Wormholes

I'd like to start off by saying that this operation wasn't personal: Probe Patrol has nothing against Mad Mystics of Maniacal Mayhem (4M). You were just a target of opportunity for a proof of concept mission.

Ever since Two Step mentioned that POS defenses in C1 through C4 wormhole systems are over powered and needed to be nerfed I wanted to see for myself how hard it would be to take down a POS in a C1. Now I'll freely admit that the POS we went after was no "**** Star" or "Death Star" but it really didn't matter -that POS was going down...

Due to mass restrictions the largest ship class we could use was battle cruisers, so we chose the Gila (a pirate faction cruiser) as our initial weapon to get the tower into re-enforced. Due to the ship's drone bonuses, and the drone damage amplifier module, we were able to fit Gila's that could do in excess of 600 DPS with Sentry Drones (over 700 DPS if you have Gallente Cruiser 5). We used Warden IIs and Bouncer IIs to play off of a large Minmitar Tower's resistance holes and it took less than an hour for less than a dozen Gilas. Note: That was Sentry Drones folks -a POS bash that consumed no ammo.

For the completion op we used armor cruisers plus support ships. Someone from 4M batphoned their friends, and we watched a lot of pilots go into the C1 and log out before the tower came out of re-enforced (lost count of the number of Falcons they brought in) but there wasn't much resistance. A few stealth bomber runs that were completely infective, and a Falcon that died in our bubble when it jumped in from high sec with one of our pilots and the worm hole collapsed behind it. We were really hoping for a fight, but it just didn't happen.

After we pulled the POS takedown fleet out of the system 4M did use a derogatory term for describing a female's genitalia because we didn't stick around and fight them. Pro tip: The time to fight is BEFORE someone blows up your POS...

So I'm sitting here thinking that C1 through C4 wormholes are just fine with the current Player Owned Stations and that there doesn't need to be a change to the kind of defenses that you can have in those systems. You just need to think outside the box and be willing to use something other than capital ships...

If you put 1 or 2 ECCM projectors on every gila it should be no problem. If the gilas are Jammed, big deal, the drones keep shooting. If the logis get jammed, it is 2 ECCM projectors per gila on the logi. The way ECCM projectors work is funny. The stacking penalty of ECCM projectors only comes into play at around 160-180 sensor strength which should be enough that the jams do not take too much effect anymore. Taking down a large dickstar pos whith good setup in a C1 is still a hassle, and most often not worth it.

Why wouldn't you use Oracles with tracking computers etc when they do 1000+ DPS? Support with Guardians as necessary.

IIRC small arty locks sentry drones pretty quickly and can hit them out as far as you can use them even with tricked out drone ships that are almost 200km out.

I actually enjoyed the story. You looked at a situation and applied a creative response that not only met the given constraints (C1 mass limits) but also mitigated to a great extent the overarching issue with towers in all classes of w-space (overpowered ECM).


That is true, however the drones method is still surprisingly effective against ECM because of the sheer number of targets that the ECM batteries must attack. But do you at least now acknowledge that ECM is the problem that requires extreme methods, and not necessarily the tower size? If ECM could only reliably jam same-racial targeting systems and only have a very low chance to jam off-racial targeting systems, would that not be a more balanced approach?


That is a different situation and would require a different setup.

Flying a Gila or an Ishtar, both cruiser-sized ships which easily fit in a C1, you can get 600+ DPS from T2 Heavy drones. Those are much harder to hit than stationary sentry drones and would be quite useful for taking out any guns on a dickstar; a death star would again be different and require a different approach.

A situation that contained POS gunners might employ mobile drones instead of stationary drones, or they might have used a different tactic altogether. But either way, scouts would know whether there are targets online and be able to relay information so the FC could prepare appropriately; if things changed suddenly, both ships are also capable of swapping drones on the fly.

You can't just take one configuration and apply it to all situations. You'll either die in a fire or use up far more resources to succeed than you could have if you do succeed. Because POS-based ECM is so overpowered, having POS gunners or other active defending pilots nearby increases the difficulty exponentially.

The problem is ECM, not tower size. Fix ECM, not what isn't broken.

This. So much this...

Yeah my immediate thought was it wasn't a **** star so you're not dealing with the 30 jammers or so that make it a hassle. Were they using any starbase defense managers, or did they have any active defense? Really I think most towers are easy to take down if you have 10-15 people (it sounds like you might have had more) and there are no defenders online. C1s get a lot of grief because people don't like popping 15 cruisers into a wormhole to take down a tower, they want to do it with 4 afk battleships with 15 falcons in support :P

~ Svodola Darkfury.

Yes that is, though the finishing blow that is.
a day and half before they done it with the sentry's.
Tactic changed because as mentioned, they noticed a lot of stuff coming in
though, having witnessed myself, nothing engaged us :'(

Perhaps another time...

I don't show up on any of the kills on that board :(

That report is not showing fulland accurate information.

I'm guessing that you're talking about your alt Rek, since you and I were flying neut Legions for the completion strike -it's just too bad 4M didn't come out to play :(