Tuggy lives!

name: Tuggy the Tugboat

class: retriever (mining barge)

pros: (compared to the puny venture)

• great mining speed (9m³.s^-1 up from 4)
• great ore capacity

cons:

• Uglier than a Minmatar toilet
• slow as a walrus on ice-skates in summer
• smaller capacity than a 9 volt battery
• fewer turret mounts than there are fish in the sahara

Ah, it was worth the wait.
It does one thing, and one thing only: gather vast amounts of ore without having to rely on auxiliary freighters or boosters (although help is always welcome). But it does it better than any other T1 mining barge, so huzzah! What a nice present for myself it was, to have it all trained up for my return from christmas.

There's no countering its hulking slowness, which might become a problem if and when I get dropped by an ingrate third rate irate pirate or a rat. However, with only a small cap recharge rate booster, I got it to be barely stable while mining...as long as I don't get fancy and try interrupting the 180 seconds long cycle.
The two modulated strip miner II I installed need to operate are further enhanced by ore-specific crystals to operate, that degrade over time (an average of 10 hours mining for my T1 pyroxere crystals, so it's not really a big deal in the long run), so mining is finally getting mildly strategic and interesting. I'll be sticking to pyroxeres for a while, get some jaspet gathering skills next, and the future is looking quite bright.

Already it's become quite handy in strip-mining the pyroxeres from my home system, and doing tier 3 mining missions. Although some of those missions are most easily completed by having my Coerce Life Lessons clear the rats first. All in all, it dwarves the venture in every aspect that counts.
It'll be such a sad day when it eventually gets exploded due to my carelessness.
So here's a little contest idea: invent a name for my next mining barge, which I hopefully won't have to buy for a long long while. Maybe I'll even have tier II hardware trained up by then.