The biggest annoyance for me in EVE has been traveling back and forth between trade hubs and multiple trips between mission hubs to bring the Tengu and Noctis ships. Also the pain in the ass of having enough cargo space for the loot/salvage.
It looks like the Orca might take care of that.
When I fist picked up a pilot in the bazaar, I chose a pilot that had mining skills because I thought that might be what I wanted to do. After discovering how boring that was, I picked up another pilot that was focused in Golem/Tengu skills. I split the two pilots to keep learning skills on both accounts. I thought the mining pilot might be a bit of a waste but it turns out he was only 10 days from being an Orca pilot, my Alt will have the skills to fly it in about 3 days.
For those that don't already know, the Orca is a bit of a unique ship:
Cargo Space
Possibly the biggest selling point of the Orca is the huge amount of cargo space that it supports for a ship that “only” costs around 400 million ISK (note: more like 700 Million current pricing). The ship has 4 different areas for storage.
The first is the Cargo Hold. This starts off holding 30,000 m3, and can be expanded through modules, rigs, and an additional 5% bonus for each level of the Industrial Command Ship skill. Maxed out for hauling, you could fit over 90,000 m3 in the cargo hold. This is the ONLY hold on the ship that receives bonuses from mods, rigs, and skills.
The second is a 50,000 m3 Ore Hold that can contain only mined materials (unrefined ore or ice). If you try to drag modules or anything else into the ore hold, you’ll get an error message.
The next area on the ship is called the Fleet Hangar, which holds another 40,000 m3. This hangar can be made available to other fleet members or members of the pilot's corporation for access in space. This is very useful for supporting mining operations, as mining fleetmates can then use the Fleet Hangar to store mined ore or ice. The Orca pilot can then move that ore or ice to the Ore Hold or Cargo Hold, or leave it in the Fleet Hangar, as space permits.
The final cargo hold is actually a Ship Maintenance Bay. This area holds 400,000 m3, that can hold fully assembled ships.
I created a corporation and placed my pilots in it. I plan to use my Alt pilot to fly the orca. The ship maintenance bay is large enough for me to fit my Tengu, Noctis and a Buzzard (or maybe a skiff) into it.
Fitting Service
Besides being able to swap ships, the Orca has a fitting service – so you can swap modules while in space. Right click on the Orca to choose to Use Fitting Service. You can swap fittings that are in the cargohold of the ship you’re flying, or you can pull fittings out of the Orca’s bays. Drones can also be swapped in and of a ship's drone bay.
Tractor Beam Bonuses
The Orca gets 2 big bonuses to tractor beams. The first is a 250% range increase, and the second is a 100% beam velocity increase. While the velocity increase is nice to have, since you’ll usually only fit one beam at most, the range increase is really nice – if you’re supporting a mining op with multiple players, the ability to pull all the cans without moving is huge. Whether you pull them and loot them or pull them just so your industrials can have a single warp-in point, it’s a big timesaver. It’s also great for pulling in wrecks to a single location to be looted/salvaged.
Survey Scanner Bonus
Survey scanners on an Orca get a 500% range increase, so you can see how much ore is in every rock in over a 100km radius. This allows the Orca pilot to easily tag asteroids to mark those that are full or nearly empty, and better coordinate the miners.
The plan is to focus on exploration (Odyssey expansion coming June is focused on exploration). I'll travel in the Orca with both Pilots and then launch my Tengu/Noctis/Buzzard as needed. I'm thinking this might work OK for Wormhole exploration as well.
Gang Links
You can equip and use 3 gang links on the Orca at the same time. However, the Orca only has 3 high slots so a tractor beam would have to replace one gang link. This is also going to depend on what you’re using the ship for – a mining support ship is going to have different high slots than an exploration platform (more on that later).
Tank
The Orca has a really nice tank. Out of the box, it has 10,750 shields, 6,900 armor, and 46,000 hull. Add your skills on top of that, like mechanic level 5, and this thing can actually be hull buffer tanked. In fact, doing nothing but adding a Damage Control II to the ship will give you a huge buffer to ward off attacks. With a DCUII in a lowslot and a shield tank in 3 or 4 midslots, over 170kEHP can be achieved. If you really want to go crazy, you can get the thing over 270,000 EHP with good skills. You cut into your tank significantly by going with 2 cargo expanders in the lows (granting over 90k m3 in your cargohold with rigs though) so a DCU is generally recommended.
Hauling
The Orca is a wonderful shipping hauler - the capacity of the Cargo Hold, with sufficient skills and rigs, gives the Orca one of the largest shipping spaces in the game, exceeded only by freighters. For more information about how to use the Orca to earn ISK as a speculative hauler, see this class syllabus: Hauling 101
Wormhole Support
Flying your expensive ship into a wormhole, assuming you’ve got one that can support the mass of the ship, requires serious nerve, but it can provide you with a mobile platform for refitting, swapping ships, storing loot, and repairing. Many corps set up POSs for this sort of thing, but the orca doesn’t require all the logistics that keeping a POS fuelled and online would. Plus, in the Uni, the chances of you having the proper permissions to set up a POS are slim to none.
Fit reppers/repper drones, and a cloak. Stay cloaked in a safespot until needed. Uncloaking should only be done when there are no ships in the system outside of your fleet.
Missioning
Running two accounts in missions, one of which is flying an Orca, can be helpful. In combat missions, you can provide non-mining link bonuses to your other character, and tractor the wrecks to a central point while the other character fights. Clear the room, and then head back to the orca to get your salvage ship, or refit your combat ship right in space. Since all the wrecks are already together, you can fit 8 salvagers instead of the usual 4 salvagers + 4 tractor beam configuration, and quickly salvage everything. For mining missions, the benefits are obvious. You can semi-afk your way through the mission and never be in danger of your can expiring. Occasionally you may get a courier mission that requires a huge amount of storage for hauling, particularly some of the storyline courier missions. Instead of needing a freighter, the orca can fit the bill.
So the plan:
Alt:
Fly Orca, stay in cloaked when primary pilot is off doing their thing. Also use Gang links to aid in L4 missions and even mining if I decide to do that for some reason. Also Orca will store all the salvage/loot.
Primary:
Launch Buzzard to explore and find stuff. Pilot has Astrometrics V, Archaeology V, and working on Hacking V, also skilling a few levels in Astro Pinpointing, Rangefunding and Acquision.
Launch Tengu to kick ass, rat, mission, and launch assloads of scourge heavy missiles at stuff. Main pilot has great missile skills and everything else geared toward rapid rate of fire and targeting little shit normally hard to hit by missiles.
Launch Noctis to clean up after.
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So, I'm hoping for some cool new stuff to do with exploration after we find out what's up in Eve Fest next week. I was planning on the exploration route anyway.
I'm going to use the Orca as a mobile base.
This thread also gives me hope for possible future first person avatar missions/activities in EVE:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.as ... ind=unread
Being able to dock and explore, first person, abandoned space stations, etc.
"Prototyping the Future":
"Team Avatar and Team Prototyping Rocks have been
developing new gameplay ideas for EVE over the past
year and a bit. Come along and find out what prototyping
is all about and see some of the ideas they came up
with for features as diverse as Mining and Exploration.
They will also be discussing the new features they are
implementing for the summer expansion which were
generated as a result of these efforts."
The prototype itself has been finished and has been presented internally to the company stakeholders, the CSM and finally to the company as a whole. The feedback from that was overwhelmingly positive. So on to the information!
Extra-Vehicular Activity, Wrecks and Exploration
There has been an idea kicking around CCP for a long time now about an ideal starting point for avatar gameplay. That is exploring hazardous environments in order to get awesome stuff. Think scanning down a site before entering it in order to find and salvage artifacts, technology and other goodies. Sounds straightforward and it would be but for the dangerous nature of delving into long lost places where time has taken its toll on the structure and the previous owners may not have left things in a benign state. In true EVE style throw in the added dangers of lurking competition and things have a chance to go south fast. The inspiration for this comes from a lot of different places, back to the original Aliens films, Event Horizon, the cleanup of Chernobyl, high-altitude mountaineering, games such as Space Hulk, Minecraft and Moonbase Alpha, to name just a few.
Over three months we concentrated on the minute by minute gameplay of actually being inside a long abandoned structure, the hazards that it would contain and how the players might deal with them and any uninvited guests. We used the Unity engine which is a great game engine for prototyping in as it lets us create environments and gameplay very, very fast and iterate on it equally quickly. A lot of our art is much more abstract (a "grey box") than you’d see in a final game. This is due to us concentrating on the gameplay first and foremost whilst also recognizing that ambience plays an important role in how a game feels. We do throw in the occasional EVE asset here and there for flavor but those are not descriptive of any final theming or style.
The gameplay premise is simple, players move through our abandoned structures with their fitted Extra-Vehicular Activity suit, using their wits, tools and teammates to deal with the hazardous environment. Some of us are enthusiastically and maliciously killing teammates for personal gain. We’ve even allowed two teams into the environment to really let all hell break loose.
It’s a part of the EVE Universe
There have been a lot of questions on the forums about how this integrates with EVE. Whilst this isn’t the core focus for us at the moment it is something we are thinking about long and hard. Like DUST514, this part of EVE should contribute to the overall economy as well as supporting its own ecosystem. Right now we’re thinking that these abandoned structures are so dangerous, radioactive and toxic, that they can only be entered with special suits. Obviously with access to clones you aren’t worried about radiation and long term health effects of hazardous lifestyles. You probably all smoke and eat lots of bacon as well and besides robots won’t survive the violent EM fields. Robot electronics would toast, thus only teams using gear that involves crude electronics, like found in EM resistant military hardware can go in and recover the technology that lies within.
One example of a link with EVE gameplay we’re thinking of would be to put implant manufacture into the hands of players and making avatar gameplay part of the resource gathering chain it has. We want to make Avatar gameplay a viable and vibrant part of the Universe without forcing anyone that doesn’t want to use it from having to use it.
A benefit from the EVA game is that a lot of the technology that would need to be developed to properly deliver the EVA experience would be directly useful in providing social areas and tools in stations.