Warfare & Tactics

12 webs and 12 scrams is very excessive. I'd stick with 4-6x webs, 2-3x scrams, and 2-3x disruptors. It is a good idea to have more anchored, I just wouldn't online them until the hostiles incap the modules already online.

4x Neuts are good to have.... when your POS is being shot by a few sieged dreads. Capacitor warfare is very important to have when taking out sieged or triaged opponents. However, in highsec, capitals can't be used to shoot your POS, so the Powergrid for these weapons is much better spent elsewhere. Realize that your enemies will use logistics to keep their ships alive, and POS ECM modules are already effective at disabling those (when manned).

25% resists is too low for a highsec POS. Whomever is attacking your POS has to rely on subcap dps, which outputs 1/10th the dps of your average dread. Make this worse for them!!! Take the power grid required for those Neuts and put on hardeners allowing you to fit 7 more hardeners to boost your EHP by 40m hitpoints. This will almost doubling the time required to RF your POS.

Pulses vs Beam Lasers. To be honest, I lean more towards Beam's than the Pulse Lasers. Pulse laser's have a very short range, allowing an opponent to strategically position to negate much of its DPS. I haven't thoroughly tested this out, buy my hunch is that, while pulse lasers do more damage, in most cases beams will apply their damage more effectively.

The two extremes are dickstar or death star:

Dickstar:
I first make the POS a PITA to kill by uniformly increasing my resists above 55%. This will give the POS a massive amount of EHP, which takes a long time to take down (It would take several hours for ten 1k dps ships to RF it). This, by itself, is enough to deter most corps.

Add in ECM, and it becomes a larger PITA for subcaps to deal with. Admittedly, drone ships and marauders can sit there and whittle away at the POS, but it will take up quite a bit of their time to do so.

Example Dickstar

For Dickstars, weapons are generally icing on the cake, needing only enough to make self tanking difficult.

Deathstar:
Have lots and lots of guns. Ideally, you'll have enough guns to quickly destroy anyone that lands on grid with the POS. This will force the enemy to have logistics ships to support their fleet. More logi == less dps.

Your second attempt is a decent middle ground.

I personally have different fitting priorities.

I personally prefer Minmatar towers because projectile damage types can be mixed up a bit.

I also rarely have neuts online, but usually I have a few ominously anchored. IMO, it is only effective (i.e. worth the PG requirements) in niche situations.

Short range weapons often have too low an optimal range to be effective on a large POS. Batteries on opposite sides of the POS are about 60 km's apart. A medium Pulse Laser battery has 80 * 1.5 = 120 km's Optimal range which is excellent unless you put in Multifreq crystals, because that will reduce the range down to 60 km's. IMO, POS guns are not actually for defense, but simply a deterrent stamp.

You mentioned using fast drone ships to out-track guns. I've used drone ships to sit at 150 km's and snipe down amarr POS's batteries in total safety because pulse lasers simply don't shoot far enough, and the few that did were easily tanked using EM/Therm specific tanks.

POS offensive batteries will NOT truly defend your POS.
♦ If your opponents have more than 10 pilots they are attacking you with, it doesn't matter what you have on your POS, they can outsmart the randomly switching AI. You then NEED to have POS gunners to make any headway. I go with a Dickstar at first to slow them down so I can show up to the fight, and then online extra guns and EWAR batteries to counter what is on field.

Gonna play devil's advocate here:

KISS and just don't fit any offensive mods. Best defense in HS is being able to GTFO.

A tower's defense is only as good as the fleet supporting it, and If someone wants your tower down, it's coming down regardless of what you fit to it because a 4 man corp such as yours will never be able to field a large or strong enough fleet to deter any serious bashing fleets...Unless they're noobs and don't know what they're doing, but I can't say I've seen too many noobs attacking towers lately.

1. You do not have nearly enough shield hardeners. Not by half. There are ways to bypass/counter pretty much any POS defense, but you can never bypass resists. Long shield grinds are a surprisingly effective deterrent.

2. I'd consider splitting your scrams between scrams and disruptors. Not only will you want to be able to tackle beyond 75km in case you are beset by snipers, your previously stated concerns about shutting down the MWDs of ships trying to speed tank your guns doesn't really apply to MWDs. Generally speaking, the only ships that can effectively speed tank with an MWD are 'ceptors; the signature bloom on everything else makes them easier to track thus negating the speed. Not to mention, if ships have their MWDs running and are heavily webbed, they are slow with a huge sig, making them far easier to hit.

3. I'd focus less on tackle. Your concern about small afterburning ships speed tanking your guns is valid, but if you are manning your defenses, 1-2 webs online at any given time can slow down targets enough to hit. If you're not manning your defenses having more won't necessarily help unless they all happen to align.

4. Use more faction weapon batteries. Even the lower tier faction turret batteries get a huge advantage: their signature resolution is one class lower than non-faction turrets. That means that a Blood Small Pulse Laser Battery will have a signature resolution of 40m instead of 125m. That is a huge increase in damage application to all targets, especially smaller ones.

5. Drop the pulse lasers for autocannon batteries. Starbase projectile batteries are currently equal to or better than all other (EDIT: short range) starbase weapon batteries even after taking the racial tower bonuses into account. Unbonused autocannon batteries are better in every regard than bonused pulse laser batteries. Better damage, better range, better tracking, and selectable damage types. The difference between bonused beam laser batteries and unbonused arty batteries is less clear-cut, but look at the numbers and consider arties is appropriate. (And by "look at the numbers", I don't just mean the DPS reported by the IGB POS planner. Look at range, tracking, damage types, etc.) Needless to say, this gives you some idea of just how powerful projectile batteries on a Minmatar tower are.

Good luck.



EDIT: My post was made looking at your first build, not your second. I think most of my advice still stands, although maybe not as strongly.

I could be wrong, but I'm about 95% certain that:

The weapon ACTIVATION range is from the tower.
The weapon optimal range and falloff is from the module itself.

Do a forum search, and you'll find people that have tested this and reported the same thing as I proclaim. I haven't tested it myself, which is why I'm not 100% certain.

The best way to defend a POS is to crash the node.

An all out ECM EWAR POS tends to **** people off to the point that they don't even bother. Best used with Caldari starbases (so I hear), even though the best indie POS would be minmatar. If you really want a minmatar POS, I'd suggest going with with arty turrets, webs, and scrams. If you can fit them, maybe a few auto cannon turrets for good measure.