Tiberizzle wrote:Everyone seems to be getting really excited about the theoretical yield of the rorqual but they're completely forgetting how bad drone mining mechanics are.
#1. There isn't even a hot key to make the mine, you have to use the context menu.
#2. The drone goes out, mines exactly 1 cycle and then returns with its mining amount.
The excavator drones exist on tranquility right now and they MWD at 100m/s. That's like a 10+ minute round trip to some of the ore site asteroids even with drone navigation comps and skills. The base speed needs to be an order of magnitude higher, or these things will spend over 90% of their time in transit and a sieged rorqual will be considerably worse than a barely trained barge in reality. The other option is that the Rorqual, a capital ship with **** for agility and warp speed that must additionally exit siege, rewarps for basically every individual asteroid it mines, and spends 90%+ of its time in warp... and is considerably worse than a barely trained barge in reality. Even if the drones are much quicker than the preliminary stats imply they will be, that theoretical yield will translate into a real yield of 25-50%, if that, and they'll be barely worth using as an upgrade over a Hulk.
With a theoretical yield of 18400m^3/minute and the speed as they exist on tranquility currently, for an asteroid 40,000m away (i.e. roughly the range something like half of the rocks in a colossal are from the warpin), it will take the drone 800 seconds (13.3 minutes) to travel for every 60 seconds of mining, meaning its real yield is 6.976% of the theoretical 18400 or 1283m^3 per minute. With drone navigation 5 and the MWD bonus from siege it will be 162.5m/s or 492s (8.2 minutes) of travel for 60 seconds of mining, or 10.8% efficiency / 1999m^3 per minute. That's like 20m isk/hr on spod, lol.
Put another way, a rookie ship with Miner II's jetcan mining (187m^3/min) would give an unsieged Rorqual (8.5% efficiency at 40km with 125m/s speed, of 3000m^3/min =257m^3/min) a good contest for most of an ore site after you factor in travel time if the base speed on tranquility is currently representative of final stats.