Orca Guide
A few weeks ago there was some information flying around in the Uni Industry channel about Orcas. Some of it was accurate, some of it was misinformed. I’ve been flying one on my alt for a few months now, so I figured I would provide some clarification on what they can do, so that people can decide whether or not they really want to spend the time training for one. I rolled an alt specifically to become an Orca pilot, and it turned out to be a bit different from what I was expecting it to be. I’m still happy with the ship, but I wish I had this information ahead of time. It’s around a 400,000,000 isk investment for the hull alone, so it helps to be forewarned.
What is the Orca?
The Orca is a mining support vessel. It does a decent job of this, but it also has many other uses. And depending on how many people the ship is supporting, you might actually be better off with another miner (covered later).
The Orca is also an Industrial Command Ship. It is NOT a Capital Industrial Ship. I’ve seen some people buy the wrong skillbook and waste over 400,000,000 isk. Unless you want to fly a Rorqual, save yourself the cash. I think the confusion stems from the Orca being listed under “Capital Industrial Ships” in the market window. The proper book (Spaceship Command Industrial Command Ships) costs 45,000,000 isk from NPC school stations.
Skill Requirements
- Spaceship Command Industrial Command Ships
- Spaceship Command Spaceship Command
- Spaceship Command Mining Barge
- Leadership Mining Director
What do you get when you buy an Orca?
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. 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 cargohold – not that I would recommend it (more on that later). This is the ONLY hold on the ship that seems to receive bonuses from mods, rigs, and skills.
The second is a 50,000 m3 Ore Hold that can contain only mined materials (unrefined Ore, Ice and Gas). 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 Corporate Hangars, which holds another 40,000 m3. The hangars hold a mixture of items like the standard cargo hold, but it is divided up into sections that match your corporate role distinctions, like any other corp hangar. The total corp space is 40k m3 – you don’t get 40k m3 for each tab. Like any other corp hangar, you need sufficient rights to access the individual tabs. One exception is as follows: the Orca pilot can access the corp hangar while the ship is in space, even if the pilot wouldn’t necessarily have the right permissions to do so while docked. Otherwise, someone could jam contraband or other random items into the hangar and you’d be stuck with it. The Corporate Hangars area is particularly useful in that it cannot be scanned, making it nice for hauling sensitive or high-value goods. Further, if your Orca is ever attacked and destroyed, anything in the Corporate Hangars area is also destroyed, denying any contents there to the attacker. Most pirates and gankers know this, and therefore assume that a savvy Orca pilot will store valuable cargo in the Corporate Hangars, thus providing a disincentive to attack it in the first place.
Ship Maintenance Bay
The final cargo hold is actually a Ship Maintenance Bay. This one holds 400,000 m3, which sounds like a great deal, but there’s a catch – the only items you can put into the bay are assembled ships. To give you an idea of what would fit in the bay, here are the sizes of some common vessels, when assembled:
- Hulk/Covetor – 200,000 m3
- Mackinaw/Retriever – 150,000 m3
- Skiff/Procurer – 100,000 m3
- Osprey – 107,000 m3
- Scythe – 89,000 m3
- Rifter – 27,289 m3
- Raven – 486,000 m3
So if you’re using this to support Hulks, you’ll fit at most 2 in the bay.
To access the ship maintenance bay, you either have to be in the same corp as the pilot, or the pilot has to right click the ship while in space, choose configure ship maintenance bay, and check off the “Allow fleet members” option for the ship, which allows all fleet members to access the bay. Note that this setting resets itself every time you zone. If a fleet member wants to switch ships in space, they can open the ship maintenance bay, right click the ship they want to use, and choose either “Board Ship from Bay” or “Launch ship from bay.” The Board option is safer – it stores your current ship in the bay, and puts you into the new one in space. It’s only available if there is enough room in the bay to store the new ship minus the old ship. Otherwise, you have to choose the Launch option, which leaves your current ship abandoned in space, and puts you in the new one. As with any abandoned ship, this could potentially allow someone to steal your ship, so use the option cautiously.
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. If you're flying the Orca, you can use your own fitting service if you first jettison a can with the fittings you want to equip into a JetCan. 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 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.
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). Additionally, you get a bonus to mining gang links with each level of industrial command ship skill, on top of the bonuses you would get from the Mining Director skill, Warfare Link Specialist, and the Mining Foreman Mindlink implant. Since the ship only gets bonuses to mining gang links, we’ll focus on those for now. The three mining gang links are:
- Harvester Capacitor Efficiency: cuts down on cap use for your mining lasers/harvesters
- Laser Optimization: cuts down on your cycle time for mining lasers/harvesters
- Mining Laser Field Enhancement: increases the range of your lasers/harvesters
The Capacitor link is the least often used, since a tractor beam is generally more useful. The Laser Optimization link adds a large bonus to miner's yield and forms most of the Orca's yield bonus. The Laser Field Enhancement allows a fleet to mine the whole of many asteroid belts without moving, which is a large convenience.
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.
Uses for the Orca
Mining Ops
The obvious use for the ship is to support mining ops, but how?
The Orca has a couple of disadvantages in a mining op. First, it's a ship that could be mining: an Orca pilot has most of the skills they would need to fly a Hulk, except for the Exhumers skill. An orca with full bonuses (Industrial Command Ship 5, Mining Director 5, Warfare Link Specialist 5, Mindlink Implant) would have roughly a 25% bonus to each activated mining link. So an Orca needs to be boosting at least 4 other miners to be worthwhile in terms of mining yield.
Secondly, the cargo space isn’t enough to support 4 or more hulks mining a belt. Even if you fit it for max storage, it holds about 180,000 m3 of ore (remember, the ship bay only holds ships) between the cargohold, orehold, and corp hangar. That’s about 6 and a half full cans worth of ore. Not bad, but a large mining op will fill up 6 cans quickly. And if the Orca has to warp back to a station to keep dumping ore, that negates the link bonuses, as they deactivate in warp. Losing a range bonus halfway through a strip miner cycle can waste a lot of ore if the roid drops out of range. Not to mention that the inertia and warp speed modifiers, while faster than a freighter, will still make your hulk feel like a frigate in comparison, so constantly moving the ship isn’t a real option. A dedicated hauler is still required.
However, the Orca has many bonuses on top of mining yield. The range link is invaluable, as it cuts down on how often you have to move your mining ships to new targets, considering the speed of most mining vessels. Someone out of range is mining 0 ore.
Second, the range of the tractor beam on the Orca makes it great for pulling in cans to a central location, rather than having haulers slowboating around belts to scoop them up with pitiful range tractor beams. Or even worse, requiring mining ships to haul their own ore back to station. Also, the orca can tractor the rat wrecks to a central point as well. Many mining ops have more than one hauler. If one of them is in an orca, not only do miners get the bonuses, but the haulers can be reduced in number since they have a single warp-in point to keep offloading ore. One hauler on top of the Orca can keep dumping the ore, and if he equips a salvaging unit, can provide additional income to the op, without having to chase down wrecks. Another advantage of the huge range on the beam is that the orca can pull in cans when a can flipper is in the system.
Additional functions that you can provide are repairs through drones if needed, a place to store lots of mining crystals, and as a combat ship hangar, should the op be working in a lower sec area with tougher rats. If you have a survey scanner equipped, you can mark the biggest asteroids in the belt, so that people can focus on the most profitable rocks first.
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.
Less Reputable Uses
Many pirates use Orcas as mobile bases. They can hold all the loot that they’ve gotten through suicide ganking or other means, and they can provide a nearby platform for switching and refitting ships when needed. Not to mention that an outlaw can stay in a pod and just pull a ship out of the bay when needed. We won’t go into detail on using the Orca to further a career in crime, but if you’re a hauler and you see an orca with a bunch of non-mining ships, be on your toes.
