As a dedicated miner and someone having Mindlinks, i did consider using an Orca. But one thing stopped me.
Its price and what it can do for its cost.
I will not lie if i say that orcas are just insanely expensive, everyone knows that. The biggest problem i see with it, is how little of an upgrade it is compared to a Porpoise, what is like 1/8th it’s cost. A porp can boost at 38% unsieged, an orca can do about 40. with t1 siege porp does 40%, orca does 43%. With t2 core orca does 45, porp is 41. I am not max skilled, but even at max its not much more.
The biggest problem i see with the orca is how expensive it is for the amount of boosts it can give, and i don’t think a ship capable of compressing moon goo and ice should cost 2b. I don’t even know why citadels can’t compress moon goo and gas, but back to topic. I am pretty sure porpoises would be kings if they had ice/moon compressors.
So my idea is, why not to do one of these things with an Orca:
Higher cycle reduction (i was thinking about 50% with max skills, a bit lower withou without)
Make it cheaper (cut its price in half)
As of currently, Orca is just not worth it for many people because of it’s cost, and how little gain it gets for general ore mining. While i am aware most use it for ice, other than that, its not very effective for general ore mining, only with very large fleets what not everyone can have/run.
I am open to discuss this with anyone, and any other improvement what can be made.
That’s probably the main reason why Porpoises do not have ice and moon compression.
As result the Orca is by far the cheapest option to get compression for ice and moon ore for about 38% of the hull cost of a Rorqual.
Why should the Orca become cheaper and why shouldn’t it cost 2 billion ISK?
I see you’ve told us that you don’t think it should be 2 billion ISK and that you think it is too expensive, but you fail to give a reason aside from your preferences.
Aside from the extra compression options the Orca also gives over 9% additional yield to all miners in the fleet compared to a Porpoise.
Considering that miners always have cheap and expensive options and some are willing to pay a lot for top tier yield rates:
Covetor: 45 million ISK
Hulk: 300 million ISK for 35% more yield
Inherent Implants ‘Highwall’ Mining MX-1001: half a million ISK for 1% mining yield
Inherent Implants ‘Highwall’ Mining MX-1003: 20 million ISK for 3% mining yield
Inherent Implants ‘Highwall’ Mining MX-1005: 145 million ISK for 5% mining yield
Mining laser II: 9% mining yield for 1 million ISK.
‘Aoede’ Minin laser: 10% mining yield for 800 million ISK
Mining drone II: less than a million ISK
‘Augmented’ mining drone: 13 million ISK a piece or 65 million for a 12% drone mining increase compared to T2
‘Harvester’ mining drone: 566 million ISK a piece or 2.8 billion for a 16% drone mining increase
And all those numbers are upgrades you have to pay for each individual miner.
The lower tiers are cheap, but when you can get a 9% yield increase for the entire fleet on top of that, an Orca doesn’t seem that expensive to me.
It has its uses for a couple of specific things: it has better range boost on mining and other boosts enabling the right fleet to sit in the middle of an asteroid belt and strip it,
It has a fairly large fleet hanger which can be useful
It has a fairly large fleet maintenance hanger which is useful
In various roles it is really good for transport and as a defensive core, or as a mining support vessel.
I actually have never said to use and Orca for drone mining. Just i have heard from multiple people, that unless you run a very large fleet, its not worth it. Rorquals are a whole another level, as yeah, they cost a hell a lot more, but provide hell a lot better boosts, can jump around, and make you immortal for 5-6 minutes, even if its limited to null/ls. An Orca does none of that, not mentioning the fact that its near useless in nullsec, as soon as you go into a belt/anom you are guaranteed to die without a fleet defending you. 90% of guys who run 1-3 alts simply cannot justify the cost of an orca, and raher just dock up after a load of ice. Not everyone wants capitals or 10 alts, and telling them to just “go mine moons in fleets” leads to eventual burnout of not being able to justify an orca without being able to afford to have 10 alts.
A booster should be your fourth alt. Up until then, you’ll mine more with an extra mining ship.
The more miners in fleet, the more valuable the booster becomes, that’s just how it works.
They’re not designed as solo mining vessels, so don’t expect them to excel as a solo miner.
Even the lowest boost tier of a Porpoise without core you get a -38.7% cycle time on your mining ships with max skills. This means it boosts the yield of your mining ships by a factor 1/(1-0.387) = 1.63.
Two barges mining at 163% (326%) exceeds the yield of three barges mining at 100% (300%).
Personally I already use my second character in a boosting ship, because with it’s mining drone bonus the miner + booster is pretty close to two miners, except has a lot of extra utility with the huge ore hold and remote repairs. And it’s cheaper too to fly a Porpoise instead of a second Exhumer.
People forget that ISK nowadays is worth a lot less than it used to be. It’s a lot easier to get ISK nowadays and PLEX turns into a lot more ISK than 3 years ago.
And still the Orca is significantly cheaper than the Rorqual, so I think it’s in a good spot.
Having said that, you can make your money back on the hull cost of the Orca in a single moon pull. The Orca is not, and was never meant to be, a solo drone mining ship.
I’ll give you a quick, free lesson in basic economics, and why the price of everything in EVE is higher today than it was years ago. There is more ISK and PLEX in circulation now than there ever has been. The more you have of something, the less it is worth.
Dailies, Project Discovery, Tutorial Agents, and AIR rewards inject ISK into the game economy artificially. Much like the Federal Reserve of The United States, this ISK is literally printed out of thin air. When you do that, it devalues the currency. So, over time, the ISK that you have in your wallet is worth less and less.
This, along with changes in manufacturing, is why Orcas used to cost 600 million ISK, but now cost 2 billion ISK.