Science & Industry

TLDR: with 3xgunners@4, would you try to defend a highsec Large pos (losing 14,112 labslot hours and 120m/fuel per week) or strip it down and roll it to an alt corp hoping to waste away your foe's war bills/morale/determination?

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I have planned to set up a research POS, I have a large tower sitting around and a dozen mobile labs. But I cant decide if i should buy ~300-600m worth of defensive batteries and spend time anchoring them, and strip the labs if a dec rolls in, and try to defend the stick (I have 3 accounts each with gunners at IV)

or if I should just strip the tower down and keep an alternate corp rolling with standings from some of my other characters, and muddy up my corp histories rolling research alts from corp to corp piddling away the wardec fees of any enemy.

I am not really happy of losing 14,112 labslot hours +1wk fuel (~120m) vs someone else 50m war fee, hence the lack of interest in defending vs. stripping the whole tower and rolling everyone to another corp and hoping the enemy gets fed up of war fees that yield no target.

plus it is alot easier to strip 12 labs and 1 stick down than setting up 80 batteries and trying to defend and eventually losing 600-900m+ worth of POS and batteries to a determined aggressor

thoughts?

Personally I wouldn't bother actively defending it. The most I would do is turn it into a dickstar with lots of hardeners, ECM and stuff like that. They won't have caps in high sec which is a plus. I don't have a single gun on mine :). Thing is I'm not that fussed about getting war decced. I just take the POS down and go and do something else.

Hisec POS removal is rare. You have to really make someone mad at you, or have a very poorly defended POS.

My hisec POS

I'd defend it. Hi sec POS takedowns are rare, and with three gunners and a proper setup it's practically free kills on the aggressors.



While online (bubble up)? Not even close. Even if it's undefended and only has a few hardeners up, it would take more like 10-15 max DPS battleships several hours.

Thanks everyone for replies, A lot of useful info

This can be true, however.
Invention slots are easy to find in stations. at least in my experience. copy slots and ME/PE slots are the hard ones to find that most high sec research POSes are used for.
My point was a POS in a system with a station has much less chance to get targeted for its potential loot than a POS in a system without a station. Unless you do something to make yourself a target.

Important to note that an Offline POS does not go into RF. It just dies.

a large tower needs at least 15+ undisturbed, dps fitted battleships to die in a reasonable time, as soon as you throw in logistics + a small anti-frig wing to defend the big ships against bombers you realize that they need a bare minimum of 25 ppl to go for a large pos and that will still take up to 4 hours of their time... and no, a pos dps fit does NOT use autocannons. snipe fits only, so dps is low. And since the attackers will be in danger they can’t use anything shiny like an arty machariel.

Now you throw in 2 pos gunners on your side, one doing ewar on the logistics and a second one controlling 2 stasis + artys... that means instead of 25 they need 35 people. just because of those 2 gunners. Add in a small ragtag merc fleet that can cost you 500millon for the day and you can actually wreck their siegue in 5 minutes.

also, if you offline EVERYTHING but hardeners so you get +75% resists against all, and you fill all your pg/cpu with ECM towers, they will need something like an absurd 10x more time to kill the pos, and you don’t even need to have pos gunners. their dps will be so crippled that the passive regen on the pos shields will often offset their dps.
And I’m not sure if you still can neutral rep a tower, afaik you used to be able to, if its still doable, then its pretty demoralizing seeing an AFK osprey repping 1 hour worth of bashing in 5 minutes.

Do you have an idea of just how much you have to **** someone off so they would go through all the trouble of actually killing a highsec pos?

Only offline poses are in trouble in highsec.

Personally, i think CCP should take the t3 bcs and turn them into BC sized "destroyers". Making destroyers their own ship class and add a third size dessie, battleship sized. to aid in Structure grinds. Something like a mini dread that you can take into wormholes/highsec and clear the place.

20-30 BS cannot take down a POS quickly by any means.

I have been running a hi-sec pos with a few friends close to a year now, and we was forced to take it down one time, so i would not consider wardec a problem. If you are planning on doing something like capital me/pe research, being forced to take it down is going to hurt a lot more then if you just to small ship/mod T2 invention.

With the recent POS changes the tower always use the same amount of fuel, and it's a lot faster to anchor structures. So any unused power/cpu can be used for defense, with no added expense to fuel. You can fit a lot of labs on a large tower, unless you know you can max out all lines, you can use some resources for defense if it makes you feel safer.