You mean that wasn’t its purpose until CCP redesigned it and introduced Excavators specifically to make it a mining ship, right?
If CCP decided to get rid of Excavators tomorrow, the miners of nullsec would basically shrug and keep on trucking. Rorqs get hulk-esque throughput w/Mining Drone IIs, you know? You know who’d piss and moan about it?
The guys who lobbied hard for fighters and Excavators to give them killmails.
So sure! Nuke 'em! Tune Rorqs down to where they don’t get as much yield as a Hulk. It won’t stop people from using Rorqs. Know why?
Mobility.
Rorqs have jump drives. You want them to go back to being a support ship? (Frankly, a lot of us in null would prefer that.) Let them do Industrial Bridges so the Exhumer-fleets can move around enough to be worth actually using. Because that’s what really keeps them from being used: they’re just not worth it. They’re not mobile enough in an environment where you have to actively mine all your moons.
Dont’ get me wrong, active moon mining is good. Passive moon mining was utter crap that let people make money for doing nothing once the POS was set up. If you want the ISK, you should have to actually work for the ISK. Spent time out in space where you can get shot at. Ideally, you’d do that in a ship that doesn’t sit on an obscene amount of local tank… like an Exhumer. But it needs to be able to get around to all the moons you need to mine.
More importantly… so does the pilot. Right now, you can put the ships in a rorq and jump it, but then the miners need to interceptor around, which takes longer and frankly, is annoying—the interceptor can’t be stashed in the Rorq when you get there, so everyone wastes time docking and swapping ships back and forth. And when you’ve got dozens of moons to deal with… that wasted time adds up. So people just spend more ISK to get into Rorqs and jump themselves around.
Now, if Rorqual Clone Bays (which are a thing, but NOBODY uses them) could let people JC around without the 19-24h timer? That’d do it, too, but that would be massively abuseable. Rorqs would basically be a low-cost invasion platform. Just carry the beach-head ships in a carrier or fax, and JC to the Rorq. So it’s probably not the best option.
Enter the Industrial Bridge. Bridge around industrial ships—miners, haulers, etc—with a Rorqual. (And FFS, remove the ability for BlOps to jump to Industrial Cynos, cuz that’s just dumb. ) Remove Excavators. Poof!! Now the Exhumer w/Rorq support is the premier mining ship for nullsec, instead of massive groups of 400+ Rorquals.
But, you know, that doesn’t drive the Skill Extractors.