Endurance Boosting

Whilst I certainly don't consider myself a miner, I have been seen in HiSec ice belts before because I'm either such an enormous tight arse that I won't pay for my own POS fuel, or I'm just so industrious that I insist on making my own POS fuel. Yeah... industrious. I've got well skilled Exhumer and Orca pilots, a few days of ice mining every three months or so isn't a big deal. It's almost therapeutic, right up until the time you feel like putting a gun in your mouth.

Anyway, ever since Shattered Wormholes came around and CCP trolled the crap out of us by putting ice belts in systems only accessible to frigates and destroyers, I've longed for the opportunity to harvest that high grade ice for convenience's sake and the obvious time saving. The Endurance frigate has now made that a reality, but how do you get yourself those dank mining boosts without an Orca?

You use a Stork, of course. Conveniently, it was only a short cross train on my Orca pilot to have him able to fly a Stork Command Destroyer for the express purpose of boosting a fleet of Endurance frigates and, as it turns out, the difference in the effectiveness of the boosting is remarkably small.

Obviously, this is hostile space, so one thing more than anything that is vital for this boosting Destroyer is that it be impervious to Combat Probing. I've solved this issue with a truck load of Gravimetric ECCM and a Back Up array and even tried to combat probe it out with a very high skilled Buzzard pilot with scanning mods and a full Mid Grade set of Virtue Impants to get a result of around 80%. So yeah, no one's going to probe you out, only a dumb safe spot will likely get you killed. Moreover, the fit isn't so specialized that you'd even need to dedicate a Stork to the job, you could just re-purpose your PvP one when the situation calls for it.

Now, to the miner nerd stats. Boosting the Endurance fit you see in the top part of the image with a maximum skilled Orca pilot with a Mining Foreman Mindlink will give you a yield of 1,691. Don't ask me to put that into cycle time seconds, because I can't/won't. Unboosted, the yield is just 1,144, so it's an appreciable boost in efficiency. The surprising number is that boosts from the Command Destroyer fit pictured yield a return of 1,591, just 100 less than the max skilled Orca. Of course, it's not just ice harvesting this will work wonders for, Gas and Ore are equally affected should you choose to bust out a Venture or Prospect for similarly small wormhole connections.

So there you have it. Go mining in W-Space; it's totally safe and super efficient.