Science & Industry

This is going to look like a very noobish question, but can someone Explain what exactly Corporate Hangars and Ship Maintenance bays do in ships like the Rorqual.

Consider them as additional separated cargo holds with following features;

- Corporate Hangar shows up as a bunch of pages and should you allow it, others in your corporation can access them in space. Also any corporate hangar access limitations your corporation has apply to others (except you - a pilot of the ship always has access to all those pages).

- Ship Maintenance Bay holds only assembled ships. In case of Rorqual, only mining barges and haulers. They also cannot have any cargo except ammo and charges (no idea if mining crystals are ok, I guess they might be as they are sort of "ammo" for barges). Also others in your fleet can take and board ships in your maintenance bay in space if you allow it.

When you right click your ship you can open normal cargo, corporate hangar, ship maintenance bay or fuel bay etc as appropriate.

Additional tidbit; neither of these holds can be scanned using cargo scanner, so Orcas are often used in high sec as "high value stuff transport" with the valuables in Corporate Hangar as those cannot be viewed by pirates using cargo scanner.

If ship goes boom, all stuff in these additional holds are destroyed, they never drop as loot.

Functionality of these for Rorqual is that in theory you can get a cyno frig in a juicy mining system in deep 0.0, jump rorqual to that cyno (it has jump drive) and then use the cloning vats aboard the ship to allow others clone jump to the rorqual and then board ships out of the hangar for mining op. This theory fails due to the long cooldown of clone jump and the impractical limitations of cloning vats aboard ships. It's one of those "sounded good in theory" features by CCP that never really worked as intended.

In practice I guess ship hangar is mostly unused - I guess it can be used to move haulers and barges around bit like with a carrier (carrier can carry any kind of ships). And the corp hangar is just extra cargo space.

I haven't personally checked it but have read numerous times in this forum that the Corporate Hangar in Orca vessels CAN be scanned by suicide gankers using a cargo scanner module. It was unscannable at some point but the 'loophole' was removed.

Additionally there are no measures currently available to stop customs vessels in high sec scanning your ship for illegal items.

Confirm that corp hanger is not scanable by other players/pirates.

Even if they could if the ship is popped nothing drops from there. So a suicide Gank profitability can only be based on possible drops of the basic cargo hold. most suicide ganks are against ships with a cargo value much higher than the value of the ships lost in the attack making it still profitable.

However now that you do not get insurance if you are popped by Concord, suicide ganking should drop noticeably. There are still those that gank for fun not profit , like in the up coming Hulkageddon, but I am sure there will be far less suicide ganks of freighters now that the losses are not offset by the insurance payout.

Destroyer dps was increased, and battlecruiser dps/price was increased by the new battlecruisers (at least enough researched bps are in production that the margins are small). ie the value limit for "uneconomic to gank" hasn't changed that much. About the only thing that has changed is the economics of solo ganking a hulk with a brutix, which is probably only economic for people failfitting with faction active tanks in highsec.

Confirming they are indeed considered charges.