The Faction Miners: Antares, K’Vort, and Valkis

Going from a Horizon to any of the faction miners in Star Trek Fleet Command is a big step in the game. Enormous. The term “game-changer” is completely overused, but these ships will change the way you play the game. You’re going to get your mining done much faster. You’re going to be able to mine in places that you haven’t mined before, and you’re going to be able to raid bases much, much faster.

Appearance

Apart from their color, they’re identical cousins. Aside from the red accents on the top of the K’Vort, they’re single-colored reprints of the Horizon.

Building Your Faction Miners

In order to build the Antares, K’Vort, or the Valkis, you’re going to need a level 30 shipyard and 100 Blueprints. You can get them from the corresponding faction store, where they cost 150 credits each, by defeating level 31+ faction hostiles, or from rare armada packs.

Ship Abilities

Each of them gives you a big increase in mining speed of one material. The Antares is the gas miner. The K’Vort specialized in crystal, and the Valkis is for ore.

Each of them starts off with a 70% increase to mining their specific material, and tops off at 250%.

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Upgrading Your Faction Miners

The Antares, K’Vort and Valkis all cost the exact same amounts of everything to upgrade.

The quick version is that you’re going to want to start saving your crystal now. This will be difficult if your primary warship is an interceptor, like the Saladin, as they also require crystal to upgrade.

Having

Should I Build All Three?

Absolutely, especially if you’re working on going triple faction. They each focus on one material, and if you’re needing to mine 25,000 units of each material each day, having three faction miners is going to be a save you a lot of time.

I’d only recommend maxing out one of them, and that’s more for the overall cargo capacity than the mining speed.

Mining Speed Test

So I did a little test, to show just how big an upgrade these ships can be. Keep in mind that mining speed is dependent on a lot of factors. Ship upgrades, officers, synergy, and multiple technologies. For the purposes of this demonstration, I’m going to crew each ship with T’Pring as captain, with bridge officers of Stonn and Ten of Ten (tier 1). In terms of tech, I’ve got Gas Miner 9 and Federation Gas Miner 4. Your results will be different from mine, this is just to give you a basic comparison.

I then ran the same crews on the Envoy, North Star and Horizon for comparison.

Ship	Tier	Gas/hr	25000 time	24/hrs	Lat Rush Pts
Envoy	5	5,649	4.4	135,576	2,711,520
North Star	7	11,151	2.2	267,624	5,352,480
Horizon	6	13,806	1.8	331,344	6,626,880
Antares	5	20,186	1.2	484,464	9,689,280

So you can see that the Antares will finish my 25,000 daily mining requirement about 50% faster than the Horizon would. This will make a big difference when you’re triple faction, trying to mine all three, or even more so during a mining event. Over the course of a 24-hour Latinum Rush event, you can see it’s almost over 3 million points more.

Base Raiding Stats

The upgrade from Horizon to faction miner is even more stark when it comes to cleaning out an opponents base.

Again, I put together a comparison. For the speed crew, I went Pan, Rima, and Stonn. For the warp crew, I went Helvia, Domitia, and Stonn. Again, these are crew and tech-dependent, your results may vary. I added the Botany Bay to this comparison because it does have a great capacity.

Ship	Tier	Impulse w/Pan	Warp w/Helvia	Cargo Capacity	Trips to Match Antares
Envoy	5	112	10.1	138,628	12.25
North Star	7	149	19.1	15,260	111.24
Botany Bay	9	165	20.9	546,000	3.11
Horizon	6	101	13.8	600,936	2.82
Antares	5	101	18.6	1,697,584	1

So as you can see, the jump in total cargo space is enormous, especially when raiding in other systems. The Antares has three times as much cargo capacity than the Horizon, and even with all the Outlaws research, it’s still close to the Botany Bay in warp speed.

If you’re a base raider, like I am, you’re going to find this upgrade is going to save you an awful lot of time.

Should I Use Faction Miners to Mine Latinum

No. But it’s an awful lot of fun to hunt unsuspecting D’Vors with your faction miner.

Background

The ships in the game are a redress of the Horizon.

Antares

The USS Antares was a trading ship that appeared in the Original Series episode Charlie X. Except that it didn’t appear on screen.

The actual ship model was created for the Animated Series and was later added to Charlie X in the remastered version in 2006. It would be nice to see STFC add this model instead of just the redressed Horizon, as it’s far more interesting. Just my two cents.

The star Antares is  550 light-years (170 parsecs) away from Earth. It’s about 10,000 times as bright as our Sun, and is a red super-giant star. It’s in the constellation Scorpius, and was named “Antares” by the ancient Greeks – as Ἀντάρης,  meaning “rival to-Ares” (“opponent to-Mars”), due to the similarity of its reddish hue to the appearance of the planet Mars.

K’Vort

There are mentions of K’Vort Class Klingon ships in Star Trek – but none of them have anything to do with mining or trading. They’re Birds of Prey – attack vessels.

In Star Trek Discovery, K’Vort was listed as both a location, and as a person.

Valkis

The name Valkis doesn’t appear anywhere onscreen in Star Trek. It does appear in Star Trek Online, but it’s not a survey ship there.