Crime & Punishment

Greetings all you mercenaries, griefers, and opportunists. BSTRS is back from hiatus to bring you a new service that is currently in development: a comprehensive survey of POS locations.

Dropping a wardec on someone? Been wardecced and looking for a chance push back? Scouting a potential target? Give me a corporation or alliance name, and I can tell you whether our scouts have seen POS owned by them. Here's some specifics:

The fee is 40 million isk per POS. We will only sell you locations for fueled POS or derelict POS that have modules still attached. You provide me with a name, I'll check our survey database. If we have any candidates, a scout will investigate the site to confirm that our intel is up to date.

Prior to expecting payment, I will provide you with an overview of the configuration for each POS we have on record (whether it has defenses, industrial structures, storage, etc) and the total cost of the full intel. As a bonus, any "dead sticks" (unfueled towers with no modules) will be provided free of charge. To reiterate: we do not sell dead stick locations, and you don't pay until you know what is on the POS. I want my clients to be able to make informed decisions.

At present we have catalogued nearly 300 locations across an entire region. 50+ locations are added to the database daily. We've already had four hits, stumbling across POS owners who were at war and selling the intel to their enemies. I'll let those clients speak up if they feel so inclined to give us a good reference. Our primary goal now is to survey all of connected hisec over the next month. Highsec islands and even lowsec might come later.

Since you've read this far, I have a question for you: If you're the type to pay for our POS location services, would you also be interested in POCOs? It would be trivial to add them to our database as we gather info on POS in the system.

Edit: After several requests have come in, it occurs to me that there will be instances where I may be selling intel to both sides of a conflict. I want to go on the record as saying that BSTRS is a neutral entity and will provide services to all parties. We also guarantee confidentiality; your requests will never be divulged to another party.

The survey of the Derelik region is completed, with 365 POS logged. We suffered some data loss on the configurations of the first ~40 POS, but can determine whether they are fueled and can tell the difference between a lone tower and a tower with modules. As we will re-scout any potential target, this won't affect our service.

I support this service too, the sandbox in effect

Very much. We're just really getting started with it, but at the rate it's going I expect to have a significant portion of highsec documented before the end of the month.



Exactly. We were looking for derelict POS to salvage and realized since we were looking at almost every POS in a system anyway, we could take the time to put eyes on every one and build a proper database to track them all. We're learning some lessons as we go and getting much better at it, though currently the "database" is basically just a table in a shared file. I'll be migrating it to something more accessible and possibly streamlining our process as we go.

At some point in the future we might embark on a campaign to cleanse highsec of the 80% of towers that are offline. Imagine not having to sort through sticks that have been dead for 5-6 years when scanning. I'll need more guns for that, though.

I was documenting a POS the other day when I realized I was on grid with a station and thought about documenting that, but passed on the idea for the moment.

Right now, we are only surveying existing POS. This means that there would be a lot of viable locations not documented. I'm not the kind of person to be okay with such partial information. At some point we'll complete this survey and do another pass. That second survey will update the database and probably take longer, giving us time to collect more thorough information such as the number of moons each planet has. (actually that data already exists, and I might find a way to import that information so we don't have to do it by hand).

I could add it to the second survey protocol to document any stations on the moon grid (trivial) and possibly check for any asteroid belts close enough to a moon to possibly be on the grid (much more tedious).

As we develop a good system for this, I'm becoming more and more interested in the data it generates. I'm looking forward to finding out:

• The ratio of dead towers to active
• Who owns the most towers
• Seeing the changes from one survey to the next

The coding required for some of the things I wish I could do with this project is way beyond me. Time to learn new stuff!

I was part of a nomad fleet a few years ago. We documented all the POS locations and tried to find a way to capitalize on the intel we were gathering, but nothing ever came of it.

Survey just hit 500 POS surveyed tonight.

That's why I stopped too; never made a single ISK on it. Pity.

How much to buy your entire poco chart when finished?

I have a small (like 4-5 systems) database from about 2 months ago in VV
How much would you pay for it?

If I recall I have noted if active, defended, with modules, owners and locations of course
pm me in game :)

We're finishing up Metropolis and thus all of Minmatar space later today. One of my side projects is providing logistical support to mercs, and that kept me rather busy for the past week and slowed down the survey. After Minmatar, we'll be tackling Caldari space.