I keep reading about Mining fleets, from corp ads, and mentioned in other areas. But I need to ask some questions about it.
If you join a mining corp that does mining fleets, do they have “mining fleet” meetup? Or is this some around the clock thing with people coming and going? If you are mining and are dumping minerals in to be compressed or refined, how does the corp track what you’ve mined and give you an appropriate payout?
I read something about Public Mining fleets? How do they work? Is there some sort of public channel? Are they scheduled? Do they run 24/7? How does their payout system work?
There’s just so much going on out there that you only hear bits and pieces about. Theres a lot of stuff that seems like “common knowledge” that people absolutely have no idea about.
Like yesterday someone said theres a corp dedicated to selling salvaging services. If I wasn’t there at that time, I would’ve never known.
In regards to corp mining fleets. The way my corp does it is usually there is a specified time we do moon mining, and then when it’s finished everyone is payed out according to what they mined. You can see exactly what people have mined with the Mining Ledger.
The easiest way to learn is to ask questions. Nobody knows all the answers but we all know a few!
One superb resource for new players is Eve University - they have a comprehensive Wiki and instructor led classes. For mining fleets: https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Mining_fleets
For salvaging http://pro-synergy.net/ You can join the corporation and salvage other player’s missions.
Corp or private Mining fleets can be worked or thought of a few different ways depending on goals of those involved. Fleets don’t even have to be doing the same thing or even in the same system.
The main reason most mining fleets form is to share the “fleet boost”, which can shorten mining laser cycle time(by as much as 30% or 45% depending on the boosting ship, like the Porpoise, Orca, or Rorqual which have bonuses to mining burst) or defense(there is burst that can raise shield and armor strength) or even attack or speed bonuses. I set up my orca with 2 mining bonuses and 2 shield bonuses that help everyone in the fleet.
All mining fleets work in the same Belt(on grid within the charge range) if they want to share in the boosting.
Fleet different goals are at the end when dividing the ore
everyone for themselves: you keep what you mine, you can load it in the orca to brought back to base to be destituted or you can carry it to be unloaded yourself.
mine to refine: my corp head has good refining skills and refining implants to get a really nice yield, I’m an alpha so I can’t get much higher than 55%. But he can get 70%, so when we have a fleet Mining day, he just refines the ore all at once and sends us the minerals minus a small amount to cover his expenses.
barn building: the corp is building a large refinery, and we sometimes pitch in mining to go straight into that project. Not getting anything directly out at the moment…
hang out fleets: if I’m mining in a belt with other random people, sometimes I talk to them on local or direct message them just to pass the time. I’ve been invited to hang out in huge random ad-hoc fleets. Just chatting and sharing some guys boost having a good time. Everyone doing their own thing.
Let’s take a step back and look at “fleet boosts” first. A fleet boost is a buff to the ships that have joined together to form a fleet. There are a variety of boosts available that improve the fleet in various ways. To generate the boost, one player will need to train up skills which unlock the boosts, and that player will need to be in some sort of leadership position in the fleet. There are some ship modules called “Command Burst Modules” which generate the fleet boost for the fleet, but there are limits on which ships can use these modules.
So, in the context of a mining fleet, the three key ships for boosts which improve mining performance are all from the ORE faction. The ships are the Porpoise, the Orca and the Rorqual. The Porpoise and the Orca can be used in any area of the game, hisec, losec and nulsec. The Rorqual can only be used in nulsec AFAIK.
These three ships have special bonuses to make a fleet boost more powerful but the person piloting the boosting ship must have trained the correct skills for the boost to work. If the person piloting the boosting ship has not trained the skills to unlock the boost, the fleet does not get the boost. When other players join a fleet with someone in one of these ships (who has trained for boosts), the other fleet players get boosted. In a mining fleet with mining boosts active, the mining ships all mine ore faster and may be buffed in other ways as well.
The Orca and the Rorqual also have a large amount of ore storage space inside them, so what happens is the mining ships mine the ore and when they are full, they “jettison” their ore into space inside a “can” (you don’t need to bring any cans, they are created automatically when you jettison your ore or cargo from your ship). The Orca or Rorqual will normally have some tractor beam modules fitted and use them to pull the cans of ore to itself, then load the ore inside it’s ore bay. The mining ships can keep mining with minimal interruption, until the Orca or Rorqual has filled up it’s ore bay, then it needs to unload the ore somewhere, usually by docking at a station. The Porpoise can do the same thing but it’s ore storage space is not very large, some mining ships can hold more ore than a Porpoise can.
I haven’t dealt with salvaging players so I really can’t say much about them.
Details depend on the fleet organizers, but typically a fleet isn’t a 24/7 affair. A fleet is the MMO equivalent of forming a group for a specific task. In the case of mining, as mentioned above, certain ships can provide ore yield bonuses to all the mining barges within the fleet itself. Takes a while to train a character to that point (look at the skill requirements for Orca or Porpoise, and also Mining Foreman / Mining Director).
Payout system depends. By yourself you would mine x amount. In the fleet you would mine x+20% boost. So they’ll probably “tax” you 15%, so you end up with x+5% and the ships that just sit there to run the fleet boost modules will get paid the 15%. Win-Win.
So, just pop over to the right sub-forum and ask around. The main forum page has the list of sub-forums, and otherwise you can also use the drop-down menu at the top-left.