Avian Gamers Network

These are my thoughts. Take them or leave them. I just noticed lost of people see the barge as and end all be all mining machine. I do not share those thoughts.

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Well Ive had the Barge III for a few days now. Figured I'd write up a quick review.

Barge III takes longer to train that a Cruiser or even BattleCruiser
Barge III has zero defense, except for drones but usually you have mining drones fitted.
Barge III is mind numbingly slow. By the time I reach a field and get to the rock other ships have been there for atleast 2-3minutes.
Stripminers have a cycle time of 320sec. Mining small yield rocks like Omber I often will spend full cycles only to have others mining the same rock and when my cycle is up I yield nothing. Waisting 3 full minutes.

As you can see, the Barge is not working out for me. I know others like it, and you may as well. But it is not the ship for me. Once I get Refining skills under way I will spend the three days it takes to get a BattleCruiser. Yeah they are 25-35mil credits but in the end I think it will be a better ship for me and my playstyle.

Yield: The Barge has a nominal advantage over a BattleCruiser in Yield. Yeah it is dependent on Skill etc, but the yields are pretty similar when mining Veld, Scord and Omber. As times goes on the Barge will pull away once we mine Ice etc. But for now, Barge is equal - in my mind- to any other well outfitted ship.

I can see nice advantages to the Barge III further down the line. As we start mining more and more precious Ores and Ice the Barge will be very valuable. Also, mining Plag, Scord and Veld the Barge is great. Those rocks have higher yield totals so you can mine those rocks longer.

Also, the 320sec cycle is nice for those who mine will watching a movie or working offline. It just sucks to waist 3 mins and find the rock it depleted.

Scanners are nice, but there is little chance of finding the specific rock(s) you are mining with a scanner so no real way to see which is yours and how much is left. If Scanners showed which rocks you had targeted I think it would help greatly.

The speed of the Barge is also a big issue for me. Other people get to rocks 2-3 min before you do. That is 2-3 full cycles for them. In that time you basically loose and yield advantage over them. Plus the 60m/s is just numbingly slow unless you have travel insta's set up. Even then going the last 15-30km once in the belt is quite annoying.

So for me, it is more bad than good. I will probably take my Barge to Luminaire and do some solo mining with Moniker hauling but since it has no defense I cannot really do that in .6 space.

The Barge, Im sure, will be an asset down the line. But right now, I'd rather be in a Cruiser or BattleCruiser.

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Moge

Yup. Many of the reasons I wen't with the Battlecruiser for mining.

Competative yield with less training time.
Far greater flexibility in equipment loadout.
Far greater defensive and offensive potential.

However. Longer term the barges are a better investment in my opinion because of the newly introduced Exhumers.

Longer skill investment, but a Hulk outfitted with a couple cargo expanders and 3 giant secure cans can carry over 13,500m3 in ore in it's belly. (Better than that with better expanders and any skills that might extend cargo capacity)
And the Hulk can sit in a high sec belt unprotected because of it's much higher shields. Throw on a few shield extenders and a little shield regen skill and the Hulk can shrug off attacks from several rats at one time.
Add in the drone capacity and you can either mine at the Keys with extra capacity from mining drones or you can mine AFK with combat drones set to auto defend you in a .8 to .5 sec belt.

The Exhumers have the advantage of independance when operating in high sec. They are their own haulers and with all the skills it takes to get them and outfitted with 3 Stripminer IIs and mining crystals they can haul in a heafty sum.

But definatly not a waste of time to go with a battlecruiser first. The flexibility alone is worth it. One ship for many missions.

-LA

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"Do not try and make the enemy respect you, try and make them think you are a joke. Because it is much easier to shoot them in the dark when they are laughing."

The mid-level barge, which is the highest level barge any of us have achieved yet, is competitive with battleship mining yields. A battleship CAN mine more than a barge, although a barge making effective use of mining drones should still edge out ahead. The top level barge, however, well outpaces even a battleship-- probably only a battleship with properly configured deep core miners could hope to match a top level barge with 3 strip miner IIs.

Prior to RMR, barges could not be seen as the ultimate mining vessel mainly because they could not do deep core mining. There are still issues with deep core mining and regular barges, since deep core mining kicks up a dust cloud which damages anything that's too close to the asteroid being mined. With RMR, barges can now deep core mine, so they are competitive with even deep core mining battleships.

As for mining alone, it requires some not-insignificant skills with drones, so you lose a bit of the efficiency due to having to change over from mining drones to combat drones.

Keep in mind that the strip miners being used are strip miner Is. Just like any other module, the difference between Tech 1 and Tech 2 is fairly significant.

The one thing that barges can do which no other mining platform can is ice mine. But you don't want to do that for a while. I speak from personal experience when i say that there's nothing quite so demoralizing as spending 600 seconds mining only to receive 2 units of ice. Of course, each of those units is 1000m3 in volume, but it is still a pretty big shock if you weren't warned!

The upside to ice is that it's pretty valuable, since it and its products are used to fuel various things such as jump drives and stations. Refining ice takes a ton of skills, though, so there aren't usually very many, if any, buy orders in higher sec areas.

All in all-- No, barges are not the ultimate mining vessel and nor are they meant to be. Battleships and Battlecruisers can be quite competitive with barges, winning out easily against the first barge and running a very close race with the mid-level barge. Destroyers would be contenders as well if they had the CPU to mount 8 miner IIs or deep core miners, or the cargo to keep those miners running. Barges are very weak, defensively, and very, very slow-- they're for mining, not fighting. This makes taking them into low sec fairly risky.

Exhumers, they may qualify for ultimate mining ship. They're tough enough to last in low sec and they can do everything the Tech 1 barges can do and more. With the addition of the deep core strip miner IIs, there's no longer an aspect of mining that the combat ships can do that the barge types cannot. With mining upgrades, you can decrease the cycle time on mining lasers of all kinds, including the turret mounted, the strip miners, and the ice miners. As with everything else in EVE, the watchword is 'choice.' You can go either way, or even choose which methods you use by the op.

I've never actively encouraged anyone from TCO to go for barge, because I always felt (and this was more clear pre-RMR) that there were aspects of mining which the barge was better suited for and aspects which combat ships with miner loadouts were better suited for (ice mining and deep core mining being whole categories of mining that only worked with one type of vessel). Best to decide for yourself, as Moge did (that's moge, right? right?) which is best for you. But hey, if you can use a barge and you can use a battleship, that just means you have more ways to go at the same problem!

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[insert Blackadder quote here]

Two very useful points of view! I think I'm going to switch over to training for a Battle cruiser... and just switch to it when I make an extra 15mil.

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--The Hermit