some serious ass or ice prices are going to go even higher.

So if I have a Hulk with 2 MLU II's and my alt flying Itty 5 with 38K cargo who is hauling, will that still give me more ore per hour than the lower exhumers?

That's not really on point, but they really couldn't be botted well. PVP has elements of unpredictability that just don't exist in PVE. Computers don't deal with the unpredictable nearly as well as humans do. They can't improvise for something unplanned. That's not a problem with PVE because there's nothing unpredictable about it, and you can plan for all possible human interaction (neut in Local in null, canflipper in High, probes on DScan in WH -> Dock/POS).

Fleets:
First, Text to Speech isn't that good at the moment.
Second, a Bot wouldn't likely be able to lose a fight gracefully (E&E, etc). A Bot fleet would be a win-or-whelp fleet.
Third, knowing when it's worth using Cap Boosters, when it's safe to pulse your MWD (wrong time and you're stranded trying to align), what to do if the FC goes down, etc. (How do you think a Bot would handle "Target Tackle").

Suicide Ganking requires finding likely targets, which I suppose you could bot, but it would take a fair bit more complicated bot than a PVE one.

Gate Camping really requires a good decloaker if you want to be good at it, which requires manual piloting, which I doubt a bot can do well. A botted gate camp also probably couldn't identify bait and when (and how) to run away.

Anyway, even if botting was efficient at running PVP, that would reinforce my point. A Mining bot is not more efficient at mining than a Human. A mission/ratting bot is more efficient at missioning/ratting than a Human. Therefor, in competition with bots, Miners have a leg up compared to missioners/ratters.

L5 in a rigging skill takes like a week and a half, and L4 is all you need for T2 rigs.

They're probably gonna stuff it into an existing rig category.

Cheers.

Unless the manufacturing costs of ships decreases, I can see prices spiking some what as demand increases. Not only because of more people or alts joining the mining profession, but also because every miner will want a couple of their preferd ship type each with a different rig to save regularly destroying them to change types?

Would be nice to have a specialized ore rig that maybe has the ability to accept either the ice or mercoxit module that can be removed without destruction ;P

while now getting with a mack 4 cubes of ice @ 191 seconds ( orca boosted ) , anyone know what would be the new output considering Ice Harvesting Upgrades and the rig?

Thanks in advance!

The best post in whole topic. Pure truth!

Question to all those who curse AFK mining - Have you EVER tried to mine for couple hours not-AFK?

AND beeing so low income source, mining MUST be made AFK activity, because nobody will do it other way.

1. I would love to do mining without AFK, but it's too borring.
2. If you make it so I have to sit constantly like running missions - make adequate pay. Nobody wants to actively mine for 1/5th of mission runners pay.
3. High-sec is probably the only place AFK mining occurs, and not counting ice belts it's not that much of afk mining anyway - roids pops really fast...

P.S.
Why everybody in every game wants main resource gatherers nerfed to oblivion and DPS chars to get all the glory and money?
What if I LIKE crunching rocks, but can't because of absurdicly low pay rate?

Yes.

/Or/ you could have 2 alts, both in Retrievers/Macks for a higher yield (you'll lose a couple of cycles hauling every 10 cycles or so, but it should still turn out higher.)