EVE Information Portal

Guessing someone may have said something once is asinine.

That said, the reason to cap them is because, as is, they are practically impossible to destroy, not to mention when an actual fleet shows up to defend the Mega-POS, it would be impossible to defeat them, nevermind taking the tower.

Limiting its use is still the best option to avoid critical abuse and deifying alliances.

they then said the defenses must be manually controlled, which means solo folk reinforce them easily

This is one of those suggestions that once implanted into devs minds can never be retrieved.

That's a valid sentiment but I'm guessing you're not an industrialist.

Industry involves a practically unmanageable volume of materials, and it's nearly impossible to evacuate everything in a matter of two timers. A month, even. Caches of ships and materials that you really have no place else to put them, other than NPC stations. If you don't make considerations for assets, it would be a profound nerf to player owned structures.

Materials accumulate quickly, by way of buy orders and several players filling them. Not just ore or minerals.

There are a lot of situations where it requires tens or hundreds of freighter loads to build just one thing. If you have a freighter pilot, you can get a sense of this on Sisi by joining up with Wedge Rancer. He builds supers for players. I had ten freighter pilots ferrying materials from station to POS for hours, and there's no end to that. I did it just for the perspective, and I think you should too.

Structures can, will, and do accumulate more stuff than can be moved by a corporation or alliance... coalition even, in a short period of time. Good luck organizing a coalition-wide materials evacuation op. That's about the least sexy gameplay I can imagine.

If you ask me, players are already going to be up a creek in the new destructible structure system even with the considerations their assets are being given.

I think a better solution would be an emergency Interbus moving service that is invulnerable to player attack, but costs ISK and time. More than the ISK or time cost, though, displacing assets would be the real consequence for losing a structure, and I think that's enough. Otherwise, Industry and market become a casualty of structure / system / Sov ownership, and I don't think you want that. Personal assets, too. They need to be removed from at-risk-in-space-combat gameplay. The fantasy hardcore EVE you are asking for is one that would destroy itself.

The PVP playstyle would destroy all others, and that's a bit OP.

About the Interbus moving service thing... if assets are moved to the next-closest owned structure or nearest NPC station (for free?)... chasing out a group's war and industry materials in this way isn't a wasted effort.

It's not destruction, but it's still a denial of access. Compared to destruction (which is absolute), you can balance that denial if it has variables of distance, time, and ISK cost (in the Interbus method I suggested).

It adds an interesting gambling scenario, too, where you might order your assets moved then save the structure.

(Personally, I would prefer a 15% buyback insurance and 10% drop.)

Your post amazes me. Yes, I am amazed at how a person can play a sci-fi game with FTL travel/communication, shields, lasers, wormholes, cynos, and clone swapping... Oh, and spaceships! How this person can be okay with all of those things, yet find it unrealistic for someone in EVE to invent a system to fit into a FIFTY KILOMETER STRUCTURE that would safeguard items in the event of a catastrophic hull breach...

News flash! CCP tracks asset loss and can easily see how many die-hard pvpers, like you, quit after losing a significant portion of their stuff... But no, lets design a game around your bias and feelings. In order of importance, CCP is a profit driven company that makes a game that is a sci-fi, sim, hardcore pvp niche product.

iLIKE

oh yes! cloaky stations :)
but only and i mean it IF there is some way to uncloak an enemy structure if you know that there is one and where.
After all there are these jove observatories (+sleeper stashes) that were cloaked all that time. Not much used recently, but "cloaked"! That tech migth be harvestable....

Oh god no. I'm all for finding a solution that doesn't completely screw pack rats, but this is going too much the other way. You know our leadership, there would be plenty of ways to strategise this to make building destruction actually beneficial to the structure loser, and so that you would never want to evacuate anything ever again.

Consider our recent departure from Delve. Complete clusterfuck, and thats how it should be if the planning isn't done right. Consider an alternative strategy where instead of NPC null (where there wuld be no benefit from staging from ever again, as if you lose a player owned station you'll default back to the NPC one anyway), we staged in a player-owned station, and when it came time to withdraw to Deklein, we did it via staged station-drop, so all our assets got moved to the next station in the "delivery" chain. We literally could have gamed a way to get our assets auto-moved all the way back to Cloud Ring without undocking a ship. That's bad in all ways.

Is there is a specific reason why POSes as we know them today could not continue to exist alongside citadels?

The fact that they require Fuel to remain online, where Citadels do only require fuel to keep its modules active will be a significant differentiation, and new features can simply be linked to citadels' presence and not POS presences.
The POS would likely disappear naturally over a few years time, and that would avoid a complicated refund process (as well as a too drastic impact on the market for POS stuff).

You have to move all the stuff in the structure, so why aren't you able to move it out? It's all about planning.
Then again, you could always defend your structure. Or you could run your operation out of an NPC station.

The Interbus moving could be interesting, but then those convoys should be vulnerable to player attacks. So the gamble woud be: do I stay and fight and not evacuate or do I move them with Interbus and risk losing the stuff?