EVE General Discussion

see bottom for tl;dr

1. there are 720 hours in a month (where "month" is understood to be 30 days). Given that EVE downtime is daily, and that your enemies aren't likely to log out in your space, we will assume a maximum playable time of 23 hours per day.

23 * 30 = 690 playable hours per month.

The man-hours spent defending the tower will depend on how many pilots the Defending Alliance commits.

1 pilot = 690 man-hours
10 pilots = 6900 man-hours
100 pilots = 69000 man-hours
500 pilots = 345000 man-hours
n pilots = 690n man-hours


2. It's been a long time since I've personally looked at the tower mechanics and scanned moons, so I'm using base numbers from the wiki. Hopefully they're accurate enough for this exercise (and that I'm understanding them right).

Now, we'll specifically look at Curse. It's a relatively small region (50 systems), with systems containing between 7 and 95 moons.

The best moon scanning probe will take 5 minutes per moon. Now, you can have multiple scans going at once, so it's not a multiplicative process (that is, it won't take 35 minutes plus travel time for a 7 moon system).

For the ease of numbers, we will assume that it takes 30 seconds to warp from any object (gate, moon, sun, planet, etc) to a moon or any other object. We will also assume that you land 5,000 km from the surface of a moon, probes travel at 3,000 m/sec and must reach the surface of the moon before their flight time ends (IIRC, you may just have to shoot in the general direction of the moon and wait til the timer expires). you must also sit in system til all moon scanning is completed.

I believe (though could be very wrong) that the probe only needs to be sent in the general direction of the moon, and will scan it provided you're aligned. Otherwise, this means the following:

1. the fast probes will need to be launched within 900 km of the moon surface
2. the middle probes will need to be launched within 1800 km of the surface
3. the slow probes will need to be launched within 7200 km of the surface

(I don't recall needing to do this, so from here on out, I'm going to assume that you only need to worry about being aligned, and how long the probe will take.)

Now, 30 seconds per warp means that we can start 9 moons for every 5 minute "cycle" (because we'll always be 30 seconds behind -- that is, assuming perfect timing every shot, we'll get the 10th moon at 330 seconds in the system). After the last moon, there is an additional 5 minute wait for that probe. To make things easy, we will make the assumption that anything less than 9 moons still takes 5 minutes to scan as obviously humans can't hit that 30 second fire rate perfectly every time.

Back to Curse-
2 systems <=9 - 10 min (0.33 MH)
3 systems <=18 - 15 (0.75 MH)
4 systems <=27 - 20 (1.33 MH)
6 systems <= 36 - 25 (2.5 MH)
9 systems <= 45 - 30 (3 MH)
10 systems <=54 - 35 (5.8333 MH)
5 systems <= 63 - 40 (3.33 MH)
7 systems <=72 - 45 (5.25 MH)
1 system <= 81 - 50 (0.833 MH)
2 systems <=90 - 55 (1.833 MH)
1 system <= 99 - 60 (1 MH)

Totals = 25.98999 MH, so 26 to scan all the moons.

A tower takes one (1) hour to anchor, and another hour to online. bare minimum is 2 man-hours, though you're likely to have at least a token guard force, maybe 10 pilots total for this operation. so 20 man-hours.

Since each tower will likely follow similar building principles, we can assume 6 defensive gunstars, each taking 15 minutes to online (before ammo), as well as up to 9 hardeners taking 22.5 minutes to online, plus 70 seconds anchoring time for each gunstar and 90 seconds anchoring for the hardeners, the stuff actually related to moongoo is 5/5 for anchor/online. Not everything can be onlined at once, so the time may fluctuate a bit, each turret or hardener not onlined saves 2.5 minutes.

When I was doing this (a long time ago, before JF's), it took me 1.5-2 hours every 3 days to babysit the towers. Additionally, every 15 days I would take another hour to fuel the towers involved. Every 30 days, I worked with another pilot to get cynos up (we both were moving product out, so would have an alt at either endpoint) ... this usually took 6-7 hours, because of small cargoholds, needing to be smart about lighting the cyno and other time sinks. every 31st day, 4 hours or so were spent carting product to market, and buying fuel. ABSOLUTE BARE MINIMUM is 50 man-hours of work for babysitting reactions, and obviously other players could make that take a lot longer (camps, roams, etc.).


TLDR --
ABSOLUTE BARE MINIMUM is 50 man-hours of work for babysitting reactions, and obviously other players could make that take a lot longer (camps, roams, etc.).

That 500 man-hour average figure is the estimated average amount of time that POS/moongoo holding alliances spend keeping their stuff running for the cycle (30 days). As we're saying bare-minimum is 50 MH per month, this leaves us with 5400 MH we need to come up with over 12 months to reach our "500 MH/mnth" average.

you can do it however you wish, from 450 MH per month to 5400 MH in one month (and 11 of no fighting), or any combination in between such that 5400 MH are spent dealing with towers over the course of a year.