EVE General Discussion

I have been seeing this new mining drone that is not yet available and looks very interesting.

Video of it animating in window preview with stats.

Excavator Mining Drone


High Res. Images with stats on my blog.

http://tomseve.blogspot.com/2016/03/images-of-day-03242016.html


What do you think?

Can not say much about it. I think it depends on how many drones you can release. I am hoping we can place modules to sent out a few more drones.

When I said sending out more drones I was thinking of being able to send out the normal 5 large drones for those rats and maybe two of these drones for mining.

Since they what more people using the Rorqual I think they are going to have to do more options with their high slots and not just for boosting

or maybe even let us fit "Captial Mining Lasers" or something like that.

My thoughts as a professional miner:

Before checking stats:

Oh come on...

After checking stats:

Useless non-highsec piece of sh/t.

I would actually mine a lot more if I could buy a Rorqual and use it in high sec.

Some fine people on Reddit have done some numbers on these things and with the assumption that the Rorq will get some sort of bonus to using mining 'fighters' to be able to use 5 at once, the theoretical max mining yield with the 5 and max skills is in the region of 10,000m3/minute. Now this is NOT counting travel time as it's horrible (150m/s with maxed skills from memory, could be wrong, still sub 200 either way). Factoring that the realistic yield drops down significantly, so much so that they are almost not worth the bother (for a frame of referance a maxed hulk is around 3.6k m3/minute or whatever, soemwhere around there).

here is the link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/4aufqg/sisi_excavator_drone/


Will this make me use my Rorq in nullsec in a belt as opposed to sitting it in the PoS boosting? No, the realistic attainable yield is not enough to justify the 2.4 billion+ ships to sit in a belt and boost and mine about as much as 2 hulks, maybe less due to not wanting to be bumping asteriods when warping out (assuming not just gtfo jumping when hostiles appear in system). Granted insurance will cover around 1.8 bill of the hull, you only need to mine 600ish to 'break even' but even then, that break even point is still a meh proposition.

This is also assuming that the rorq can even use 5 of the things. On SiSi the stats are the exact same as they are now on Tranquility so testing is impossible and with the expansion coming out in around a months, some of us are getting a little worried that this is going to get rushed out and botched and not fixed for quite some time due to not enough testing.

You idiots.
The idea is to get out of hisec, not beg for awesome null ships to be used in it.
I can just see all the rorquals undocking 1 minute after downtime to hoover up hisec belts with fleets of alt exhumers.
F##### stupid.
Ugh, breathing through my mouth here, my disgust can really only be expressed with interpretive dance.

Maybe allow Rorqs in HS if the owner has standing with an empire of 4.0 or better and then it could only use the gates in that empire's space. Would keep the number of people using rorqs in hs down.

Just thought of something. I do not know if it is a good idea since I can not test it, but. a way to get these drones on without a big reworking of the Rorqual and usable on other ships.

They could make a new module that increases the ships drone bandwidth. So for instance a ship that normally sent out 5 med. drones with a couple of these modules you can sent out 4 large drones for higher damage and survivability in null against rats.

Would something like this actually work?

Firstly, why do these drones need to be used by other ships?

If you want to use them, then learn to fly the ship that is designed to use them with.

Secondly, no that wouldn't work in any case.

In addition to 200 MBit/sec bandwidth, the drone has a volume of 200 m^3 (SiSi stats, so subject to change).

That won't fit in the drone bay of regular mining barges or exhumers, etc.

Think of it like the Gecko of mining drones. Big and uses lots of bandwidth, so limited in how many and what ships can use it. Not everything in the game needs to be usable by everyone. It's ok for things to be specialised.