EVE New Citizens Q&A

1. It takes 3 or 4 mining laser cycle to fill your ore bay in procurer. Each cycle lasts 3 minutes. If it will be 3 or 4 depends on if you use mining drones or not. Without mining laser upgrades and drones it really can come up to 5 cycles. So yes, it is up to 15 minutes but most likely you will have to switch asteroids before your get ore hold full. So it is not that much afk any way.

2. It is hard to kill properly tanked retriever in 1.0 or 0.9 as well. Even reasonably tanked procurer can be ganked if attacker has 10+ well organized catalysts. If they prepared attack (lure CONCORD far away from your system), they need even smaller number. What I have heard is that in some rookie systems you can not be attacked at all. But I am not sure of this and if it is true, belts in there are probably mined out in few hours after restart. You do not need much drone damage if you are in procurer. One Hobgoblin I is enough for any high sec belt rats. So hobgoblin and 4 mining drones let you semi-afk mining as long as you want.

3. Covetor has even smaller ore hold and single mining laser works like 3. But costs less ISK and ftting.