People complained that I demanded an Orca alt for members of the ganker corp. Well, I’ve outgrown the Orca. Of course I still use it for its 1 MWD cycle align, 250K EHP, 2.7AU/sec warp speed. It’s great to carry around fittings and loot. But not to move hulls. An Orca can carry around 23 Catalysts if it’s not carrying anything else (please don’t say to put cargo expanders on it, only suicidal morons do that). With dual-ganking, that’s used up in a few hours.
I used to Red Frog a freighter worth of hulls to some nearby system and go with the Orca to pick 23 up. But I also noticed that covering large distances during ganking increases kill count greatly. No point finding that last Retriever in this constellation if there are Mackinaws 5 jumps away! This way I could get several jumps away from my storage, making the Orca trip 15-20 mins long. That’s a gank lost.
Not anymore. I grabbed a Providence freighter and will move hulls for myself! How? Just as currently, I Red Frog a freighterload of hulls to my current base. Then I gank from there until I move. When I move, I move with my Orca filling it with fittings, loot and as many Catas I can. I move and gank. When I run off, I just jump into a shuttle, ride back to the storage, grab the Providence and move it with the hulls to my current base. If I’m 8 jumps away from my old base, I have to take 8 jumps with the Providence. With the Orca, I had to do 16 for every batch and there can be 7 batches in a freighter.
So an own Orca alt is not a convenience but a must for a ganker. Without it, you can’t move at all. The convenience is having a freighter next to it.
PS: of course it’s insured and a full load of destroyer hulls cost 180M so don’t get any ideas! The fittings are travelling in the Orca.
Some anti-tears:
I used to Red Frog a freighter worth of hulls to some nearby system and go with the Orca to pick 23 up. But I also noticed that covering large distances during ganking increases kill count greatly. No point finding that last Retriever in this constellation if there are Mackinaws 5 jumps away! This way I could get several jumps away from my storage, making the Orca trip 15-20 mins long. That’s a gank lost.
Not anymore. I grabbed a Providence freighter and will move hulls for myself! How? Just as currently, I Red Frog a freighterload of hulls to my current base. Then I gank from there until I move. When I move, I move with my Orca filling it with fittings, loot and as many Catas I can. I move and gank. When I run off, I just jump into a shuttle, ride back to the storage, grab the Providence and move it with the hulls to my current base. If I’m 8 jumps away from my old base, I have to take 8 jumps with the Providence. With the Orca, I had to do 16 for every batch and there can be 7 batches in a freighter.
So an own Orca alt is not a convenience but a must for a ganker. Without it, you can’t move at all. The convenience is having a freighter next to it.
PS: of course it’s insured and a full load of destroyer hulls cost 180M so don’t get any ideas! The fittings are travelling in the Orca.
Some anti-tears:
10 comments:
Slightly unrelated, but re-reading your care page.
Since corp bookmarks are limited to 250, there is no way to create instas for all regions. So just make your own bookmarks or trade with others.
An easy way to make copies of bookmarks is to copy them via corp bookmarks.
http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/copy-bookmark-between-corporations.html
I even use this method to copy bookmarks for my own out of corp alts.
If you don't want clutter (or shared ongoing bookmarks), just encourage anyone using the corp bookmarks as a 'copy service' to delete them when they are finished.
Now if you know of an easier way to copy bookmarks, I would love to know of it.
Copying bookmarks between alts is something that even you could see value in. Using the corp to do that trades possible security vs convenience; among players that already can shoot each other at whim.
That aside, I am rereading http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/p/we-gank-because-we-care.html, searching for word bookmark.
I find the only reference that I quoted in my earlier comment. I will highlight again :
So just make your own bookmarks or trade with others.
Your words, not mine.
If you don't like these words, as they are your words on your ganking corp page, I suggest you change them.
"please don’t say to put cargo expanders on it, only suicidal morons do that"
Sorry, what? I am genuinely confused. I get that the Orca loses a huge chunk of its EHP without a Damage Control/Reinforced Bulkhead in its lowslots, but that hardly turns it into papier mache.
As with all hauling, it's a question of estimating how much it would cost someone to destroy your ship, then making sure your cargo isn't enough to make it profitable. Purely as an example, you can fit an Orca for cargo (2x Expanded Cargo Hold II, 3x Large Cargohold Optimization I rigs) and as long as you're willing to get +5% Powergrid through implants you can still fit a 100mn MWD and a trio of Invulnerability Field IIs for 90.9k EHP. That's only a bit less than half the EHP of your new freighter, and it holds significantly less cargo; if a full catalyst load in your freighter isn't worth ganking, neither is a full catalyst load in a cargo-fit Orca.
Personally before I got my own freighter some time ago, I used to rely on my Orca as a hauler, including flying it fully cargo-fit; I made sure the cargos weren't expensive enough to be worth ganking and not only have I never lost an Orca, nobody's ever even taken a shot at it. Suggesting that hauling in a cargo-fitted Orca is "suicidal" seems to make no sense at all.
Gevlon, he quoted you directly http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/p/we-gank-because-we-care.html, 2nd last paragraph. "So just make your own bookmarks or trade with others."
Stupid mistake with the bookmarks fixed. Sorry, and thanks for pointing out. Now the corp page tells not to share bookmarks.
An Orca, even as empty is 600M+. So with 90K EHP, it would have worse EHP:price ratio than a somewhat tanked Mackinaw.
The Freighter suffers the same problem, it is simply much bigger, not everyone can muster the force needed to kill it, while getting half dozen Catas are trivial for most organizations ganking for fun.
But this is why my Freighter is insured and limited to carrying hulls.
"The Freighter suffers the same problem, it is simply much bigger, not everyone can muster the force needed to kill it, while getting half dozen Catas are trivial for most organizations ganking for fun."
But how many organizations ganking for fun can not only get those half-dozen Catas but have them either already camping travel routes or able and willing to scramble them in sufficient time to track down a travelling Orca?
It's one thing to get together a bunch of individual gankers plus their ships in order to take out an Orca that's sitting static in a belt/anomaly, giving them time to mobilise and prepare. It's another thing entirely for a bunch of for-fun gankers to actually have scouts watching station undocks and gates that a hauling Orca would pass through and then to trail it while assembling a team to intercept it and gank. What for-fun ganking group actually does that?
Alternately, if you have a gang of catalysts plus a scout to scan targets who are camping a travel route to gank targets, sure you [b]could[/b] attack a hauling Orca and kill it, but since the 600m hull price doesn't actually drop it's not cost effective; in contrast you could gank multiple T1 industrials hauling goods that would pay for the ganks and get an even greener KB for your troubles. Put another way, who assembles a team in perfect position to do for-profit ganking and then attacks an orca that will not be cost-efficient instead?
You said that cargo-fitting an orca was "suicidal" - where is your evidence for people killing hauling orcas travelling to stations/gates for fun and en mass, rather than occasionally ganking them in belts?
@Hivemind: good point, we must separate travelling Orcas that need scouts and preparation and mining Orcas that just need some bored nerds.
However my travelling Orca is often hauls 1B in fittings and loot + my Tengu. It needs just one idiotic moment to not replace from cargo expanders to tank and I'm down with 2B. Same for everyone else.
Also, especially in this case, people would kill the Orca just because it's Gevlon's Orca.
@ Gevlon
Fair enough, I just objected to labelling cargo-fitting an orca as suicide, since it really, really isn't. Frankly the best reason for you to expand into a freighter is the increased cargo space anyway, which beats out a cargo-expanded Orca by a wide margin anyway.
Out of curiosity, since it was missing from this post, why a Providence? IMO at least the only thing it really has going for it are aesthetics, which I can't see being an issue for you. The Fenrir aligns faster, the Obelisk has more EHP while the Charon carries more cargo. The Providence's only empirical feature is not being the worst in any of those areas (2nd worst cargo, ahead of Fenrir, 2nd best align/warp time after Fenrir, 2nd best EHP after Obelisk). On the other hand, given the paranoia inherent in not cargo-fitting Orcas I'd have thought you'd go Obelisk for the raw EHP, or bow before the general consensus that the Fenrir's faster align time makes up for its other deficiencies.
@ Anonymous
You'd think so, but IIRC Gevlon actually baited the Goons with a tanked Orca sat on the Perimeter gate during one of the Burn Jitas; they didn't take it then, nor did anyone else show up just to gank him.
Even better, in spite of his hatedom Gevlon still flits around hisec with -10 security characters on his way to barge ganks - he doesn't find stations/gates camped by instalock sniper Cormorants or Thrashers, for example.
I guess it's possible MiniLuv might target him due to his e-fame, but frankly they seem to be solidly for-profit when it comes to Freighter ganks. That said, I wonder if the ganking profit ratio gets skewed when your target is likely to drop a replacement set of catalysts plus gank fittings...
@Hivemind: the Providence is an all around second-best in cargo, align and tank, but it's not the real reason.
The real reason is that learning for it also learns for the Ark JF which is using the cheapest, Amarr fuel.
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