Sailing an Orca

It is new ship week for the Twilight Cadre it seems.

Potshot, while laying out plans for the corp W-space station, also mentioned that he finished up training for his blockade runner.  And yesterday I mentioned the Buzzard covert ops ship that is to be part of our plans.

Today it is an Orca.  Mine makes the third Orca in our corp… or it would be the third one in the corp except that Gaff has run off to join the Latvian Rifles in 0.0 space to experience some fleet action fun. (Maybe he can tell me if fleets do indeed look like this.)

My Orca isn’t that new actually.  I have had it for a couple of weeks now but I have not gotten around to mentioning it.  But, as I am closing in on the final skill I have planned to support it, I thought it was about time.

For somebody who does multi-box mining, the Orca is a dream.  As long as it sticks within 2500 meters of your mining ship, the harvesting craft can drop ore directly into the corporate hangers that are part of the Orca.  And if you’re doing a group mining operation and you are all spread out, a tractor beam mounted on the Orca can reach out 50km to pull in a jet can at double time.

Orca and Hulk

I have the Orca fitted out as follows:

High

• Mining Foreman Link – Mining Laser Field Enhancement
• Mining Foreman Link – Laser Optimization
• Small Tractor Beam

Mid

• 100MN Afterburner I
• Large Shield Booster I

Low

• 2x Expanded Cargohold II

Rigs

• 3x Cargohold Optimization I

With my current skills, this gives me a cargo capacity of 85K cubic meters in the cargohold, plus the additional 40K cubic meters in the corp hangers give me an effective 125K cubic meters of hauling capacity.  That isn’t quite up there in size with my Charon freighter, but about 75% of the time I use the freighter I could probably have fit everything in that much space.

In fact, if I could sell the Charon and invest the money in something that paid a regular, reliable return, I would probably do it.  The Charon has been sitting in the hanger a lot lately.  However, I am not certain such an investment opportunity exists in EVE Online.  Ponzi schemes and directors just running off with the ISK seem to be the more popular scenarios… or at least the ones you hear about.

Ironically, I suppose, one of the things the Charon is better at that the Orca is maneuverability.  The Charon’s agility is enhanced by an additional skill, so the Orca can feel as cumbersome, if not more so, when aligning for warp and such.  On the other hand, you can’t slap an afterburner on a Charon.  And the Orca needs that afterburner to keep up with a Hulk, which is yet another declaration of its whale-like performance.

But for what it does, it is a fine ship.  And once I get Mining Director V trained I will be able to use the Mining Foreman Mindlink I got as a mission reward some time back.  That will put me near the pinnacle of mining performace.  Just another 19 days to go.