Science & Industry

Minmatar towers are superior to Amarr in almost every measure.

More CPU, best balance of CPU and grid, more shield, racial 50% EM + 25% thermal shield resist, weapons that can do all 4 damage types (and with only two different types of ammo), highest alpha weapons (artillery), longest range weapons, highest damage weapons (falloff not affected by ammo).

If I switch towers, it will be to a Minmatar tower. [My first large tower was a Domination.]

For medium and large towers, I generally agree with you, which is why I specifically called out smalls. And for production-based POSes, I also agree with you to an extent since assembly arrays have a different balance of PG and CPU. But on small research/compression POSes, I think it's different. Here's why:

1. Currently, Minmatar smalls make better research POSes than Amarr smalls do because you can have two hardeners and two mobile labs online in a small Minmatar POS, but not in a small Amarr POS. Post-Crius, this dual-lab setup doesn't make sense because there's no longer any benefit to the second lab, and you don't have enough CPU to online a design lab in it's place, so it's on an equal footing with an Amarr tower.

2. Individual projectile batteries on a Minmatar POS are superior to individual laser batteries on an Amarr POS. But try fitting a one-lab (or one-compressor) small Minmatar POS with two shield hardeners and defensive modules, and you'll find that you can mount more of them on an Amarr POS. The Minmatar POS will have CPU going un-utlized, whereas the Amarr POS will be at roughly max PG and CPU (with one additional turret).

3. While you are correct that projectile batteries will have a longer range than laser batteries (given appropriate bonuses), The 187+50km on small beam batteries is nothing to sneeze at. More than likely, if someone is going to be taking shots at a POS from 250km to avoid your defenses, they've brought battleships and will take down your POS regardless of whether it's an Amarr or Minmatar tower. Autocannon batteries clearly have a greater max range due to their massive falloff, but they lose damage engaging literally any target because their optimal lies well within any POS's shields. Small pulse batteries do full damage out to 52km, which is far enough away that the tracking on beam laser batteries will allow damage application. I'd call this a wash, but others may differ.

4. Damage type selection clearly favors Minmatar. There's no argument there. Never having to reload your guns clearly favors Amarr. I tend to assume that people are lazy more often than not, so I tip the scale slightly in favor of Amarr there.


If all this is about small towers only and they use the least amount of fuel, why will their fuel demands shift the market? Because (at least based on what I've seen and heard) I think people are probably more likely to anchor one small POS as a throwaway instead of using a medium or large and having to commit more to it's defense and upkeep, and because I think people are going to tend more towards compression, and to a lesser extent research, over production in POSes post-Crius. If I'm wrong on any of those counts though, my predictions will go right out the window.

EDIT: I base my thoughts on people favoring small POSes on the small faction control tower prices at the moment. Last time I checked, "super"-faction small towers are selling for almost what their medium counterparts are.

I'm aware (which is why I indicated that they were removed). But even without the stacking bonuses, if you want to do material/time research and copy/invent in the same POS, you'll still need one of each.

No sorries. Looking back, it wasn't the most clear way to say it.

This isn't going to happen, because the higher demand for Caldari fuel is driven by large reaction POS's far more than it is by high sec research.

Now, if they at some point make non-caldari larges viable for running a simple+complex... then we could see a real shift in the fuel market.

No. Both reverse engineering and subsystem manufacture are POS-only. There's a lot of it done in highsec, most industrial POSs I've seen have an experimental lab and/or a subsystem assembly array.

I am not fully versed on the dev blogs. You keep stating ore compression in hi sec towers. Will ore compression in NPC stations not be possible?

Nope, compression requires a compression array or rorq now. They're essentially killing 425mm rail compression by nerfing reprocessing of all modules.

Interestingly, this should also cause an increase in ore prices as it reduces the mineral input from loot.

I wonder if people switching to hauling compressed ore in smaller ships (or simply making fewer freighter runs) will decrease the rate of hisec freighter suicide ganks. Fewer people having to replace freighters could have a non-trivial influence on the market.

An old Charon, 980k m3, full of low-end/basic ore, was roughly 200M ISK. Very rough ballpark figure, and from sometime like last year.

New Charon is slightly smaller but has the same EHP. Let's say 170M ISK just as a guesstimate.

What's the Crius compression ratio for ore?

If it's x15 then a new Charon can haul a bit over 2.5 billion ISK worth of ore. I'd say that's very gank-worthy.