So, I happened to notice something that just seemed off about the Orca’s align time. All times are through ghost fitting with a blank pod and my skills: Capital Ships 4, Evasive Maneuver 5, Gallente Freighter 3, other freighters @ 0. The orca with no implants impacting align time or speeds is 36.49 seconds (my skills). This is slower than several capitals (nearly all). All of which are much larger in size and mass. They are as follows with aligns times based on my skills:
Carriers:
Archon 29.00 s
Chimera 29.24 s
Thanatos 26.71 s
Nidhoggur 26.93 s
Dreadnought:
Revelation 31.87 s
Phoenix 32.09 s
Moros 31.58 s
Naglfar 31.83 s
Supercarrier:
Aeon 34.98 s
Wyvern 34.36 s
Nyx 32.34 s
Hel 34.42 s
Freighter:
Fenrir 35.97 s
Bowhead 28.80 s
Jump Freighter:
Ark 33.00 s
Rhea 35.20 s
Anshar 30.84 s
Nomad 31.65 s
Most of these ships are easily four times or more the mass of the orca’s measly 150,000,000 kg which is only slightly more than battleships. Perhaps the align time of the orca can be reworked to bring it in line close to ships that are of similar mass and physical size.
But why? Even if CCP will bring align time down, it will be still above 10s, so nothing will change. If you are using ship without prop mod, you are doing it wrong.
I see it more as a problem in there is no sense in it. yes, there’s an mwd trick but it still doesn’t change the fact that there is no reason an Orca should be slower in every sense than any supercarrier. also looking at a Minmatar titan it is less than 10 seconds slower align speed and its base velocity is 25% higher than an orca. so no I don’t think its an actual problem but I do believe it should be brought more in line broken or not.
Basically, it may be a matter (if we can imagine), the cap ships have more thrusters of larger size, more of them?
Where as the Orca may have puny thrusters, and less of them, when building large ships the Orca uses no capital propulsion engines in the building of it, why, its no longer consider a cap ship even though it uses cap parts in its construction…yup, confusion for sure but that might be your answer.
Edit; fitting a 500 mn, eve uni says this; 100MN/500MN = Battleships (actual thrust is 150,000,000 N), so that adds the umph you need for a 10 sec align time, making people choose between tank/versatility/or speed.
So no mention of the fact that caps agility is affected by advanced spaceship command which does not affect the orca. That could be reason enough right there.
I suspect the align time was chosen primarily for balance reasons. Logically the Nestor should not have a mass of 20 million kg while most other battleships are over 100 million kg - but, if you want it to enter a C1 wormhole, that’s the easiest solution.
Orca is an extremely useful ship - whether for mining or hauling. It’s not unreasonable that it should have a drawback like poor agility. As mentioned above - Orca will align/warp with 1 cycle of a MWD (10 seconds) or 2 cycles of an AB (15 seconds)
Orca is the smallest ship built using Capital Construction Components but it is also the only ship built without any Capital Propulsion Engine. Rorqual, by comparison uses 9 of these so it isn’t surprising that it is a bit faster in spite of being considerably larger.
I have no idea if there is any causal connection between the components used to build the ship and its performance but, the only other choice seems to be that CCP picks the numbers to achieve balance objectives.
As far as balance, the only ones of these that are relevant are the freighters. Other caps don’t have competing roles. Maybe the number we need to look at cargo:transit time ratio, comparing industrials/haulers of all sizes. It does feel like it probably does need to be more agile though.
the orca is a brick designed to sit in belts and hand out boosts, it doesn’t need to be fast. And as said just fit a mwd on it and you have 10s aligns.
As @Piugattuk said Orca is rather confusing ship that include the skills it required to operate and its stats. Its more like a mix of different ideas that someone put into that hull in the end.
