Science & Industry

I am looking for a place to set up a POS in high-sec. I have hunted around a number of suitable systems, but every single moon is taken. Many POSs are operational and in use, but at least 60% are offline towers (usually small) with no other structures nearby. The only purpose they serve is to prevent others from using the moon. Obviously one can pay a fee, war dec the corp and blow up their unprotected small tower pretty quickly, but that's not really the point: it costs them nothing to leave a tower anchored in space, effectively claiming an area which another player could use. This seems to be:

a) achieving something for nothing, which is contrary to EVE's ethos;
b) not the intended use of a POS.
And I would guess that
c) it probably puts off newer players who find space is "full"

Since POS mechanics are being reviewed perhaps something could be done to make players pay for the space they claim or lose their structures? I would propose some sort of timer (say a week or so) after which offline towers automatically unanchor themselves. This would give people who've taken a holiday (etc) time to recover if they forgot to fuel their POS properly. Some sort of failsafe would be needed to prevent exploitation, namely to prevent the tower being onlined for a few minutes once a week to reset the timer and then offlined again.

Thoughts?

You are not looking hard enough. I know there are empty moons within 4 jumps of Jita.

There are corps that make a living by ransoming POSes, and failing that destroying them. They leave a wake of empty moons behind them.

It is fairly simple to check eve-kill for hisec POS killmails, and check if the moon is still free.

Two things. First, just wardec and take the moon. It's only 2M and a bit of ammo.

Second. No, offline towers should never be simply removed. Some corps (like my own) have a POS but don't constantly use it due to fuel requirements. We do online it when needed, but it's not always needed every month. And we don't want to take it down due to the standings required to re-anchor it (requiring people to drop and rejoin the corp is just painful if you don't have to).

There really isn't a problem here. If you want a certain moon, take it. Otherwise don't complain about it, the system is fine as-is.

Small tower AFK in a few hours.

I've managed to take down a medium DG tower in about 26 hours, minus downtime, solo before. Of course being a DG tower it had extra hitpoints. That was also with an alt that had large energy turrets 3, amarr BS 3 or 4, and sentry drones 3.

Skill up a little more it would take a little less time. Soloing a large tower, thats gonna take a while due to the shield regen rate even though the tower is offline, but it is still doable.

find out your dps, then take the rep of the towers shields and subtract that from your dps, then take the ammount of shields/armor/structure and divide that by your dps(dps - shield passive recharge)

Yeah, was just going to add - make sure they are a dead corp before you go afk :).

Also, those damn Minmatar towers have 50% em and 25% therm resists, so it takes forever with lasers :(. It is almost worth it to load up a Tempest or Maelestrom with autocannons and pick a good ammo (i.e. fusion)

most of those offline towers arent there to block people from taking them. they are there because the owners dont want to grinding/buy the faction standings to set them back up when they return to the game/area. ccp should allow these towers to get unanchored and claimed by someone else after a certain amount of time of being inactive.

To narrow down your search, i suggest first looking for a system that has cheap rent, and more than two available corp slots.

If lots of corps already setup in a system its less likely to have available moons.

A low-risk way to test the new battlecruisers... now that's an idea.

Sounds pretty good... how about something like this so we can have a numbers discussion:

30 days of inactive, then they become hackable (l4 or l5 required).
You hack the tower, and it becomes yours. You have one hour to fuel it or it goes boom (or something, I dunno).

flying up to a tower, you won't know if it's hackable or not, so you just have to try with all offlined towers. If it's not hackable, you fail with some specific message that you're not able to gain access to the tower's computers (i.e. something really specific so you KNOW you'll never succeed). Otherwise, you just get normal failure notes (stuff along the lines of "almost had it ... maybe if I tried ...") or a success message.