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Yes, Mackinaws are about to be the confirmed king of the mining world, from most people's persepctive. I would have prefered to see Hulks have a touch more yield potential.

How would I (personally) do that? I would put 4 or 5 rig slots on them (and calibration to match). You want to make your Hulk super expensive with rediculously priced T2 rigs incresaing yeild? Go for it, you have the best yeild and no-one can complain. Want to shield it up with defence rigs rigs? Sure. But you have to pay for what you add on, not get it free with the hull.

[[Statistics - All five]

Effective HP: 9,145 (Eve: 7,608)
Tank Ability: 21.90 DPS
Shield Resists - EM: 37.50%, Ex: 65.00%, Ki: 62.50%, Th: 50.00%
Armor Resists - EM: 60.00%, Ex: 10.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 35.00%

That's using skills at lvl 5 and omni damage. So a nerf to the EHP, a nerf to sig size, a boost to anyone wanting to gank a Hulk.

I AM one of the newer players that has spend a lot of time and isk on skillinig for a Hulk and am absolutely pissed off at the fact that what I have spent so long doing now seems futile.

Cheers for that. One less account.

A bit off-topic...

A friend of mine has a blueprint copy of a Covetor idling in her station on the off chance her built Covetor got ganked. It seems the mineral requirements are going to change with these alterations to the mining barges. So would it be a good idea to build through copies now before the update this Wednesday?

I know this is pointless, but let me make one last attempt.

We are being told that Hulks and Covetors are being limited to 5 sets of crystals because it will "force pilots to make some decisions" before undocking. In other threads, some of you have also claimed that this limitation will force fleets to be come up with a plan about who will be mining what.

The problem here is that this change will not place any such burden on most miners. Instead, it will only affect the subset of miners who operate in SOV and wormhole space.

Miner B lives in SOV null sec space, in an alliance with a number of other corps. Most of his mining takes place in gravitational sites, and the miners in his alliance have worked hard to upgrade their main mining system to both reach and maintain the desired industry level. They have a large asteroid cluster spawned in the system at all times, and it contains 12 different ore types. To be able to mine in these belts (plus the regular belts that appear in his system), he has had to train 4 times longer than Miner A, since he needs to mine all 16 different ore types in the game.

When Miner B gets home from work and wants to go mining, other alliance members have already been in the belt ahead of him. There's no way of knowing what kinds of ores are still in the belt, how many units are remaining, or where those asteroids are located in relation to one another. One of the bigger mining corps in his alliance is made up of primarily Russian speakers, and communication is difficult. In any event, it's already late in Russia and most of them have gone to bed. Another group of miners comes from the German corp. They are still in the belt, but language difficulties make it hard to have a conversation about ore types. So Miner B makes some random guesses about which ore types he might find when he lands in the belt, hoping for Arkonor, Bistot, Crokite, Hemorphite, and Hedbergite. He loads in 3 of those crystals apiece, and warps to the corp bookmark for the current large grave site.

When he lands, he realizes that his guesses were awful. All of the Arkonor is gone. The Germans have 3 Hulks hitting the last remaining Bistot rock with 3 lasers apiece. There are still 2 Crokite asteroids left, but they are far away from each other. and neither one is currently in range. He can't even scan them to see how much is left in them. There is one Hemorphite rock just 15 km away, but his scanner shows that it has only 520 units left in it. All of the other Hemorphite is too far away to either mine or examine with his survey scanner. His only lucky guess was Hedbergite. There is one untouched Hedgbergite rock within range. It could keep him mining for an hour or more, but not if he nails it with all 3 lasers at the same time. But what choice does he have? The only other rocks within range are 2 nicely-sized Kernites (that he doesn't have crystals for) and a Spodumain that nobody wants to bother with.

So he slowly turns his Hulk around, spends the painfully long aligning time writing down a list of the closest asteroids, makes a few bookmarks to some asteroids that are too far away to hit with his scanner (hoping that there is still a decent amount left in them) and warps back to the station. There he reloads with a different set of crystals, and heads back out to one of his new bookmarks. When he gets there, though, he finds that the Crokite that he warped in on is largely exhausted, and that there really are no other rocks in range.

He docks, shuts down Eve, and goes to play World of Tanks.

This Hulk configuration will only have its stated effect on Miner B. Miner A will get max yield without any need to make choices. Miner B -- who has already paid a price in having to train all those different ore specialization skills and working with less efficient refineries -- is essentially forced to choose a less efficient ship.

Nothing I say here will change anything. But I thought I would make one last attempt to explain why those of us who live in these asteroid cluster sites really do need to carry more than just 13 crystals into the belts.