OOC Entry 40 - Industrial Motherships

I trained one of my characters to fly the Rorqual recently and was discussing uses for those ships with people from my corp and alliance. Eventually talk turned to the difficulties of POS based industry in wormhole space with all it's constraints. Eventually we began to dream about a ship like the Rorqual - only with more abilities.

Something like an Industrial Mothership.

If you look at the combat oriented ships, then their range starts with frigates and ends with ships like supercarriers and titans.

If you look at industrial ships they also start with small mining frigates, but you hit the ceiling with the Rorqual, and that despite there being a possible opening for a ship type that does more and better things than the good old ore compressor.

Such a ship would have a heavy tank, most likely based on strong shields. It would therefore need a good amount of midslots. In it's high slots it would use mining ganglinks and would have the ability - like the Rorqual - to use three of them.

At this point I would actually like to propose a new module for that ship: An Industrial Drone Control Unit. Like the carrier's drone control unit it would allow for the deployment of additional drones, only in this case it would be limited to mining drones and the new upcoming salvaging drones.

While I am on the subject. There are three more new modules I would like to propose. The Refinery Installation, the Research Bay and the Assembly Line.

Those could be low slot modules and only one of each can be fitted. As their names suggest, they would offer refining, research and manufacturing slots. Those can only be used when the ship is in deployed mode, like siege or triage or the deployed mode of the Rorqual. In fact it would use the same Industrial Core for reconfiguration.

The three utility modules would also require their own skill to operate, and that one would grant one extra slot per level for each task - research, refining and manufacture - beginning with one to a maximum of five.

This Industrial Mothership could require it's own skill - ORE Mothership or something like that. Each level in this skill would grant shield buffer, a bonus to mining link efficiency and a bonus to time and/or waste factor of it's industry installations. Even the prerequisites are set up. Of course you need level 5 in ORE Industrial and level 3 in Capital Industrial Ships.

On maximum skills, it could operate at only slightly less efficiency than a station where you have optimal standings. It should be good but not superior to actual stationary facilities.

Like all real capitals it should be able to fit a jump drive.

Wouldn't that be a great ship?

It would give industry characters something new to aspire to, everyone else something new and shiny to kill with possibly very valuable loot inside. It can have some strong defence (mainly in the forms of shields and drones) but it would need support to survive a really serious attack. It would be the ultimate mobile industry platform for lowsec, nullsec and wormhole space.

Now I only have to hope for the sake of all industry pilots out there that someone from CCP reads this, then someone else from CCP actually thinks its a good idea, and then even more other people from CCP work on making it a reality.