EVE always has tradeoffs of risk versus performance, where small increases of performance at higher performance levels cause much more rapidly increasing risk than the early steps. This means that anyone can find a point of efficiency that works for them.
I’d probably never use expensive officer modules for example even if their performance is greater than any alternative.
I could fly my mining ships with T2 strip miners, with ORE miners or with max rolled abyssal miners, or max rolled abyssal ORE miners.
I’m not going to risk billions for the latter, so I’m already choosing less risk for lower yet reasonable performance.
Likewise my mining laser upgrades are T2 or one of those storyline things at best, because I calculated I’d have to mine 62.5 billion ISK worth of ore before dying for the recently added officer mining laser upgrade to become worth using over T2.
So there too I choose massively reduced risk for a small hit in performance.
In this same line of thought it’s not at all strange to fly a mining support ship without core for a small hit in performance as this too is a massive reduction of risk.
I could fly my Rorqual without core too, but that’s not worth the risk to me either, I’ll just use a cheap Porpoise instead.
If you wish to squeeze out the absolute highest performance of your mining ships and are willing to risk tens of billions extra to do so be my guest, I’ve found a more economical optimum for my own playstyle.
After all, if you lose your ship too early any of that added performance will set you back, so if you expect to lose any ships at all (which is not unlikely in this game!) it’s also good to manage risks and not only chase performance.
This makes cores just optional.
If I recall correctly activating the core on an Orca only adds 5% more yield to the fleet, a small fraction of what an uncored Orca already boosts at a fraction of the risk.
