Science & Industry

Now as a disclaimer this is for nullsec miners not empire or lowsec as they dont have to deal with the same types of rats that nullsec does. As most know nullsec miners ussually have a dedicated belt tank for the rats, ranging from a domi to a drake to pretty much any ship that can be setup to perma active rank a 3 bs 3 bc spawn of rats. the tank sits in the belt while the miners do thier stuff. Now with the changes this means thats rats will most likely agro onto the mining ships. Now an option would be for the entire fleet to swap from hulks to skiffs but most of my miners and myself included do no want to lose the amount of yeild we would swapping.

Having not goten to test how this is going to work out on the test server i was running down a list of things that we will have to do to be able to mine without having to constalty deal with rats.

We can have the same tank ship sit in belt then pick off the rats one by one but that will still require a booster of some sort on the hulks to keep them alive while this happens, so it looks like all the hulks will be needing the shield boosters and mods accomping them. This was apparantly a popular setup a while ago, pithii b or a type booster with resistance rigs but now that we ussually have to dedicate one whole rig slot to the mining rig we lose out of the second res rig.

Another option is to spider tank of sorts with with shield drones and a small shield booster. or use a scimi to shield rep the hulks while this could work for small groups there is no way it would be able to sustain any size of mining fleet.

Lots of ways to attempt to deal with this problem and im hoping the bigger rats will tend to stay on the BS tank ship though im not holding my breath. One could hope that ccp would turn nullsec grav sites into the sleeper wh grav sites where you kill rats once and your good till dt or a server restart but i suppose thats asking to much.

What worrys me finally is this eliminate anything but an exhumer from being able to mine in nullsec meaning just like before most people training up a new mining toon will be delegated to hauling roles in a mammoth untill not only can they fly an exhumer but when they get the tanking skills as with target swapping rats you not only will need 70+ days of training to get into the exhumer but now you need to train a shitload of tanking skills to be able to do this with any sort of peice at mind. therefor limiting the mining pool at start, forcing people to either stay docked or just warp out evry single time a new wave spawns which is about 15-20 minutes.

Just want to see other nullsec miners views on this and what you are planning to do?

Obvious trolllllllll

If you want one hulk to perma tank the entire spawn, you'll have to run a setup with 2 faction hardeners, 1 pithi b type small booster, 1 gistii b type small booster, 2 ccc rigs with a 5% cpu implant. This allows max yield, but requires alot of max skills, including mining upgrades 5. This was my old tank hulk fit before the skiff buff.

I've trained my hulk toons for a little droneswarm action. Its not hard to fit a simpler, lower SP, but still decent tank on a max yield hulk either, t2 small booster, 2 faction resist amps, 1 resist rig. that's enough to hold the hulk together until my 45 drones have finished off the rats.

I am having trouble with getting drone assist to work, when assigning them to one hulk toon. Someone told me assist only works if you fire guns at them, or use another type of offensive module. Should they assist based on my drone attacks? If it requires an offensive mod, I will not be happy putting a target painter on one of my hulks.....

As for skill training new mining toons, your talking about the "end game" of the mining profession; it shouldn't be a fast thing to train. Leave them in haulers or the new mining frigate until they can handle the big boy stuff

but the rats will be attacking random targets, not focusing on the one i assign the drones to

now if i could set them to defend the whole fleet, i'd be a happy camper

for now, im just gonna put them all on aggressive, and target individually as i need