Jita Park Speakers Corner

POSes in general are basically an ISK sink unless you're really lucky to have access to a moon with the right minerals for either selling directly or use in a reaction that makes more than the fuel costs.

Looking over some older informational articles about POS setup it's mentioned that fuel prices for a small tower were on the range of 70K an hour, now it's more like 200K an hour. That completely blows the profit margins to be made as far as I'm concerned. Of course you can do PI and ice mining to make your own fuel, but that's not saving you money - it just means you might not fork out ISK directly for fuel blocks but you may end up just wanting to produce fuel for others to use.

Bottom line: Fuel blocks, while nice, are still way too expensive for the rate they're used, which means that people are not going to want to deal with the hassles of low-sec moon mining since it doesn't make economic sense.

You used to be able to turn off things to reduce fuel usage and make things more fuel (and thus ISK) efficient.

I would think that a reduction on the fuel-per hour usage would help make POSes economically viable once more.

The original motivation for asking for modular star bases was, frankly, because POSes look like crap. The inclusion of other functionality in the original proposal came down to the fact that I found the station UI to be much more accommodating than the travel to -> right click bonanza that is starbase operations. Only as time has gone on have I really come to appreciate how utterly inadequate the POS is for anything that isn't starbase warfare.

As a safety zone during a siege, a POS is the perfect tool; tough, safe, and mostly secure. As an industrial platform, they provide some of the functionality needed, but they were never truly capable of filling the role; they simply do not have the capacity to provide the robust UI experience that stations offer.

What a new starbase system needs to address is the need for a tough, relatively secure, relatively safe, robust, and intuitive user experience that serves as a player operated, but limited and vulnerable, surrogate for station services. Beyond the modular interconnecting system, there's numerous ways this could be pursued. The really tough question from an overarching design standpoint is, how safe should the contents of a replacement star base system be?

Using a starbase should be more like using a station; that much is obvious.
How should a starbase's combat mechanics work?
How should a starbase be destroyed?
How durable should a starbase be?
How much industrial capacity should a starbase be capable of utilizing?
How should the ore refining mechanics accommodate station independent mining operations?

...which isn't much, let's be honest.

What if Sovereignty was to disappear, never to be heard of again? How would you "hold" space then?

nah i'm pretty sure "cosmic consortium" would be the new nullsec power broker if ihubs/tcus were taken out of the equation

CCP wouldn't have to remove infrastructure upgrades and TCUs just because Sov disappeared. But let's wait for these mythical minutes and see if there are any teasers about the surprise future of nullsec & POSes.

Well, yes, there's that. I wasn't around to experience that particular hilarity myself, but you're right, that is one of the things I've heard about pre-POS sov times.

One of the alternatives I keep thinking of as well is to bring back the old POS sov warfare, but with a few minor changes.
1) Anchor them to planets instead of moons. Makes more sense, and still makes some systems more strategically important than others, without repeating the 50+ moons grind of olde.
2) No guns. This should help avoid or curb the self-reinforcing which was done repeatedly with POSes.
3) Bring back the manual timers. Opens up for human fuckups and kiting and counter-kiting, as opposed to today's "set a timer once and forget about it" tactics..
4) It'd bring back the good old tug of war, which I'd say was better than today's flowchart-requiring sov system which basically means that you have to grind your way through all timers, and then you can move on to the next one.

Alternatively, make a 2nd version of Fuel block that doesn't consume Ice, but only PI goods. This version would consume WAY more PI resources of a greater variety than the ice version to account for not needing ice products. This would ensure POS fuel remains available at a somewhat consistent price and balance out the supply between Ice and PI.

This is kinda exciting. If we get the whole modular starbase plus Incarna interiors I will declare CSM the winners of the internet.

1. Modular Pos's is this where we're going?

2. Will we see this start to come in winter?

3. Are they going with the massive threadnaught of awesome ideas?

4. What happened to the nomadic pos's?

5. Any chance we'll see something along the line of being able to take a Pos, with shield range extenders, and lots of mods, that it eventually has so much **** on it to service an entire corp or 2, that it shows up on peoples overviews because its sig radius got so big....

6. Will we finally see with this the advent of being able to develop public service pos's for say invention/copying etc...?

I mean if i build a huge massive pos thats nearly the size of a station, and can have out of shield docking ports for people to approach like Customs office's sticking out from the main structure, wher epeople can pickup BPC's or run invention etc... that would just be epic an entirely new enterprise for corps/alliances to offer each other and the public.