The Complete Miner's Guide by Halada
44Version 2.2
11.1 Mining Foreman Link - Ice Harvesting
Ok so we know your cycle time will be reduced by 22.5%, but how many extra cycles does that give ? Again, the math to the rescue:
500 sec * 1.25 * 0.75 * 0.75 * 0.95^2 * 0.775 = 245.90 sec
Roughly this means almost 15 cycles per hour, which is 4 extra cycles. Here's our edited
table from section 9:
And our original table from section 9, for comparison's sake:
As you see the Mackinaw will roughly mine 16 extra ice units per hour. Hence we can all
agree it's an important difference, which becomes even more important when a whole
group of Mackinaw attach an ice belt !
And now on to the good stuff...
11.2 Mining Foreman Link Laser Optimization
As I mentioned at the beginning of the section, the laser optimization link will reduce
your cycle time (it doesn't affect ice harvesters by the way) instead of giving a direct
bonus to your yield. Which means that a 22.5% reduction in cycle time translates into a
yield increase overtime by 1/(1-0.225)= 1.29 (29%)! Yes, it means a maxed command
ship pilot will increase your yield by 29% ! Yes, you can drool.
We could have treated this link as we did with the Ice Harvesting Link, meaning,
calculate how many new cycles we get per hour and then compare the difference.
However since we always treated ore mining with yield bonuses, introducing a cycle time bonus could confuse many people, so as I've demonstrated, the 22.5% bonus to
cycle time actually is a 29% bonus to your yield. This is how the bonus is factored in the
next equation ...
Let's see how our pimped Hulk pilot from section 7 does now:
360*1.25*1.25*1.15*1.15*1.15*1.05*1.05*1.05^2*1.75*1.29 = 2347.48 m3/cycle
Using Omber, it means 2347.48 /0.6 = 3912.47 
3912 units of Omber/cycle (per strip)
Since you're fitted with 3 strip miners, you will be getting 11 736 units of Omber per
cycle, or 234 720 units of Omber per hour. We already know this is a 29% increase over
our pimped Hulk, so no surprises there. How about our retriever from the very
beginning? Well, it's a 254,99% increase! Yes, you read right... amazing how efficient we
can become when we know how everything works !
But what really interests us is how this affect us in an ISK/hour ratio ? Instead of
spoiling it right away, section 13 will cover this in more details.