Science & Industry

Each of the 4 main Factions (Caldari, Gallente, Minmatar, Amarr) have Control Towers with different ratios of CPU:Powergrid. Mobile Lab Arrays consume more CPU than most other Arrays (500-600 versus 150-250) whereas Manufacturing Arrays tend to hog more Powergrid (relative to how much CPU they require). If you're setting up a POS primarily for research, then Caldari is almost certainly the way to go.

Also worth considering is each main Faction's pirate variant - in this case, Guristas or Dread Guristas towers. They offer the same fittings, but have a few advantages such as shorter anchoring times and (most importantly) reduced fuel consumption. Compared to a Caldari tower, a Guristas tower (of equal size) consumes roughly 15% fewer Ice Products (isotopes, heavy water, liquid ozone) and a Dread Guristas, roughly 25% less. As Ice Products can easily account for half of your monthly fuel costs, this bonus is worth looking at (but takes some time to offset the purchase price of the Tower).



There are a few different Lab configurations you can have, depending on your particular research needs. Basic Mobile Labs have more ME/PE slots than Advanced Labs, but only 1 copy slot. Advanced Labs have 3 copy slots (and a better copy job time multiplier) but fewer of the rest. Hyasyoda Mobile Labs (Caldari Epic Arc reward) are basically Basic Mobile Labs with extra slots, but zero copy slots.

That being said, you can easily fit 4 Basic Mobile Labs, a Hyasyoda Mobile Lab, and an Advanced Mobile Lab and still have a bit of fitting for some basic Manufacturing Arrays (Equipment, Drones, Components) if you so desire. That would give you a total of 33 lab slots, divided up among the different job types. In any case, I'm sure you can find an amicable configuration to keep your 2 characters fully occupied with the research job of your choice, with the possible exception of Copying.




If you anchor in Hi-Sec and don't go making unnecessary enemies, you can probably get by with anchoring a metric buttload of ECM arrays and Shield Hardeners, supplemented with some Artillery Batteries and Warp Scramble Batteries. Your goal should be to make the POS appear to be as dull a target as humanly possible - something that would take a small gang hours of AFK pew-pew to put a dent in.

If, on the other hand, someone is intent on dropping your Tower, your best bet is a good unanchor strategy.

I was looking at the faction Towers and was weighing the pro's and cons of getting hold of one. I would of thought it would of just made me more of an inviting target to greifers but from what has been said it seems they would make it more of a bad thing to attack due to teh amount of time required to bring it down. It does however present me with an issue of cost for the initial outlay, but would it be worth it for a medium tower?

if you are new to running a POS and all the stuff that goes with it, i advice you to do what i did and get yourself a caldari small POS.

it has enough CPU to anchor 3 labs in whatever combo you want.

a small caldari POS is a great starter for a person getting to grips with research and invention. All you need to worry about is finding a system/station with spare/free manufacturing slots and a cheap office rent.

Just a tip, because the tower is so cheap, if you get wardecced, you can just unanchor the labs inside the shields and leave the POS as a throwaway. (As a reference, i did lose mine to some friends as a prank, and its isk value was only £1.50, not much really)

Just remember to put stront in the POS to give you some leeway if you get war decced and cant evacuate the labs in time.

edit to add link to best browser based POS planner
http://eve.1019.net/pos/

tbh...

anyone attacking your POS should know what they are doing; unless they mess up, more than likely the POS will die

Anchoring more defensive modules will just prolong the death and make it a more expensive affair for you the POS owner. But by all means, if YOU think you can defend be my guest.

http://tk.konstipation.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=950

check the 'related kills' on that KB link (also be careful the browser doesnt mess with the '&' when you follow the link)

Anyone researching with BPO's actually at the POS is a fool

POS defense... Within the 24 hours u r war decced, take the pos down.

This can be accomplished if you go small. A small caldari tower can support 2 advanced mobile labs, 1 mobile lab, and 1 corp hanger. You can fuel this with one ice miner mining about 8 hours a week or less and with one character with pi skills for 6 planets and the best command center upgrade skill.

Alternatively, I think you could mount 2 mobile labs, one advanced, one corp hanger.

Slot wise, with the first option:

7 me slots
3 te slots
7 copy
9 invention

2nd option:
8 me
6 te
5 copy
10 invention

That should be enough for most u indy work. Just login each day to watch for war decs.

Additionallt, to avoid standing issues, simply don't have standings with that faction on any character in the corp. For example, if your characters have no gallante standings, pay for a corp with standings high enough to anchor in gallante space. Your characters won't change the standing, allowing you to always anchor there.

Don't leave anything anchored during a wardec you cannot afford to lose, or replace.

Oh, and a bunch of people trained as POS gunners doesn't hurt.

The calculation for the corp's faction standing is done every day at downtime and is calculated as:

- The average of every player who has been in the corporation for at least 7 downtimes (6?).
- Has a non-NULL standing with any corp/faction (i.e. there is an entry in the character's standings information).
- Connections skills / diplomacy skills do not get taken into account (only raw standings).

When you buy a corp with high standings and put in a CEO who has NULL standings, AFAIK the standings will never re-calculate.

It used to be that the standings would slowly level out, but now it simply does a faster calculation where it looks at everyone who has standings as of the downtime and just averages all the members who qualify.

Fred 8.0 (15 days in corp)
Sue NULL (30 days in corp)
Jim 4.0 (8 days in corp)
Alice 2.0 (2 days in corp)

Average is 6.00 (only Jim and Fred count). Five days from now, Alice's standings will count, so the average will drop to 4.67.

Two things:

One, having nul standings (nothing displayed) does not get averaged in. So if you buy a caldari corp and since you have no standings with caldari state, the standings for your corp will not change.

Secondly, skip story line missions. You can skip them once every 4 hours just like any other mission. I have an alt with enough Lai dai standings to use level 3 agents. I skipped all his story line missions without running afoul of that 4 hour limit. He has no cal state standings, so no impact on his corp standings with cal state.