I had the opportunity to roll out the Orca (USS New York LPD-21) for a little solo work Saturday and a Corp common can op on Sunday afternoon, where we ended up with two Orca's for the last hour.
For solo work, this ship is everything I had hoped it would be. Kaye pilots the Orca, with salvaging Dessie and Hulk in the ship bay. Dee flys a Raptor to web sling the Orca. Jump into system, use the Raptor to do a quick fly by of the belts and pick a spot. Kaye warps the Orca to Dee in the belt, Dee swaps to Hulk and the work shift begins. Takes about an hour to fill the ~135k m3 available. Dock, unload. Rinse & repeat. No can ever outside, much to the chagrin of the Rifter pilot who sat beside me for 15 minutes, popping off in local that he was a "can flippin' mofo, cum 2 steal yur rocks!" That earned him a pat on the head in local in return. ;)
For group ops, the real issue is going to be co-ordinating the haulers so they can keep up. Many of the belts required no repositioning to take down completely and only 1 move was required for the largest belt (22KM range for strips!). At peak, we were generating the equivalent of a full can every 2 minutes (134 sec strip cycle time!). The second Orca as hauler was a good solution. The hauler Orca stood off about 25km and we tractored a can back and forth to transfer. The can Orca has enough buffer storage to cover the trip by the hauler to the station. If you know that you are going to have 2 Orca's you can use 1 with mining links and the other with a different set (say shield links), too.
Some wierd GUI and stacking issues, but nothing too distracting. Kaye is only at Industrial Command Ship 3, so there's still 6% topside available.
Here's a pic:
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7 comments:
Sweet, that looks like it was quite a good operation indeed...funny bout the can flipper maybe they will blow up and all die ( can ya tell I hate them?) Glad you like the Orca, makes me want one too.
I wonder what's the isk/hour is with good skills on your duo mining idea...
Hmmm.... For Empire:
135k m3 of veld = 1.35M units of Veld
1.35M units of veld = 4.054M units of Trit
4.054M units of trit @ 3.95 isk/unit = ~ 16M isk / hr.
There's a little slop in that, but somewhere between 13M and 17M, I'd say
Nice round up Dee! I get mine in a week or so and it's really great to read about it in action :-D
Am I right in thinking it cannot go through mission warp gates, i.e. to get at ore inside missions?
Cheers!
Daen, we haven't tested that yet, but I can't recall a mission gate with nice ore behind it that wouldn't pass a battleship, so I'm hopeful that the Orca will go through as well. I'll post an update when we make that test.
Hey, Dee! o7
I was one of the new people in corp chat over the weekend. Lots of great camaraderie for a new cadet, I must say.
Thank you for writing a blog that's not only informative but acts as a great advert for the University. It was the primary way I learned about the Uni and I'm happy to be here.
wish i my orca would be delivered already ...
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