Orca Expanded Role

I’m just throwing this out there for feedback - so be gentle… What about slightly expanding the Orca’s role as follows:

• Allow reprocessing of minerals (only) in the mining hold (no bonuses). And this is for the Orca only (no remote reprocessing).
• Give it +2 turret slots and a +2% yield/-2% duration/+5% range to strip miners per Industrial Command Ship level. So if not utilized for strip mining it can run point defense weapons instead.
• Add +20% to mining drone hold per Industrial Command Ship level.
• Increase the number of locked targets by +2.

The drones on the Orca are great - don’t get me wrong - but having a more active mining component would be more engaging for this ship.

I don’t even want to touch the remote compression aspect because I know that’s a mixed bag of snakes.

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I don’t see why the Orca needs any of these bonuses.

Mineral hauling? That’s completely unrelated to the role of the Orca. The Orca is a mining support ship and can haul and compress ore, but it has nothing to do with how ore is used further downstream after it already has been refined in a station. That’s what other ships are for.

Turret slots? Orca isn’t meant to fight, nor is it supposed to compete with mining ships. It’s there to support the mining ships.

Mining drone hold? What even is this supposed to mean? A bigger drone hold for mining drones?

Additional targets? How much target swapping do you think an Orca is supposed to do? A couple of barges with remote repairs, and a target for your drones to fight or mine. Even if you set your mining drones on 5 separate asteroids you have plenty with the 7 locked targets it has.

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Why? To give it a more active mining role (rather than just bonuses and compression). And there’s nothing wrong with a few turret slots to pick off those pesky frigates.

And yes, I meant the mineral capacity of mining drones.
7 isn’t really enough targets (especially with the slow lock time); 10 is a more ideal number. A slightly faster lock time wouldn’t hurt, either.

And yes, I do use an Orca. It would nice to have more of an expanded role for it. It should be able to mine/keep pace with at least a T1 mining barge. Just based on the cost alone you’re not going to see fleets of Orcas anyway.

I get ‘more is more better’ vibes here, but aside from that 10 is higher than 7 I do not see why the Orca needs to lock more targets. With the role of the Orca in mind, which is targeting a couple of stationary rocks in slow-paced gameplay, I do not see the reason this ship requires to swap between targets often, nor fast.

And the rest of your suggestion just feels like a “please buff my ship” plea for a ship that already is capable and has a well designed role.

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5 active targets for asteroids, 1 spare asteroid and 3 empty slots for rats = 9. I guess I could drop a tractor beam and run an auto targeting system.

I would love to see fleets of Orcas. More of them to play space pinball with…

I find the Orca to outperform expectations in a lot of roles. I see no need for it to be even more op.

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The orca already makes a big difference if you have one on grid so why buff it again, curious


I just realised the Orca isnt good at mining. This seems wrong

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It would be cool with a symbiotic relationship in mining so that if an Orca has a mining barge in the fleet the Orca will mine faster. The more mining barges in fleet the faster the orca mines

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some are impressed with my orca fleet when its out in force, others are dismayed the instant it lands on grid(like the lone orca mining) and start screaming in local…

As much as I would abuse turrets on an orca(mining lasers yay), these things are not needed and would overpower the orca more than it has a right to be.

-1

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T2 Orca…?

Sure. It’s called a Rorqual…

Orca is at an absolute fine spot, if anything the price could be toned down a bit. 800M to 1.2B would be quite okay imho…

But Buffs… no.

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Agreed. The Orca is in a very good spot as it is. Even with the 2 billion ISK price tag, what the Orca does can allow you to recover that initial cost in just a couple of days.

Yeah sure, but we might see more Orca killmails if ppl wouldn’t be so hesitant to use them because of their high value. As an initial investment it really doesn’t matter if it costs 1.5 or 2.2b, you’ll get the costs back in pretty soon.

In general I think most ships should be a bit cheaper, so people have less fear of losing them and need less PvE time to grind the losses back. Not “free” of course, but when I played starting most ships did cost like half of what they did cost now. Sure, veterans have better high-income options today, but not everyone likes to grind abyssals, blitzing L4s or having their own WH to grind money.

Yeah, 1.2 billion maybe. 800 million is too cheap. That’s a brand new Orca every single day, for me at least. Others mileage may vary…

Just have CCP make a T2 Orca, but instead of boosts, it’s focus on strip mining lasers and drone defense.

Think superaized Mackinaw. You know these would just be bigger piñatas.

Dont make a new ship, just fix the Orca

An interesting fix could be to make more enemy NPCs spawn. The Orca has bonus to tractor beam and bonus to drones. If more NPC spawn it has more to do.

It can be conditional too. The more people on grid the more NPCs spawn.

A Skiff pulls in excess of 40.73m3/s (50m3/s boosted). An Orca only 25.42/s by comparison. You’d think it could least pull in something comparable.

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