Business Thursday: industrials and their rebalancing

The announcement that among many other ships, industrials will be rebalanced was already overdue. This posts shows not only why they are a mess, but - as a Business Thursday post should - but helps to find the best possible ship for the job.

The first problem is that - unlike all other ships - you fit the industrials of the various races exactly. The max-cargo version has Cargohold Expanders in lows and Cargohold optimization rigs in highs, meds have shield tank. The "max-tank" version has a Damage Control taking the place of one low and Core Defense Field extender rigs. Armor tanking an industrial would make its cargo space laughable. The max-cargo version of all ships have 1.94x larger cargo, the max-tank has 1.75x more EHP on average (STD: 0.05, no outliers), for all ships. A Merlin and a Rifter are both frigates but you fit them differently and fly them differently. But you fit and fly all 12 industrials and 4 "deep space transports" the same. Let's see the EHP and cargo space of the "max-cargo" versions of all ships: So, this is the problem: they are all stepping stones towards the Deep Space Transports and even these transports are much worse than the Orca (which is faster to learn) and much-much worse than Freighters. Since Freighters can jetcan and scoop, there is simply nothing left of the Industrial ships than newbie freighters. While the frigates are not "combat ships for newbies", these ships have no field where they are better than Orcas or Freighters assuming there is enough cargo to fill them. The only exception is Iteron Mark V which has OK-ish cargohold but no tank, so you can carry cheap things in it until you get an Orca/Freighter. For dangerous zones there are covops haulers and jump freighters beating them again.

So which industrial you should use? Neither, get an Orca or Freighter! If you can't afford it yet, you can haul in any of them temporarily. We can see now why this class need a rebalance: they are all the same and they are all inferior to other ships. How could they are rebalanced? The different races need to do different things, like fast, fast aligning, tanked, large. The problem is that in order to be more than just stepping stones (ships that newbies use), they must be competitive compared to Orca, freighters and covops haulers. Not an easy task. If you have ideas for a role, please comment, I'll list them. I also list problematic ideas:

• Fast hauler: I mean 500m/s without afterburner, it's good doing distribution missions on autopilot. Distribution missions are the only hauls where you need to move medium sized things that are not typical sucicide gank targets.
• Tanky hauler: Problematic because of the Orca. It is only competitive if it's more tanky (200K+) and has other competitive property that offsets its smaller hold (faster, aligns faster).
• Fast aligning hauler: Good for doing distribution missions manually.
• Specialist hauler: tiny cargohold, large specialist hold for items like planetary materials, minerals, ores, fuel
• Combat hauler: moderate cargohold, large ammo hold. Moves similarly to a battlecruiser, tanks like a battleship, has a non-zero DPS and can supply its fleet with ammo, nanite paste and some spare parts.
• Interdiction nullified hauler: passes bubbles like a T3
• Scanner hauler: bonused for scan probe strength, so can scan itself in and out of wormhole chains
• ECM bonused industrial: can protect itself with ECM and ECM drones