Science & Industry

You don't use silos for storage, you either use a Corporate Hangar Array for general purpose or a Compression Array for raw resp. a Reprocessing Array for compressed ore. Silos are generally used for moon mining and booster manufacturing.

If you don't want to reprocess the ore directly in the WH, I'd suggest a compression array and just putting the compressed ore into the corp hangar array. It has 3Mio m³ space, which is more than enough.

And what tower size you should use depends on the wormhole class I guess, but small are generally a bad idea because of the low cpu and pg. Consult the WH subforum and ask those guys with more experience, but imho a medium pos is the absolute minimum you want, better go with a large tower, lots of ECM and some guns.

Since ECM are so cheap to fit, does it make more sense to just keep mass ECM on the small tower to avoid damage, or should it have some guns too?

Approach setting up POS the same way you'd approach tanking your haulers against griefers who suicide in hi-sec; make the cost more than the pay-off.

If you had a large POS, you could simply stack so much resists it'd take forever to kill, especially if it's inside a w-space that won't allow carriers or dreads in. Then they lose ISK/hour bashing something, and they risk wormholes closing on them and costing them a lot of time getting back. You don't have to successfully defeat the attack, you just have to defeat their "victory", Pyrrhic is a term that comes to mind.

How you could do that with a small POS? Maybe lots of guns. It has no tank because of low PG, so it must gank.

Anchor and online ECM, Hardners, and webs. Anchors disrupters, scrams, and a lot of turrets with a few toons trained for starbase defense 4. The AI can manage ECM until pilots rally to man guns of the POS. Make sure not to log off in the POS sense the opposing force can rage cage it with bubbles. In the end if they want that pos gone no matter the price it will fall.

So marauders with bastion module are designed to take out POS?

There are upsides and downsides to all of the choices. If somebody wants your POS dead and they know their **** they will make it dead, small, large or otherwise. You have to start with the question "what can I sustain?"

POS fuel cost doubles each time you move up a size. Using Minmatar fuel prices it goes ~90m/month for small, ~180m/month for medium and ~360m/month for large. If you go with a large you better be sure you can make a good deal more than 360m/month if you want to cover fuel and still make a profit. The POS and POS parts themselves can add up quickly as you go up in size. There isn't much point in using a large if you aren't going to load it up with defenses, and those cost ISK and take up space.

The safest advice to give you is to say "use a large," but that may make your venture unprofitable. Mining isn't the most profitable activity in a WH but since you will be there anyway you should consider running combat anoms in addition to mining. That could help your profitability.

I moved into a WH last weekend, you can read about it here if you'd like, although my POS info isn't there so I'll post it here. This isn't my first time in WH's, but it's my first solo attempt to live there.

My setup is:

Minmatar Small (named Rusty Smalls)
3x Medium Artillery Batteries
2x Medium Autocannon Batteries
1x Ship Maintenance Array
1x Compression Array
1x Refinery Array
1x Ammunition Assembly Array

The small doesn't have the powergrid to run all that at once, so I keep one of the Artillery Batteries offline most of the time, and only online one of the following at a time: SMA, CA, RA, AAA. The SMA is a grid hog and that's why the arty stays offline, it could be on with any of the others without a problem. I skipped using a Corp Hangar Array and just keep stuff in a T1 hauler in the SMA. Since I'd never have both online at the same time there is no point to having both for the way I'm operating.

I have no illusion that the guns are scaring anyone, unless maybe I'm controlling them at the time, and even then a T3 fleet would laugh them off. It just didn't feel right to have a POS with no defenses at all, and most other EWAR doesn't fit well with a small.

I would also recommend a full load of strontium, it's cheap even if it takes up valuable space when moving in. A full load of strontium will give you 41 hours of reinforce time. If somebody reinforces your POS for fun they may chose not to stick around to wait out the timer.

Just remember, everything you take in is what you are risking. You could lose it all and have to self-destruct your pod to get out. If you accept this before you go in and plan for contingencies you may have a successful venture. Good luck!

That's a very good point. Even though I have offline modules at my POS it didn't occur to me to put up additional defenses and leave them offline also. I may have to change what I leave online to hardeners and points and anchor more guns and some ECM. I'm in a C2 so not worried about caps unless the previous occupants come back to life (there are multiple offline POS's in my system). But I'd like my POS to look as challenging as it can.

Moving into a WH for the purposes of mining is a bad idea to begin with.

Could you explain a little better? There is some really big rocks in there.

I'll take my chances, thanks. A small is what I can support, so it is what I used. Maybe it will get blown up before it's a month old, or maybe it will still be there in a year. Nobody knows and that's the fun of it.