My alt does not yet have max skills in range. I’m working on it. The alt has a boosted range of 37km. A moon field is enormous. I apologize for not just mining Veldspar or Scordite. I only do moon mining these days. 37km will only get you a very small portion of the field.
I recently installed a rig into my refinery to help minimize the space between rocks, but that only helps a little.
Without that rig, 37km can actually only land you within range of 4 rocks before you have to move again.
And aligning is not the only way to protect a Hulk.
There are advantages to staying within 2500m of the Orca.
You can store the ore inside the Orca which minimizes loss since the Orca is a fortress.
You can store the Hulk inside the Orca which is instant and can be done even when targeted.
And even without being in range, the Orca can provide massive shield boosts to the Hulk by way of command boosts, remote shield boosts, and drone bots and can even maintain a remote shield boost for several minutes before depleting the cap.
There’s no need to sacrifice the Hulk’s movement with that rig or slow boat around trying to maximize align time. I have enough to do already by managing drones, moving and compressing ore, and planning my next mining location once these 3 rocks are done.
It’s why I’ve maxed out my shield, shield emission, and capacitor skills.
I found this: it is a post about how OP it is to escape combat by docking inside another ship: