Rorqual - Capital Industrial Ship

[Rubino]

Wotcha guys,

I've been thinking about the Rorqual over the past couple of weeks and wondering if the risk/benefit warrents the ship.

The CCP Dev blog about it is: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=490
The followup forum posts at the end of the dev blog give some insightful info - especially the 2nd and 3rd links.

The Wiki is: http://www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=Rorqual

Due to the nature of the Ship Maint Bay (only allowing industrial ships & haulers) on the Rorqual and it's drone capacity - I don't see much of a role deploying it outside of friendly waters.  In unfriendly space the chance of a hostile group jumping your mining op, having only 5 drones and no combat ships for defence (maybe only the cyno ship as support) means you're putting a 1.7b Rorqual, 0.5b of mining ships (4 x Hulks) and any ore you've mined (4 hours x 4 Hulks mining Crystalline Crokite will generate around 0.5b).

The main benefit of the ship comes from compressing ore (via ore compression BP's) in belt and it's cargo storage (Cargo, Corp Hangers and the Hidden Cargo of the undelivered compression jobs) - and while this optimises the mining op - if you're in friendly waters then you're not going to be too far from a safe POS - in which case, from a cost/benefit perspective, it would be better to use the Orca.

Any thoughts?

[peo]

From what I can understand it seems to be a ship mostly designed to support mining ops very far from any friendly pos/station where the ability to jump might be an advantage (drone areas??).
But it seems way to expensive to risk in any kind of place where you might run into any opposition unless you have alts or other combat chars escorting it.
So for supporting mining ops in less safe places it seems better to use a carrier or mothership and an orca for the mining bonuses.

[Mangala]

Less safe places and carrier & Mom? I'd like to be cloaked nearby and watching the fireworks

You'd attract every possible hostile from within 30 jumps - people really do like to kill caps (more so MoM's than carriers mind given a 15bill isk ship should have a decent amount of isk spent on its fit too) even now it happens every day all over New Eden.

The Rorq should be used in the role its designed too - and used as part of a well supported and defended mining group, including scouts, bubbled gates all the tricks really.  Personally I'd keep Orca's for hisec and solely use Rorqs for low/null work (clone bay is very handy here )

[Rubino]

Aye - and that's the issue - if you're in unfriendly space - and chance of a gank increases.
With the drone areas - while the belts are excellent (or were) you get better minerals from the drone drops (they drop compressed mins).

With clones currently it's a 1 way jump - so anybody that cloine jumps has to slow haul it back to safety (you can't put shuttles into the ship hanger on the Rorqual) or suicide back to their clone.  They have talked about changing this and having a 2-way clone jump - so it might arrive somepoint soon (in CCP terms that means maybe this year).

The size of the Ship Bay means you can carry 4 Hulks - and the Vat bay means you can have 5-10 clones.  Which means mining ops are going to be small.

If you're gonna sit at the POS with a Rorqual just to give bonuses - then when the planned change come where bonuses are only applied if you're on the same grid - you're in safe space already - so the Orca would be better.  The main bonus of mineral compression is very handy and it would mean you can safe up at the POS and compress (rather than refine at the POS and loose out due to the poor efficiency of the POS refinery) but essentially it becomes a very expensive POS module  Although the animation on the ship when it enters "siege" mode looks nice.

The reasons I've been thinking about it - is to determine if it's a "must have" (would make a big difference) or "nice to have" (ooo Shiney) - and from what I've learned so far (limited research and glad to hear of other opinions) it's more the latter than the former.

Update:
Thinking about defence should you want to ninja in unfriendly waters then without Beo's mining task force - you have essentially have the following ships at your disposal; 4x Hulk, 1xCyno & the Rorqual.
Reconfiguring the Rorqual isn't possible (you can't reconfigure your own ship but gang ships can reconfigure using the Corp hanger on the Rorqual) but you can reconfigure the hulks and the tank on the Hulk is pretty decent.

Lacking the mount points for guns in the highs you can only fit Smartbombs - and with the PG you can only fit smalls (shame - as the larges would be pretty cool on the Hulk) but you do have drones and with 50 m3 you can comfortably fit 5 x T2 Med.  In terms of Drones you'll be able to field 25 x T2 Mediums - which isn't bad - not great but not bad giving you around 122 dps.

[vacuum]

It's not really a ninja ship, it's a superhauler + compressor.

Basically you set up a POS in a nice -0.8 - -1.0 system; and you get four or five hulks stripping a belt. You have warpins to each belt at 70km radius spot.

When cans get close to 2h range, you warp rorqual in, use capital tractor beams to scoop up the cans, empty into the massive  cargo bay (see setup below). Then take it back to the POS, and compress it. If the average Hulk fills a can of arkonor in 20 minutes; and therefore in a 2h period 5 hulks therefore fill 30 cans (at 27500m3 per can) this is a whopping 825,000m3. Having a Rorqual allows this to be ~8 trips and enough time inbetween each trip to compress the ore. Compressing the ore also means you can take advantage of the refiners at POSes more effectively.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, they can be used as mini-jumpfreighters for logistics work (POS setup, etc).


[Basic Rorqual]

High
    1x Capital Tractor Beam I
    1x Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency
    1x Mining Foreman Link - Laser Optimization
    1x Mining Foreman Link - Mining Laser Field Enhancement
    1x Clone Vat Bay I or a cloak (no one will seriously need a clone vat bay over the protection a cloak affords)
    1x Industrial Core I

Mids
    1x Capital Shield Booster I
    1x Photon Scattering Field II
    1x Heat Dissipation Field II
    1x Invulnerability Field II
    2x Cap Recharger II
    1x Shield Boost Amplifier II

Lows
    3x Expanded Cargohold II

Rigs
    1x Cargohold Optimization II
    2x Cargohold Optimization I

125,787m3 cargohold, so you can fit 4 blocks at a time in the processing lines.

[Mangala]

So, I may have snagged Thera one of these. All she needs now is 25days of training and she can fly it

[Warcold]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos2MnVxe-c

Been riding bikes this weekend?

[Mangala]

Cricket at Headingley

[peo]

Criii...keet??? hmm
Is that the new Jove design?

I've been thinking about training for one on hrod, would be 40 days or so to fly it and then 40 more for the industrial core and ganglinks.

[Mangala]

Gah forgot the core thing. Make it a flat 38 or so then