Compression and Capacity
Capacity
Cargohold = 20,000m3
Corp Hanger = 10,000m3
Ship Maintenance Bay = 800,000m3 (restricted to industrials, mining barges, transports and exhumers)
'Assemblyline capacity' = maximum of around 600,000m3 (10 installed jobs not delivered)
Compression Rates
~20:1 for high end ores
~15:1 for 'medium' ores
~10:1 for low end ores
~8:1 for ice
so for a quick capacity calculation, multiply your total space by the compression rate. It averages out to between 2.6-6.4 hours of mining for 4 hulks.
Clone Bay
A lot of discussion around this, yes it is a powerful ability, and yes it is currently a one way trip, so you must factor in the clone cost to your profits bearing in mind that installing a jump clone on a ship is always without implants (new jump clone) unless you specifically plug them in after jumping to the ship.
We changed the cloning facility operation skill to add 15% max number of clones per level. In the case of the Rorqual, this means between 6-10 clones depending on your skill level. It also significantly boosts the max clones of the other moms and titans which is needed.
Additional Bonus
We added a 20% to drone damage and hitpoints per level in addition to the current bonuses. This enhances the rather low defences of the Rorqual enough to make it more comfortable at defending in some scenarios.
Cost
This has changed a fair bit since the blog was first released and is now higher than first conceived. I estimate from market prices of capital components in lonetrek that it will cost at least 1.85 billion.
The compression blueprints are designed not to be researched and have no wastage factor. They are also cheap, between 250k - 1.25mill as they are a requirement of the ship to function.
However, I would point out that with the mining foreman bonus for laser optimization, which is effectively a forth hulk for every three in gang (and who said your trained miner would go to waste flying it!Wink), that even the high initial cost is fairly reasonable when considering the time to break even with the additional bonuses and time bonuses through ease of logistics.
My personal opinion is this ship very much empowers the nomad operations as I call them whilst serving different purposes for different groups of people.