My ideas pretty simple I think at least the idea is. Orca’s probably the most underutilized ship in the game besides Titans which are only bridgers. Ship maintenance bay for the most part on the orcas useless transporting anything in it is just asking to lose everything.
What I would like to see is the for the most part capital ship get some capital love.
I would like to see either the maintenance bay greatly reduced in size but an increase in the mining hold size. I don’t actually use it for mining with drones or anything. I would also like to see it have a, I hate calling it a micro jump drive, but how about just a jump drive. Not full capital 10 light years but how about half of that. Like 5ly. Would make the ship maintenance bay a little more usable at that point. I absolutely adore the red-headed stepchild of the capital community. Just would like to see it get a little love. No bonus or anything increase or decrease. Just what I noted above. Reduced ship maintenance bay size with a direct increase in mining hold size according to reduction of ship maintenance bay size. If you do either or none the ability to jump even five light years would probably increase its usage.
What is it you want to do with the Orca that would benefit from these proposed alterations?
The Orca used to be a popular solo mining and ganking platform (even though its intended use was as a Command Ship), but that was changed by CCP. What we have now is a support vessel of at least some use to industrialists.
Sure, Orca’s aren’t used by anyone… Which game are you playing? Orcas are used en masse, every day. Because they are amazingly good at what they are doing. Namely giving Exhumers a huge boost to their mining yield and shield tank plus adding enough Drone DPS to remove all NPC threats from mining sites plus having the Compression Service and last but not least offering a huge cargo capacity for the compressed Ore/Ice so you need a lot less hauling.
Yeah you’re bound to see lots of any ship in high sec.
I think every capital ship fulfills its purpose very well. I think the primary reason the Orca isn’t a capital is because it’s meant to be relatively versatile in terms of where it can go. Orcas are the bread and butter of any large mining fleet, so they sure as hell aren’t underutilized in any capacity. Not much else I can say, since the Orca kinda speaks for itself in terms of how good it is.
Doesn’t need a stat or mechanical rework, but I do think that they’re very expensive for what they offer. 10 times the price of a porpoise to get access to moon, ice, and mercoxit compression.
If we use other in-game examples as a measurement then the bump from a battlecruiser up to a battleship is around 4x the cost. And unlike those ships which have clear differences in roles and stats, the orca is just a bigger and slower porpoise with a higher EHP and more utility options that may not even get utilized. Good to pull out for an ice or moon op, otherwise there’s no point in using it over the porpoise when weighing the risk.
The problem is that market forces seem to determine that, for all its putative drawbacks, people are still willing to pay top whack for the ship, so the price holds up, relatively speaking.
If people stopped buying it, well, you know what would happen! Perhaps that’s the point at which CCP would intervene…?!