Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm curious what the roadblocks are to this idea, since it seems obvious to me.

Allowing 2-5 pilots to set up a small, hidden POS in lowsec or nullsec, seems to allow small groups access to high risk/high reward play which they don't currently have access to. It will also increase activity in lowsec and reduce the amount of resources lying fallow.

There are of course obstacles but they don't seem that daunting to me. The existence of local will be an obvious giveaway, but if the smallholding itself is sufficiently hidden, it's not a dealbreaker.

• To hide the POS, it could be placed in an unscannable deadspace pocket behind a locked acceleration gate. The gate would be the first thing anchored, and might require a physical key to access. This key could be traded or dropped as normal loot.
• To prevent large fleet buildup, only a restricted number of physical keys would be created per smallholding.
• To ensure smallholding use, its fuel bay will be small enough to require frequent refills. If it goes offline, the gates will disappear and the pocket will become scannable until a new gate is anchored.
• There would need to be a limited number of actively hidden pockets per system.
• To allow initial access, there would need to be a new ship class that is essentially an Orca with covert ops cloak. This would allow one pilot to carry POS modules and a few cruiser sized ships such as hauler, mining barge, combat or scanning cruisers, etc). This ship would convert into the POS tower itself, becoming immobile once deployed and no further "stealth Orcas" would be allowed in the pocket. At the end of the smallholdings life, it can be converted back into a ship and the pilot can sneak out.
• There would be no special protection for the pilot when out and about in the system doing missioning, mining, exploration, or PI. His only advantages are that (at first) the location of the gate is only known to him and a physical key is required to get through.

This is what the smallholding tower would be capable of. Not everything at once, but whatever combination of modules can fit within its PG and CPU.

• Additional gate vectors - allows deployment of more than one gate leading to the pocket (may help security if one gate is compromised).
• Expanded fuel bays - allows longer sojourns away from the POS.
• Clone facility - allows jump cloning and respawn if podded.
• Repair facility - no need for paste, hull reppers, etc.
• Smuggler bay - ability to buy/sell goods as if you were at a station within range. Taxes significantly higher than normal.
• Agent uplink - ability to accept/complete missions remotely for agents at stations within range. Perhaps lower payout since lower risk.
• Ore compressor - does what a rorqual does. Should require additional fuel expenditure.
• Fuel collector - The fuel should be low-volume to begin with so that the smallholding can sustain itself for a long time. This reduces fuel needs even further so you can stay isolated longer.
• Wormhole generator - every few days can create a short lived wormhole to high security space. Okay maybe that's a bit too powerful. Maybe not though.
• Deadspace integrity reinforcers - prevents or repairs the deterioration of the unscannable deadspace pocket. The smallholding will be scannable if it either runs out of fuel or its integrity drops to zero as a result of hostile action.

This is what territorial pilots should be able to do to remove squatters.

• There should be some sort of bonus for increasing Sov level, but not overwhelming.
• Access to constellation and system-level scans for deadspace pockets. You would need to either have Sov, a POS, or your corp is headquartered in an office in station for more than 30 days.
• Scans are not quick. Maybe 2 days for a system, 7 days for a constellation.
• First scan reveals existence of a squatter. Subsquent scans start to deplete the deadspace integrity. Constellation level scans cannot be used to deplete integrity.
• After a locked gate has been used, it becomes scannable by probes for a few minutes. It should require very good scanning skills to locate it. If located it can be blockaded obviously, and hacked to reduce deadspace integrity. This is an incentive for the pilot to have more than one gate.
• Eventually, concerted effort will reveal the smallholding, but perhaps only after 2-4 weeks. The idea is not to have a system clean of intruders, but to ensure that they feel a constant pressure on their activity.

In the end, it is not the scanning but the perils of operating in hostile space that will pose the greatest threat to smallholders. It will still not be easy to do missions or exploration with pirates everywhere. But, it could be a fun existence to live and die on the frontier. I think lowsec would be better off for it.

Well, I didn't think it had been THAT long. I realized it had fallen off the radar and I was disappointed. So I posted in part to find out why it was scuttled. Why is it a bad idea?

It's not a bad idea, but isn't this kind of what holes like C3s are all about?

Great getaways for microcorps.