I haven’t been this excited for a ship in a while.
To me it completely replaces the MOLE, even for undercrewed operations, and potentially even for occasional solo use, since most of the functionality is centralised on the bridge, so you won’t have to run down ladders and elevators to reach the mining heads, plus they are on rails now so no need to swap back and forth to the pilot seat to make small adjustments. Of course, it really depends on how engineering gameplay impacts large ships with small/solo crews.
And 500+ scu of cargo? Crazy. It’s even got a tractor beam for loading/unloading.
For me it was an instant buy (well, upgrade). Anyone else?
Yeah it looks really cool, I’m currently figuring out what to melt and what to upgrade if I did get one but that brings me to the point which is the cost. At that price, it’s not that far off an Orion so it could be better to make the leap to that.
But yeah, not sure. It is a really cool looking ship and it’s probably going to be great to use as well. I actually don’t have a mining ship right now but have enjoyed that loop in the past so will probably pick up either this or the Orion.
It’s definitely close enough in price to an Orion to raise that question.
The Orion seems like the kind of ship you park in an asteroid belt and just go to town on, and have other ships come to it for support, like maybe a hull c come to collect the refined resources, maybe a herc or something to resupply, etc. so the Orion can keep nomming on asteroids.
The arrastra though seems a bit more active, plays more like any other mining ship, just bigger and with a built in refinery so you don’t need to worry about quant timers, etc. which is more my style for sure.
Yeah that’s true, in the announcement video they did mention the use cases were slightly different too and the Arrastra can also mine on planets.
Anyway, after some long overdue fleet consolidation I CCUed to one for $60 which I think is worth it. Didn’t make the leap to the Orion.
Yeah I did the same, although I did actually apply the CCU which isn’t something I’d usually do for an unreleased ship
Does it feel like every new ship that comes out in a category is somehow better than the others in the same category.
I get that is the natural iteration of things, but I just hope that older ships get an update pass to bring them up to par.
I definitely feel this makes the mole obsolete. Obviously won’t know for sure until it’s in game but I’m struggling to come up with any reason why a crew of any size would take the mole over the arrastra assuming they had access to both, but maybe once it’s actually flyable the extra size and bulk will mean it is preferable to take the mole for some jobs, idk.
I do feel that both the prospector and Orion still have a strong enough niche that the arrastra doesn’t make them obsolete at all though, imo