do not forget that this is all PLANNING for after the SSC.
At rough count we have 7 or 8 people who sound like they could be ready now, provided we armor tank. Apparently we have a lot more people with battleships than I realized.
I haven't started the Referral trial yet-sorry Lord Bucket
No worries. The link doesn't expire.
How beneficial is it to use mining drones in a Carrier?
It would be completely silly. In fact, it would be so completely silly, let's do the math just for fun.
Frist, assuming a new character without implants, it would take a minimum of 146 days of devoted training just to be able to fly a carrier. After mining and drones skills, plus the fact that you'd want carrier beyond minimum in order to field more drones, ballpark you're talking about 8-12 months of training time. Next, checking current
prices for used capital ships, I see some Archon carriers for sale for 2.25 billion ISK. Since carriers are capital ships, you wouldn't be able to fly it in secure space, meaning it would be constantly at risk and a great big huge delicious target. And not be able to defend itself very well because you'd be using your drones to mine.
T2 mining drones mind 25 m^3 per cycle. Assuming max mining drone skill, multiply that by 1.25 for a net of 31.25 m^3. If you maxxed your carrier skill you'd be able to field a theoretical maximum of 10 of them, for a net of 312.5 m^3 worth of ore pre minute.
...which, incidentally, is just more than a third the rate I can mine in a ship that cost one tenth the price, is able to go into highsec, and takes much less time to train.
Purchase price of 2,250,000,000 ISK for the carrier, plus (rough estimate) of about 1.1 billion to buy required skillbooks. (Carrier and capital ship skillbooks alone come to 906 million) Let's ignore fitting costs, and round off to 3.35 billion.
Assuming you mine scordite, 312.5 m^3 of ore is worthabout 3.72 million. Fortunately, the Archon being a carrier rather than a supercarrier, is able to dock at stations. So, assuming you jetcan mine and do your own hauling, let's conservatively say that you spend about 10% of your time hauling ore, for a net income of 3,348,000 ISK/hour.
At that rate...3.35 billion divided by 3.348 million means that your arrangement would pay for itself in 1000.6 hours of mining. Assuming you mine 12 hours a day, your carrier would pay for itself in roughly 2.8 months of mining 12 hours a day.
Or you could, you know...train for a
mining ship and be making ISK at three times that rate in the relative safety of highsec given a month or two of training and without spending over 3 billion ISK to do it.
Anyway, mining isn't much fun to begin with, and it's debatable whether it makes more money than other things you could be doing that are a lot more fun. If you want to mine, go for it...but I'd advise against engaging in any serious long-term plans for it. I can make comparable ISk/hour mining in a battleship without going through all the contortions required to be able to fly dedicated mining ships. If you want to mine to pay for your battleship in the first place, that's fine...but putting yourself in a battleship is only a couple hundred million ISK and can be done in your first 4-6 months worth of gametime. It doesn't need to be anything even remotely close to the kind of time and investment that you're proposing with the carrier idea.