9 Hour Mining-Op

Today was a really long day.  I hopped into my POD ready to start the corp mining up. For mining I can only fly my [[Osprey]] and my [[Bestower]] for hauling and this generally works out quite well. It allows the more mining specialized capsuleers to focus on crunching roids and I haul stuff around as needed. Starting around 19:00 EVE-Time, our regular Sunday corp mining op started. We had a special group of asteroids to mine today. Saturday or Friday night 3 of us ([[player-kb:Cayla]], [[player-kb:Dogmata ESQ]], and myself) were out doing the Enemies Abound (1 of 4) mission, well it happens to have some really nice roids:

        1,260,000 [[Omber]] (14x 90k-roids)
        800,000 [[Scordite]] (16x 50k-roids)
        350,000 [[Kernite]] (14x 25k-roids)

Normally our mining ops have 8 to 12 ships. Two or three hulks, a retriever or two, and a smattering of cruisers, and occasionally orca support. Today however there were four of us with a total of six ships, and nothing bigger than a mining cruiser (and of course an indy for hauling). So, any idea how long it takes to go through that much ore? A blinkin' long time.

Now this was a particularly annoying op. The mission, of course, had an acceleration gate which meant we couldn't just warp to the roids, instead we activated the gate and landed 60 klicks from the roids! And my Osprey is slow, only 167 m/s. And our haulers are all slow too, though Dog had an AB on his and was able to reach about 300 m/s. Still, all that ore was 1,296,000 m³ which is a lot of trips in indies. I wasn't hauling much, but in my Bestower which moves about 19,000 m³ it would be 68 trips!

So to help our haulers out I jumped in a [[Condor]] named "Speed Tractor", specially fit (out of random parts) for the sole purpose of moving full jetcans from the miners down to the warp in point. It had an [[1MN Afterburner I]], 2x[[Small Tractor Beam I]], 1x[[Salvager I]]. With a top speed using the AB of just under 1000 m/s it worked great for zipping out to a couple of full cans, throwing the tractors on them, and dragging them back to the warp in point. It was also nice in that without the AB it moved 486m/s, just slower than the tractors, meaning I didn't lose the cans I was pulling. This made it much easier for the haulers as they didn't have to travel 60km everytime to pick up a load of ore.

The op went quite well other than having very few pilots, in the end it meant about 8-9 hours of mining. It started with four of us mining, 3x[[Osprey]] and a 1x[[Sythe]]. Eventually the Sythe pilot left and we were joined by a [[Cormorant]] with a relatively low SP pilot, only 5x[[XeCl Drilling Beam I]]. After 5 or 6 hours we finally got joined by a [[Hulk]] and a [[Mackinaw]] which helped speed up the remaining rock crushing. Luckily my POD was equipped with various entertainment devices to pass the time. All in all a good day and lots of points earned for our monthly payout.