Harvester Implants: Where, oh where?

     Being a currently Incursion-addicted miner, I am still none the less a miner at heart, it would seem, so when trolling through the implant lists on ye olde wiki at Eve University, along with the Highwall and Michi's implants, I also spied the harvest implant set.  While I enjoy the enhanced skill point training speed of using +5 implants, it makes me reticent to go after a harvest set because they only give a +2.  I have thoughts on that though.

     The un-thinking will say that there is no real benefit to using the harvests.  Really?  Time spent NOT warping to a new belt is time spent sucking on rocks.  That means more isk.  The wider swath of asteroids you can cut from a single location, the longer you can stay there.  maybe from the short sighted or narrow perspective of a single mining barge, sure, what's the point of the implants?  Not much, really.  From the point of view of a mining fleet, they start to have their value.  A lot of value.

- when you warp a fleet into a belt, either multi-boxing or with other actual players, you need to set up the boats and get the lasers going.  This isn't instant.  It takes time.  The more asteroids you can reach, the less often you have to do this.
- when you warp a fleet into a belt, setting up the barges on either side of the Orca nets an extra 4 to 5 km diameter to the mining circle while still allowing the barges to dump directly into the Orca.  Barges can motor over towards asteroids and the Orca can simply tractor the jet cans of ore over to empty them.  BUT, the more jet cans you have in space, especially high sec, the more of a target you are to gankers and flippers.  With high hulk pilot and orca skills, you can fill your cargo hold almost faster than the jettison timer runs out, plus, constant jet cans are a PITA.

     When it comes to the matter of the implant levels, there's a personally acceptable solution there too.  I have remapped the toons to help train the major skill directions faster.  For each +1 on an implant, it takes 5% off the training time, for a total of 25% if you have all +5 implants.  If I leave the +5 implants in a clone, but substitute the Harvest implants for any of the other, I'll definitely lose a little time on skill training, and won't be able to take full use of a Harvest full set, plus Omega, but even if I get another 5% range increase, once boosted with an Orca, that's more than a kilometer.  That's a nice extra boost, in my mind.

     For the actually "getting of the implants", well, that's another thing again.  They are few and far between.  There's only one set in contracts and the guy wants 4.5 billion for them.  LOL  NOT!  Mind you, this is quite likely in line with how hard it is to get them.  ORE agents, as I found, are few.  There is one high sec level 1 ORE agent.  All the rest are in low or null, and all pretty much stretch down a long red pipe to a dead end.  The entry system from high sec into low for this pipe, big surprise, has lots of activity - lots of kills.  All the rest of the systems down, and into, this ORE pipe are relatively low in activity and even lower in kills, according to Dotlan and Statics.  Battleclinic doesn't have a lot of kills registered down there, and the ones that are, aren't ever during my time zone of play.  No, based on the way I've gotten other implants, I'm thinking that they are ORE storyline rewards, the same way the other implants that I've gotten were storyline rewards.  Not all the storylines offer an implant, so I imagine ORE might be the same way.  That means, I would need the time to do 16+1 missions, mining ones mostly (I assume) and hope for an implant.  If all goes well down in the low sec pipe, I would need to do 85 missions minimum, to expect to get the full set of 5.  Not sure about the Omega, but it should be some kind of special mission too.  That's a lot of missions and no doubt I wouldn't be just running back and forth doing the missions in the agent system either.  There would also likely be the occasional combat mission thrown in there, just like the other high sec mining and distribution agents.

     So, something like 10 or 11 jumps into low/null sec.  85 missions minimum, with the level 4 ORE agent to hopefully get the implants.  That doesn't even count all the level 2 and 3 missions I'd need to run, and you guessed it Monty, the lvl 2 and 3 agents are all in the same pipe.  With all the social skills and the mining agent skill trained, it'll boost all the rep gains, but with all the agents being where they are, it's no wonder the implants are as rare as they are.  Also, it could be argued, they really aren't all that useful.  However, I will check things out over the next few days, maybe send my SB down the pipe for a recce, and see what the options are.  If I can get enough corp members down there.  We can all mission, plex and rat.  The extra people in system with enough boats might deter any lone wolves from going down for a gank fest.  Time will tell.

The Point?  I'll see how hard it will be to get the implants.  Even if I don't use them in the end, I can still sell them for a tidy profit as individual implants or as a set.