- Beginning a Miner in EVE: Apocrypha
- Frigate Mining: Fitting a Navitas
- Frigate Mining: Jetcanning and Hauling
- Cruiser Mining: Fitting a Vexor
- Drone Useage: Mining and Combat
- Brief Re-cap and Finding a Mining Corp to Join (Coming Soon!)
- Mining operations (Coming Soon)
Hey! So to work with the Vexor fitting I talked about last time, Here is everything about Gallente Drone Useage for Mining and Combat with the Vexor.
Carrying Drones: All ships with a drone bay have a Drone Capacity and a Drone Bandwidth. Capacity is the volume of space available in your drone bay to carry drones. Drone Bandwidth determines how many drones your ship can ‘power’ at once. Drone Bandwidth alone does not determine how many drones you can have in space at once, but your skill level in Drones does. So even if you can carryand power 20 Drones, you can still only operate maximum 5 at once.
The Vexor has a 100m3 capacity drone bay, and 75 Mbit/second drone bandwidth.
Mining Drones:
If you want to use Mining Drones, You will need to train the skills Drones 1 and Mining Drone Operation 1.
Drones: Allows a pilot to control 1 drone per skill level. (level 1, one drone; level II, 2 drones; etc.)
Mining Drone Operation: Grants 5% bonus to mining drone yield per skill level.
Mining Drone I: Mines ore at a rate of 15m3/60sec, and requires 5 m3 volume in drone bay, and 5 Mbit/sec drone bandwidth.
So Aurora training the skill Drones to level 3 enables her to operate 3 drones. The Vexor’s hull bonus gives Aurora’s drones a 10% bonus to mining yield per level of Gallente Cruiser she has trained. Gallente Cruiser trained to Level 2 means a 20% bonus. (15 +(15 x .2))= 18. Each drone also gets a 5% mining yield bonus from Mining Drone Operation 1, and each level you train thereafter, for now, I am calculating at level 1. (18 +(15 x .05))= 18.75. Each of Aurora’s 3 drones would pull in 18.75m3 of ore per 60 seconds. (18.75 x 3)= 56.25M3/60 sec.
Mining Drone II: Mines Ore at a rate of 25m3/60sec, and requires 5m3 volume in drone bay, and 5 Mbit/sec drone bandwidth. Skills required: Mining Drone Operation V, Drones I, Mining V. With Base skills, Mining Drone IIs pull in 36.25m3/60sec each. Cruiser skill: (25 +(25 x .2))=30; Mining Drone Operation 5: (30+(25 x .25))=36.25 With 5 drones out this is 181.25m3/60sec. More than triple mining drone Is.
I agree that to start mining drone Is are not extremely impressive, but bear in mind that this is with the bare minimum skills required to use the drones. If I up my Gallente Cruiser skill to level 4, and my Mining Drone operation to level 4, the total m3 mined per 60 seconds jumps to 72. Considering the drones are on top of the normal mining turrets, this isn’t too shabby.
If you level your Mining Drone Operation skill to use Mining Drone IIs, it becomes quite impressive.
As for the Vexor’s high power slot mining lasers: a single miner II mines 60m3/60sec, and Aurora gets a bonus of 20% mining turret yield from her mining skill at level 4, (60 +(60 x .2))=72, times 4 mining turrets=288m3/60sec.
So turrets and drones combined, Aurora’s vexor should be hauling in about 344.25m3 of ore per 60 seconds. Thats a 190.65m3/60sec upgrade from the Navitas’ 153.6 with 2 Miner Is.
Combat Drones:
If you want to use combat Drones, you will need to train the skills Drones 1 and Scout Drone Operation Level I.
Scout Drone Operation: Drone control range increased by 5000 meters per skill level.
Hammerhead I: Has a 4.00s rate of fire, and requires 10m3 volume in drone bay, and 10Mbit/sec drone bandwidth.
The Hammerhead Does the most damage among the medium drones, thus is your best bet for defense!
So there is Aurora’s Vexor’s Drone Bay, 5 Mining Drone Is, and 5 Hammerheads. (At least until I can tech up to mining drone IIs.)
Alright. So Aurora has her Drones. Now what?
Drone Use and Control:
Alright. When you get out into space, you will see your drones appear in a window below your overview.
You want to start by putting them into groups, I simply titled mine Hammerhead1 and Miner1.
Right click on a drone, any drone, and highlight ‘move to’. Select ‘new group’ as below.
Once your drones are in groups, you can give them group commands, instead of having to give a command 5 times.
When you are mining, get up close and personal with an asteroid so your drones don’t have to fly in and out 900km.
Right click on your mining drone group, and select ‘launch drones’.
Then right click on your mining drone group, and select mine repeatedly.
Once your mining lasers start bringing in ore, jettison some ore to create a jetcan so you can continue mining.
BOOKMARK your jetcan. To bookmark your jetcan, right-click on your jetcan in the overview window and select bookmark. It will prompt you to name it whatever you like, I recommend an identifier, (I used CXVI) and the in-game time you created the canister.
With your ships cargohold and your jetcan’s cargo windows open, sit there and wait for the ore to come in, move it into the jetcan, and repeat.
Inevitably some pesky serpentis will show up, so be ready to call back your mining drones and kick out your hammerheads. Since you get the ‘right-click-and-select’ idea, I’ll do this in list form:
- Right click your miner group, select ‘return to drone bay‘.
- Right click on the serpentis/rat in your overview and select ‘lock target‘.
- If you are too far away to lock target, continue with these steps while you wait for it to come closer.
- Once your miners are in, right click your hammerhead group and select ‘launch drones‘.
- Your hammerheads will immediately move to your ‘drones in space‘ tab.
- Right click on your hammerhead group and select ‘engage target‘.
- Once your hammerheads have obliterated the serpentis/rat,
- Right click your hammerhead group, and select ‘return to drone bay‘.
- Pop out your mining drones and continue!
Keep loading up that Jetcan until it is full, or until you are done watching Voyager, and go get your hauler!
Since you bookmarked the location of your jetcan, you can warp to within 0km of it from anywhere in the same system.
Warp in, load up, and take home the ore!
I suggest saving some of your raw ore until you have leveled refining for that time. Aurora is mining veldspar mostly, so once her refining skill is at 5, She will train veldspar processing before I reprocess the raw ore.
Thats about all on drones and their use for now.
Next post I plan to re-cap Aurora’s skills trained thus far, as well as discuss finding a player-owned corp. Meanwhile, if you were looking for a guide on how to make ISK, click here.
