I don’t get why we added an Ore bay to some ships, and a Mineral bay to others. But you can’t use them for both materials.
I understand wanting a bay that specializes in the mining side of gameplay. Cargo is cargo, but who wants to carry their ammo and livestock in the same hold as rocks and minerals.
Why not combine the two though? If the ship has an Ore bay, let them store the refined Minerals in the same bay after they’re done refining.
Because m3 of ore is a lot bigger than m3 of minerals. Therefore an ore hauler would always be better to haul your minerals in due to the Ore hauler having a bigger cargo bay, thus the mineral hauler never gets used again. Poor thing.
I think the whole dedicated bay thing just adds confusion and tons of ships sitting around (though rarely used before the changes) only used in certain situations but CCP decided a change was needed to the haulers for whatever reason.
TL:DR - m3
You’re right, the Ore bay ships would see a lot more use. But that’s no reason not to do it.
Before they added Ore and Mineral bays, they were all just Cargo ships. If you carried bullets, or rocks, or minerals, or Livestock… it all went in the same bay. And then someone came up with the idea of making separate bays for some of those things. Some ships got an extra Ammo bay. Some got the Ore bay. And some got the Mineral bay.
But my point is, why separate Ore and Mineral into different ships?
Judging by this alone, they just wanted a purpose for the various Iteron hulls. But separating Ore and Minerals kinda feels like making the Ammo bays, but separating Bullets from Missiles.
If they combined the Ore and Minerals into a single bay, they could repurpose the other ship to do Ammo or something.
The only reason it happened to haulers is because we had more than we needed when they were rebalanced (5 gallente when we only needed 2). Haulers used to have tiers, not roles. So an itty 5 was better than an itty 4. It just took longer to skill into.
We should have just deleted the excess haulers but whiners whined and we got the broken overpowered specialised haulers.
Which is incidentally why you aren’t going to get a 2 merged hold, they aren’t meant to exist in the first place and if we did merge them we’d have the problem of excess haulers again.
Luckily it’s a T1 oddity, so there are minimal skill requirements for any of these specialized bays, if they are needed. At T2, no specialized cargo exists, and the haulers appear to follow more coherent design rules. With its Fleet Hangar, a DST is (almost) always the preferred choice over any T1 industrial. I wouldn’t mind a T3 industrial with modular, specialized cargo subsystems, though (also to close the gap between DSTs and freighters).
Yes, it’s mostly just a concern if you fly T1 haulers. But T2 haulers carry considerably less in most regards. And the Orca comes with a magnificent Ore bay (up to 187k m3) which is completely wasted once you refine the rocks.
And yes, I realize the whole cause was figuring out what to do with the entire Iteron line. But as I said, they could have made one of them into an Ammo ship just like the 3rd Minnie boat. Separating Ore and Minerals would have been like making several PI ships, and saying that one could only carry base PI mats and the other could only carry processed PI mats.
Um… it is not. As an example, the amount of ore necessary to build 10 dreads can fit into 2 JFs at ~463k m3 with just enough room for a frigate or three. The minerals from that amount of ore? You either use a max cargo freighter, or you commit suicide by using a kryos to transport 10 million m3, 65k m3 at a time.
There are balancing concerns when transporting materials. Too much too easy causes over supply.
Moving 300k m3 of minerals in an orca could be too competitive with freighters. Orcas have significant speed and defence advantages over even max tank freighters.
Remember the orca is NOT a hauler. It is a mining support vessel first and foremost. The ore bay one the orca and barges had two design goals,
It’s use for hauling is more a happy accident.
Consider that there are not really meant to be ore haulers. And that there isn’t really even meant to be mineral holds, ammo holds or pi holds. Let’s face it, they screwed the balance of t1 haulers and it would screw the balance of bigger haulers as well.
At this time, I think the specialized bays fit the progression well and are not imbalanced. The smallest cargo space is available on general T1 haulers. More cargo space is available on specialized T1 haulers, but, although they build on the same skill, it can be a small logistical challenge to efficiently manage multiple specialized hauling ships (as pointed out by the OP). The next step is a general T2 hauler with almost the same cargo space and other benefits (like decent tank, sharable Fleet Hangar).
Currently, if this progression is indeed fully intended, making specialized bays less specialized by combining Ore and Mineral holds, as suggested by the OP, could work, but only with smaller holds (i.e. about 40.000 m³ maximum, slightly more than a cargo-rigged and -fitted general T1 hauler).
As was stated already, the Orca should not be seen as a hauler; it has no role that would justify it being able to carry additional Minerals, because miners deal with Ore only, while manufacturers or traders get the Minerals when the Orca has already docked up (true, it could be the same character, but then again, solo mining is also not the role of the Orca). They also need to be refit for (somewhat secure) hauling, posing a similar challenge as specialized T1 haulers. Moving Minerals is not a job for Miners or Boosters.
The difference should be minimal. With Gallente Industrial V (and including the standard cargo bay), a Kryos can pack 65.050 m³ , a Miasmos 63.550 m³, and an Epithal 68.050 m³. At Transport Ships V, a DST can carry a maximum of 67.500 m³ (depending on the racial variant, minimum 65.600 m³). A DST could even throw 20 assembled Giant Secure Containers in it’s hangar and fill them up for a total maximum of 84.500 m³ (can’t do that on any specialized T1 hauler; and it’s close to what an Orca can carry in its general bays with maximum skills—without GSCs).
Regarding this racial imbalance, if ORE were to buy the rights for all specialized T1 hauler hulls and offer their own set of specialized T1 industrials (based on those hulls, alongside the Noctis), the progression would properly depend on an additional skill (“ORE Industrial”, remaining somewhat easy to train into), and a balancing pass can even out any remaining inconsistencies. This would be a simpler solution than adding multiple new specialized T1 racial variants and rebalancing them all.
Twice now you’ve said specialized bays “were not meant to be”. And yet… they’re here. So rather than arguing that something shouldn’t even exist, maybe we should stick to talking about how best to use it.
As for “competing” with Freighters… at max skills and fittings, an Orca could carry 328k m3 of Ore. Or significantly less m3 worth of Cargo in general b/c the bulk of that space is the Ore bay. Meanwhile, at max skills and fittings, a Charon Freighter can carry 1.2B m3 worth of anything it damned well pleases. Sorry to say, but I don’t think 1/4 capacity is a threat to the Freighter’s line of work.
If you use a normal t1 hauler for minerals you are an idiot. You can haul more, faster and safer in a kryos.
That’s not balanced. They just aren’t balanced. It’s not even a matter of opinion.
What they did with haulers is the complete opposite of what they did with exhumers. When the mack was an ice miner, using anything else to mine ice was stupid. And the skiff was the same for mercoxit. CCP realised this removed choice and gave barges better defined roles in 2012.
So let’s take something broken and unwanted and put it on other ships. Awesome.
And a cargo expanded freighter does not move as fast or as safely as an orca. How often do you move a charon full of minerals anyways?
Obtuse people be obtuse.
I didn’t say I wanted more ships with more bays. In fact, I’m arguing that we shouldn’t have separate bays for Ore and Minerals. I want to combine the function and get rid of the distinction.
And a Cargo expanded Charon still has 180k EHP, while an expanded Orca only has 113k EHP. So it would seem they’re still safer, as well as carrying 4x as much.
Obtuse people, indeed.
Did you forget the mid slots?
With a mwd for 10s align time it still has 200k ehp. And can fit a cloak. And has the dps of an unfit domi. And warps faster. That’s whilst max cargo fit. Defensively a freighter doesn’t even compare.
And now you want it to carry minerals in a hold that is unaffected by fitting more tank mods in the low slots. Another benefit it would have over the freighter.
Just so everyone knows!
This conversation has been been a dead horse for a long time - back to when CCP did the industrial ship pass eons ago.
Lol, yes I did forget the mid slots. =)
However, I still feel like the ability to carry 4-8x the amount of cargo is a fair trade off for the Freighter. If we have a race to see who can get more Ore from Jita to Amarr, the Orca will get there first but the Charon will deliver 4x as much when it arrives. Then if we have another race back to Jita with a full load of Livestock or something, the Charon will arrive later, but with 8x the amount b/c the Orca’s Ore bay is useless for anything else. So all it has is base Cargo and Fleet bays to fill.
Go back in the history of those ships and you will see they got buffs and offsets, these are the offsets.
They could take away the offset, like cargo restrictions, but then the other buffs need to be removed as well. Trust me, you really don’t want to go back to those old ships.
Go back and read the history of those ships, it is not our job to educate you.
I don’t need to go read the history, “I was there!” =)
I’ve been playing this game for a wee bit. Kinda like a decade and some.
I remember the progression of the Iteron series. And I know that people wanted a purpose for all 5x when they decided to even out haulers across the board. However, they have demonstrated that there are other specialties for the Bays. Minnies have a 3rd boat that focuses on carrying ammo. Gallente have no such boat. They ended up with a boat for Planetary Commodities, and a boat for Ore, and a boat for Minerals.
My point is, by separating Ore and Minerals, it’s like saying they should have separated Base PI materials from Processed PI Materials. Make you fly a specific ship just for Water, and a different ship just for Coolant. The distinction would be laughable. And yet, they make a specific bay for lumps of rock, and a different bay for ground up rock.
Why not make a boat that specializes in Gases? Or a boat just for ship’s modules? Or a boat just for Ice products (could have been useful for refueling POS before they went away).
What? Last I checked one cubic meter and one cubic meter were the same size.
It’s true that 1m3 is 1m3, but from a balance standpoint 1m3 of ore is way less valuable than 1m3 of the refined ore. Ore usually refines down to just a fraction of its source worth of minerals.
It’s kind of like: Which is worth more? 1kg of gold, or 1kg of feathers. They both weigh 1kg, but one’s worth more.
This did however give me a good idea for a potential solution to this using a rig. This rig could allow you to change one type of hold to another, but at a loss. So you can do something like turn ore, PI or other h old to a standard cargohold, but get a fraction of the space. Say 50% of special cargohold reduced and turned into 25% larger main cargo bay. Perhaps hull hp, mass, and/or inertia modifier can be adjusted as additional penalties to trade-off if needed.
This would unfortunately still leave most of the specialized haulers haul less than the generic, but can allow to take advantage of special features of some lines, like the drone bay on the Nereus.
Where this could really shine though would be with things like Orca, Bowhead, and Rorqual. Say you could reduce ship maintenance bay by 50% in exchange for a lesser amount of cargo bonus, either regular or Ore.
This could cause the Orca to be used in more places than the Freighter, but if limited to Ore, which the mining of is the Orca’s primary purpose, I don’t see a particular problem with having a similar relation to a freighter as a Kryos to an Iteron mk5.
One could even go further and make a new modular freighter or industrial command ship for each race designed to operate similar to the T3 destroyers where you can choose a mode (but presumably only in station or with refitting service) and put it into a mode where it optimizes cargo for different purposes, such as ship maintenance bay focus, ore focus, mineral focus etc.
There’s several ways that can give players more control over the focus of their industrial ships, and I’m sure there are even many that I haven’t suggested, but I do strongly feel that it would be nice to allow players more customization on their ship’s roles.