So having finally got hold of an Orca I tried a little mining op today. Took two jumps to a system (Augnais >> Alsottobier?) with no stations and there were plenty of asteroids in the belts unlike some other systems where they've been mined out this weekend.

The Orca has 40K cargo hold + 40K corporate hangar + a ship maintenance bay that can hold two mining barges or exhumers

I stored a hulk and a retriever fitted for my miners in the ship bay, had my miners in frigates, fleeted up and flew to the target belt.

Boarding ships from the ship maintenance bay is easy - just right click the Orca and 'open ship maintenance bay' to view the ships stored inside, right click a ship and select the 'board' option and you swap from whatever your flying to the selected ship (must be within 1500m). If your miners can also put up a fight they could fly combat frigs/cruisers to and from the mining site and swap into them if pirates arrive.

The Orca also provides a fitting service allowing you to rejig your ship in space - remember to take some spares if you plan on doing this.

For mining theres a choice of jet canning or staying close to the orca and moving ore directly into it. The Orca has a tractor beam range bonus so it can tractor cans from quite a distance.

I filled both the cargohold and the corp hangar in under an hour so for long sessions a dedicated hauler would still be needed, however the Orca does give you a good reserve of secure space to use. It would be possible for the assisting characters to fly maxed cargo blockade runners and swap them in and out to make the most of a single trip. This would only work wioth blocakde runners as all the other transport and industrial ships are too big to fit more than one in the ship maintenance bay.

Important point to note - you can't store a ship in the ship maintenance bay if its got any cargo in it other than charges (ammo)

I'm training up cloaking for wormhole mining expeditions...

Update: Day Two - I now have two hulks mining (although one is only with ordinary strip miners) and it took me exactly an hour to fill the Orca. Both the hulks had only one mining laser upgrade so I'm going to refit with dual MLU for tomorrow.

Interesting to note that the Orca has a fitting service so you can reconfigure your hulks on the fly - I'm now carrying around a few spares in the corp hangar so I can quickly switch to ice mining if I want to or swap mining/combat/logistics drones around.

Next step is to reopen the account with a hauler pilot so I can do longer sessions if I want to.