Whelp, 2 runs in my Orca miner over 2 hours... a pair of cracked rocks, one failed crack, and a lot of laser mining... about 120 painite, plus other tidbits. Turns out even the single medium mining laser is badly bottlenecked by 3 collector limpets. Lot of time sitting idle while the cloud of fragments slowly gets collected.
Given that I'm now 80m credits richer, it might be time to get a Python. Seems like it's a bit of the meta for medium sized miners, and judging by the slots, I can see why. Go minimal on the shields, and there's an easy 6 collectors, 2 prospectors, and 128t of cargo, which it'll be able to fill faster than my Orca is filling its 96. Laden jump of 25 is a bit mediocre, but you can't have everything.
Shame the shield and scoop will be occupying a 4 and a 6 slot, one way round or the other; I'd rather have a small emergency scoop, but since collectors only come in odd sizes, that's the most sensible allocation. Maybe I can dump the surface landing package and put the DSS in that slot? Definitely looking forward to those extra size-1 in a few days, I can't do without my DSS but I begrudge it the size 2 it always ends up in