With the current planning of CCP, the Rorqual is clearly downgraded in terms of its intended use in mining and should again serve primarily as a booster. As it looks at the moment, only the Hulk will mine significantly more ice, but with normal asteroids, the Jellyfish still has a clear nose in front.
I am actually of the opinion that the Rorqual must be brought even further in the direction of support/transport for mining. So there would be room for a dedicated mining capital at this point, which currently goes by the name of Cachalot for me. Somehow fitting for such a ship.
This ship should mainly play the role as a huge asteroid miner and the next logical step after the Exhumer especially in zero. Of course, similar to the boost of the Rorqual, a certain risk vs reward ratio should be maintained.
What does this mean in concrete terms. We are of course talking about a ship in the order of magnitude of a Rorqual and because of that of course it is correspondingly sluggish.
The mining itself should be done with appropriate capital strip miners. They can of course mine more than the normal variant known so far. But the difference comes mainly from the fact that significantly more miners can be positioned on the ship.
In addition, this ship can also deploy mining drones to increase the effect even more. So without any bonus of Indu Cores or Boosters already the mining amount should be equal to about 1.5 – 2 Hulks.
Similar to the Jellyfish, this ship should also be able to use an Industrial Core to increase the Strip Miner’s performance to a total of about 4 Hulks.
This happens mainly because here the cooling must be granted and therefore it is not possible to move active Industrial Core.
Alternatively, this ship could be made modular so that instead of a boost to the Strip Miners, it gets a better defense.
Thus this ship is fixed in space similar to the Rorqual and can be attacked accordingly, whereas the Rorqual has a good possibility to protect itself at least temporarily thanks to its Nexus Core and wait for reinforcements.
The alternative would also be the possibility to make a random micro jump in the aligned direction over a few thousand kilometers away thanks to a module, with which one is safe for the time being.
This effect could be followed by a temporary camouflage. The disadvantage of this story would be, of course, that massive damage to the modules would occur. So the cooling of the Strip Miner aka Indu Core would be destroyed and only be operational again by a repair.
The same then applies to the Strip Miner. The ship would receive massive damage. Another effect could be that the ship gets a cloak that runs for a certain time. The module would also be burned out afterwards. Because of the long range of the miners, the ship can be placed well outside the belt.
The sudden cloaking of this ship would also have a side effect that could allow attackers to find it. The particle tracks would still be detectable with scan probes, also the approximate direction with the DScan. These evaporate naturally however only after approx. 1 minute.
So every attacker would have the chance to know that there is a ship in the belt. The question is only where and would have to be found by flying around. This cloaking effect would consume cap after a certain time and would not last the whole time for the emergency cloaking. Thus this would be limited in time.
The systems would also be completely shut down and the cloak would initially maintain itself for 5 minutes. After that, it would access the ship’s cap. The longer the cloak has to last, the more cap is drawn. Thus, you have the choice of waiting until the enemy pulls off or already slowly accelerating and starting a breakout attempt.
In general, this ship has a large cargo space but can not compress the ores but only bearings. Either you take them away yourself or hand them over to the nearest Rorqual for further processing.
Basically, the ship should of course have a certain bonus. So I see this mainly in the mining time and mining amount as well as in the respective mini-drones. There should also be the possibility to work without the Industrial Core, then it would not bring the top performance but significantly more than the previous Exhumer and remain mobile. So the pilot would have the choice.
These are only a few ideas I have for this ship.