Definitely agree that asteroids should have a massive sig bloom, but you don't want to nerf a barge's res too much. Cruiser-level (rather than the current frigate-level) ought to be sufficient, as you need to tell your drones what's scratching the paint before your hull tanking skills kick in.

CCP Fozzie and Rise

Can we please have a rethink on the procurer losing a mid slot.

As it stands now we have the tanky barge option, the storage barge and the high performance barge option, its only fair to pay for the tanky option with lowered performance. If I feel unsafe I fly a heavily tanked procurer, removing that mid slot will affect my ability to create as good a shield tank as I would normally have, this would seriously diminish the benefit of the procurer.

If I want to risk it I can use a retriever for faster mining or a covetor if I am mining with support, by encouraging people to fly procurers with the same yield as a retriever I think you are diminishing the value of choice that comes from the present set up. The only barge that could use some work from a rebalance point of view is the covetor/hulk in my opinion.

While I like the Idea of the Covetor getting a third low slot to make it more viable, I disagree on the Hulk. the Hulk should get that low slot as well, otherwise there is no benefit in using the hulk over the covetor, given the huge difference in cost and the extremely bad tank both have. from an economic point of view a hulk doe not pay off how - even when mining directly into an orca auf it will do so even less in the future, because it is way too easily ganked. A covetor costs next to nothung, so the higher yield compared to other ships leads to a situation where you can afford to loose one every day and still have higher profit. wit a Hulk this is does not work.

Bite your tongue sir, It needs the high scan res to lock on pods when the ganker fails.

I have nothing againt people being able to fit a good tank but they should have to make sacrifices. The issue with the mack is that its base tank is too high, it should be the same as the hulk. These ships all have different roles but right now the mac and ret have too much overlap on the others. Hence why almost all miners are in them.

:Updated to the second iteration on April 11th, thanks for the feedback so far:

We are implementing the following updates to the plan thanks to your feedback and dicusssion:

To ensure that the Covetor and Hulk can make use of their extra mining range in group situations, we are changing the Mining Laser Field Enhancement gang link to apply its range bonus to Survey Scanners in addition to its current function.

To make sure that barge pilots can make use of the many different ORE types available in belts and anomalies, we are reducing the volume of all mining crystals by 60%.

We're giving the Hulk and Covetor a bit more yield and agility, and the Hulk is getting slightly more fittings.

The scan resolution on the Retriever and Mackinaw is being reduced by 17%, and the Procurer and Skiff reduced by 33%. This is partially to provide a small lock speed advantage to the Covetor/Hulk, and partially to ensure that the Procurer and Skiff avoid becoming too powerful in combat. The scan resolution on all barges remains exceptionally good, comparable to destroyers and frigates.

The image was just confusing people, so I'm removing it.

We considered that, but to make it balanced we'd need to nerf the strip miner yield on those ships, which isn't ideal.