And the Hulk does not stand a chance if caught in low/no sec. The cruiser will kill it and that is fine (once scrammed the Hulk is as good as dead). We are not talking about invulnerabilities here. We are talking about how long it can hold out. So what if the Hulk was resilient enough to hold up for 60 seconds against a T1 cruiser in low sec? Hardly puts the Hulk in some imbalanced place or makes life too onerous for the cruiser pilot.
I’m not sure what else I can say. I don’t see anything wrong with a Hulk crumbling in 30 seconds to a properly fit cruiser.
I just don’t.
Upthread somewhere you implied that because your Vagabond cost 200 million to buy and fit there was some expectation of survivability. If you spend that much you do not expect any noob to float by and kill you. It should take something more.
If you think losing your 100+ million ship to ships whose total cost is less than 10 million, in a way you simply cannot defend against (if they want you, they’ll get you), in a place where you have some expectation of safety (albeit not perfect safety) then I am not sure what else I can say. How you see that as a balanced and, more to the point, good and fun gaming I do not see.
Correct. A combat ship that costs a minimum of 200 mil has a certain baseline for performance expectations in combat. Likewise, a mining vessel that cost 100 mil has certain baseline expectations for mining.
We’ve already determined that you and I have distinctly different understandings of what the word “balance” means in the context of EVE. Nor am I sure as to how mining can ever be described as “fun”. It’s mining, after all.
But yes, as someone who has flown a Hulk in the past and might at some point in the future, perhaps even with my alt in highsec, I have absolutely no problem with someone being able to hop into the belt and pop me like an overinflated balloon at a porcupine convention.
If I want survivability, I’ll fit mining lasers to a Rokh. I believe that to be a fair tradeoff and wouldn’t expect a dedicated mining ship to stand up to a stiff breeze, let alone a rack full of neutron blasters. But I would expect a mining ship to significantly out-mine a Rokh.
Mining can be fun. Organize a drunken mining OP. If you have fun people in chat/Vent it is not the mining but the socializing. Otherwise I just read a book or watch movies or something.
But I do not think a ship’s ability is strictly defined by one thing. Yes a Hulk’s primary purpose is mining and it excels at that. In no way does that argue against durability. Afterall it is supposed to be the 0.0 miner and supposed to be the miner for dangerous places. Seems to me durability is in fact supposed to be a feature of the ship. Not to mention the notion that mining machines are not durable is absurd. I dislike real world comparisons to a game but have you ever seen mining equipment? Among the most durable machines anywhere. One would expect a ship meant to fly into asteroid belts to be able to take punishment.
All of which is to say a Hulk can be durable and the best miner and easily fit within its existing hull description.
As for mining in a Rokh have fun. I mined with an Apoc a few months ago (I have a Hulk but was far away and someone threw me mining lasers for an OP). Sucked something horribly. That many laser with that short a cycle with that low a cargo meant I was whipping ore out of my cargo hold every few seconds. Not kidding when I say it was terrible. All the boredom of mining with no ability to shift attention to anything more interesting. Could barely even type in chat.
But knock yourself out if you want to try.
Clearly different but I am having trouble figuring what your sense of it is.
To me balance means there is no one, surefire way to do things. That players have options and need to weigh those options. No one option being better than another (except in a rock, paper, scissors fashion).
Except here there is a surefire way to do it. The gank ship has no need to think of a tank. They have no need to think of cap issues. They have no need to think of ECCM. They know precisely what they are facing and doing it all on their terms. The math is set.
To me getting zapped with nothing I can do about it is not balance (there really is not a lot of choice to tanking a Hulk…it is what it is). As I said I would love for real options to exist to have credible defense for miners. Keep the barges as they are but allow escorts meaningful ways to protect. As it stands now escorts can only pretty much watch while you get ganked (I can look for the EVE-O forum thread that did the math on that).
So I do not see balance in my choice being to merely hope when I park in an asteroid field that no one decides to kill me.
In any case, for mission runners out there, EVE Survival is back up and has a navigation system that’s now much smoother than before.
Along the same lines, if you’re just getting into the game and plan on sticking around for at least six months, you’ll want to consider datacores. They take a bit of skilling up to harvest efficiently, but once you’re up and running, you can rake in anywhere from approximately 30 to 360 mil a month, depending on how many agents you have and how close attention you pay to them on a daily basis (and whether or not you pay attention to the market and stick with the profitable cores). All you have to do is swing by your agents once every month or two and then take the 'cores somewhere to sell, and then you can get a reliable stream of income for very little work.
So if you’re running missions, consider grinding standings with a specific research corp or two in preparation for a lazy career in 'core harvesting.
My character is well poised to train the necessary skills for that. What sort of ship would you recommend for hauling the cores around? I’m thinking maybe a Vigil with an inertial stabilizer II and a couple overdrive IIs. I have one with the tech I versions and it can go from a dead stop to warp in about 5 seconds.
Depends how many you want to haul around at once. Vigil has a minimal cargo hold so you’d only be able to move like 150 a go. That said it is darn hard to catch and likely would be very safe moving the datacores. Someone would really have to be on top of their game to stop you and I think generally suicide gankers are not that aggressive in probing everything out and being setup to nab quick ships like that.
Blockade runner (Transport - T2 Industrial) would be a good choice if you get one. Pimped for agility they are as fast to warp as most frigates and nearly uncatchable when fit and flown well. Barring that a tanked to hell and back (read lots of shield extenders/plates) battleship would likely work as well.
I’m a newbie, not a pirate (although I do think it’d be fun), and on the ganking versus Hulk issue, it seems pretty simple. Sure, it’s a durable ship as a miner. Great Lakes freighters are durable as freighters. Put an Iraqi in his bomb-laden row boat next to a Great Lakes freighter, though, and it’s going down. Put the same insurgent next to the Ronald Reagan, and he’s just toast.
The difference is, one is designed and built for battle, and the other is not. There’s always the possibility that a civilian ship could get ganked, but in the overall world, it’s not frequent. When you lose your Hulk to suicide gankers, you’re only a tiny, little outlier in the statistics.
Eve is a social game. Perhaps the best defense for a Hulk is a corp to back you up?
Unfortunately, any decent gate highsec camp will eat you alive in five seconds. Once, a buddy of mine in MDK would’ve been able to point me in just over two seconds flat.
The average number of cores per day for a good agent, when you have max skills, is just a hair over two. So in a whole month, that’s 60 cores per agent. If you spend the time to run you agents’ daily missions, that’s 120 cores a month.
Blockade runners pretty much scream ‘nice loot if you pop me’. And with heavy dictors, they can be pointed down fairly easily. And that’s to say nothing of your enemy having fast ships to bump you off of your alignment.
For my money, the best way to transport 'cores is an agility-fit interceptor. I fly 'em around in an Ares, and I go from a dead stop to warp, from 180 degrees in the wrong direction, in 1.7 seconds. You’d have to be very, very quick to catch me and without a nanoship or Rapier/Huginn on the gate, I’ve got a very good chance of MWD’ing away even if you do manage to land a point.
I am firmly of the belief that align time is king when you’re running Empire gates, as you’ll never have to deal with bubbles.
Of course… there’s always the ‘mwd, cloak, warp’ trick, which makes you pretty much invincible but requires a bit more work on each gate.
I like this one. When I am running gates in Empire, I grab one of my transports and prepare to take my time getting through. And if there is a lot of dead ships in the system I am heading to, I drop in a couple of stabilizers on top of the 2 inherent. They can still catch me, but they will have to work at it. Took me 15 minutes to get by one camp, but I made it safely. 
The ultimate ship for safe high-value low-volume hisec hauling is actually one (any) of the cloaking recons. Pretty much impossible to kill without bubbles if the pilot is intent on running, and can be fit with enough hitpoints to not instapop if someone’s sitting near a gate with smarties going off. That said, I collect my datacores with an interceptor or a blockade runner, depending on the quantities, just because it doesn’t take as long to chase out to the ends of empire with the higher warp speed.
Can you even use smartbombs in a highsec gatecamp without getting immediately shredded by CONCORD? I mean, they’re right there. And yeah, I know there are better ships than a Vigil for my purposes, I was just trying to see if it was good enough. It will be a while before I can fly inties or stealth ships, although I’m close to being able to fly a Mammoth.
Actually… if you hit a gate with a lot of wrecks/ships on it, especially if they have their drones out, a recon’s cloak becomes useless. I’ve had my Arazu decloaked in just such a manner and, luckily enough, its cargo hold was empty and the folks on the gate were obviously hunting for other targets.
Personally I wouldn’t want to depend on a recon for gate running in Empire, but I suppose some might.
Sturm: unless and until you master the mwd-cloak-align-uncloak-warp trick, I would highly advise against using an industrial to transport anything of value in Empire. But that’s your call.
Along the same lines, play with EFT. Frigates can generally get under the 2.0 second align time threshold if you put I-stabs and nano’s on them. Overdrives won’t be quite as useful, in my view. But fit it as you like it.
For my CovOps (and really any cloaked ship I use) I programmed a macro for my G15 keyboard to do that for me. With some tweaking I get it to uncloak, cycle MWD, cloak in under 1 second.
Works great. 
Speaking of balance…
I saw a BoB carrier today! I was mining in lowsec and the carrier pilot jumped in next to one of the stations. I think he said he was picking up an alt. I’ve never seen a capital ship in game before, it was freaking huge!
heh…I’ve not been reading this board for a while and now I notice a frelling long EvE thread on here!
I’ve not had time to go through the whole thread unfortunately but was just going to mention (if it’s not been said already) that if any of the EvE newcomers are looking to get into PvP then have a look at the Agony Unleashed PvP Basic classes. I used to be a member of AU until I dropped myself out due to inactivity but I still fly with them now and then and attend new classes when I can.
Well worth the money and time to go on the course if you are new to the game (or even if you are an old timer, there’s always something else to learn!) and I will quite happily sponsor the SDMB EvE newcomers if you want to go on the course (since 7m ISK for a course can seem a little daunting when you are new).