Warfare & Tactics

Now reading an article about a wh corp theft, i saw the term Bugzapper usec, with a brief description that if you online a POS and never enter a shield password, no force field forms, but you can anchor and online weapons which will fire at people.

With this in mind, how viable do you think it would be to pick a nice and quiet c2 with highsec and c4 stat and put up a Pos set to gank? I am thinking that placing some silo's and a SMA will make those who use DSCAN tempted to investigate. Seeing no forcefield I personally assume they are offline, and i go cloaked in to take a peak, but surely others do the same and not all of them are going to go in cloaked.

It seems to me that this could be a great way to bait people to come to you, alternatively i was also thinking about getting a ship with a cyno, surround, orbit the ship at 10km and abandon light drones around it to decloak anyone who warps at 10km to the cyno cloaked. though I'm thinking people would warp at 100, rather than 10 so this is probably a futile idea.

I must admit my dealings with POS's thusfar are basically nil apart from training starbase defence to 4, so would you think this is something worth doing? I suggest wh space since seeing abandoned POS's is quite common, far more than i assume are in low sec and if im willing to go and look at an no forcfield pos with a SMA and storage surely others would to. However I do have some concerns.

Is it blaringly obvious when you arrive at the pos cloaked that its a "bugzapper"

Can you slowboat to the sma or storage and open it whilst cloaked? so that I would have to position modules to decloak onroute to the SMA.

If the POS comes underattack, could I enter in a password to have the force field just spawn?

If no shield is active, can you place guns closer to the tower? and if so what happens when you enter a password.

Is it worth deploying bubbles everywhere to encompass the POS?

Whilst primarily for catching players offguard, Id also like to use it to roll the c4 static and act as a relative safe staging area, so Plated BS's could be placed in the SMA if they are not logged off as alts.

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

Ah so damps and ecm will work that far out? that is good to know. I probably wont name my SMA if you can name them, and if i do it would be named something like statr so easily worked out as static roller. So then people can guess its either an orca or BS's.

My POS is not going to be in an very active c2, no point putting it into an active one as im sure ill die before I even online the POS. Unless I get lucky and hit a off tz wh with anyone about sleepy. If i did that, ill likely fly an arazu and try to scram and damp any unfortunate person warping in uncloaked and tries to warp away before the POS can lock them, which is something im going to have to google, will be handy to know pos lock times.

Online and deadly with no Forcefield? I'd never even considered such a thing. Sounds awesome. I can envision myself getting caught by something like that. The little "online" tags would tip me off, but there's a decent chance I wouldn't even be looking at them closely since i would assume its offline. Or I might be confused and not react correctly. Of course, the biggest problem you'll face with such a pos is that most people who come to investigate it will likely be cloaked, and won't need to uncloak even if they don't realize the trap initially. In that case you can try to decloak them with bubbles (probably won't work, although putting a can+ bubble on the moon warpin point is probably good) or you can mix in some guns that are actually offline.

Well the POS will double as a staging ground to roll the c4 static that it will occupy, the hope is, pilots will see the forcefieldless pos, assume offline and burn to the SMA getting uncloaked along the way, hopefully getting enough time for the guns to shoot. Alternatively I could camp it out for a while in an arazu and see what drops, I can then lock, warp disrupt and hope webbing drones as useless as they are sometimes can keep them held for the zapper to zap. Also my understanding is, when you enter a password the field bumps what ever was inside it not anchored down very far out?

I will give it a try anyway, worse scenario is i enter a password for the forcefield and keep bs in the sma to roll the static. It just seems like a potentially sneaky way to catch people off guard whilst still being useful.