ORE Basic Ship and Skill Overview: Difference between revisions

The Procurer is the smallest and cheapest of the mining barges, and is often skipped in favour of the Retriever due to the Retriever's relatively low additional training time and the Procurer's low advantage over a mining cruiser. For those who love the strip miner's 3min cycles, aren't training for mining cruisers, or just like how damn cute it looks, though, the Procurer can be a worthy ship to fly.

The Retriever is most player's first Mining Barge, giving a much bigger advantage over non-barges than the Procurer. It also has a tank comparable to a mining cruiser, though some average drone skills will be required to successfully fend off belt rats rather than warping out.

The Covetor suffers a similar problem to the Procurer: Once skills have been acquired to fly the Covetor, the Hulk can be trained with not much aditional time: around 25 days later. However, unlike the Procurer, the Covetor is still a large upgrade over the Retriever and is much cheaper than the Hulk, so can be useful when the pilot doesn't want to invest or risk the ISK for a Hulk.

The Skiff is the smallest of the mining Exhumers and only requires Exhumer I to fly. It has been designed to fly in 0.0 space and mine the Mercoxit that can only naturally be found there. It is the only ORE ship to have a builtin +2 to warp strength, which makes it a bit more survivable in nullsec.

The Mackinaw is the medium size Exhumer and is specialized for mining ice. It mines 2 blocks of ice per cycle per laser, but has a speed penalty to the ice miners that decreases to 0 with Exhumers V. Generally, the Mackinaw is best ship for ice mining when using a jetcan or orca, but the Hulk can be more efficient otherwise due to its larger cargohold which allows it to warp to the station less.

With many mining bonuses and a solid tank for most situations, the Hulk is the ultimate mining vessel for most players, and is a direct upgrade from the Retriever and/or Covetor.

The Primae was a free ship given out along with the Tyrannis expansion. While it can be useful if the player doesn't have another industrial ship available, it is generally thought of as too specialized and an easy target for gankers.

The Noctis is the newest ORE ship released with the first part of the "Incursion" expansion in November 2010. It requires the skillbook "Ore Industrial" to fly and blueprints are available at ORE stations in the Outer Ring Region. While generally an excellent salvage ship, it has been derided for not being able to fit a MWD, an analyzer and a codebreaker in three midslots, making it less than perfect for exploration use.

The Orca is a command ship designed to support mining fleets, but can be fill many support roles due to its large cargoholds and ship maintenance bay.

The Rorqual is a capital version of the Orca, and is generally only seen in nullsec. As well as fielding similar bonuses to the Orca, it can carry a mining fleet to their destination and compress ore to make it easier to haul. Often, though, the Rorqual is seen as too risky to deploy in an asteroid belt and is set up within a POS shield instead; miners still get the bonuses and ore compression, and most pilots see this as a worthwhile tradeoff.