Tuesday, 29 July 2014

POS Nomenclature

So you have a POS, and it is in a wormhole. leaving aside the fact you don't want to get yourself trapped out and lose the shit due to this, your only real threats are you leaving a vulnerability open or setting it up to fail.

Operation Hufflepuff was an attempt we made last weekend, at great laborious effort and much gnawing of fingernails, to bait out carriers. They were new to wormhole space, being a nullsec PVP corp fallen a little upon hard times, looking to re-ISK and rebuild, living in a C3 with a lowsec static. The capitals were sitting in an Amarr large with a full retard hardener set (82.5% omni) with 280M EHP. This is known as a dullstar or shitlord castle. No way were we going to do that to troll a fight, so other options were needed.

We set up the bait POS (Medium Gallente, 8 blasters, 20 damps), poked POCOs during their prime time, and all we got was tumbleweeds and a desultory mail informing us if we wanted the carriers we could buy them and the POCOs for a knock-down price. Assuming we let the guy in. Which explained why tumbleweeds. So now we wait (with alts) for their POS to de-fuel, and see what loot fairy gives us. Success!

Failure to find a "goodfite" from the last lot has us looking around, 2009-11 style, for the next bunch of twats to harass. Maybe it will be part of the Foo empire, maybe ROC alliance. Maybe, though, we will skip properly death-starred Dread Gurista Large POS and go for a DG Medium, with pimp torp and cruise batteries (six) and ECM (eight) and a glaring explosive resist hole.

I did the maths. The target POS with it's explosive hole has 22.5M EHP before reinforce. It's in a C2 Magnetar, so 1200 DPS sentry Domi's are a thing. The torps will do, at best, 300 DPS. And the EM modules actually will protect the siege fleet against anyone dumb enough to YOLO onto the top of them. Ten sentry Domis or Istars shooting into the explosive hole will RF the POS in 2 hours, leaving us plenty of time on a weekend to camp for shinies and shitlords.

The dichotomy between these two example POSs has caused me to reconsider the BUGRY POS a little. I've always preferred a small guns and assloads of dampstar setup, having seen our domi ball assfucked by one of them before. Seriously, it was a terrible experience to be routed by a small Amarr POS with one POS gunner. This is still a valid POS setup but relies on a gunner being available to focus the guns and switch them around fast enough to overwhelm the foe.

The better option may in fact be the dullstar route of adding so many EHP it becomes literally a fucking joke to attack the POS.

And for the record;
Deathstar - a POS, typically Minmatar or Amarr, definitely Large, set up for max DPS, ECMs and  dissies. Strengths - huge potential DPS and variety of ECM defences force a large attacking force to be used. Active POS gunners can concentrate withering fire to overwhelm logi. Vulnerabilities - being in low or nullsec or a Magnetar, capitals of any sort.
Dickstar - a POS, typically Caldari large, with overloaded amounts of ECM, ideally to make the attacking fleet unable to target. Strengths - cheapness, simplicity, and ECM saturation making it impossible for logi to work. Vulnerabilities - drone boats, Marauders, off timezone attacks.
Dampstar - a POS, typically Large, with an unfeasible amount of damps (40++), unfeasible amount of small guns (loaded with long range ammo) and token ECM. Strengths include impossibility of enemy logi operating effectively under damp saturation (60s lock times @ 9km ftw) and clustering of enemies within 9km of guns for efficient bomb defence. Vulnerabilites mostly centre around off-timezone attacks.
Dullstar - a POS, always large and best a Faction tower, with full retard hardener setup, and unfeasibly large amount of EHP. Strengths - scaling-up of effectiveness of defensive logistics. Boredom factor is immense. Weaknesses - no guns will see you rapecaged. Lack of ability to run hardeners and maintain services (manufacturing, etc).


  1. I take great comfort in knowing you are playing with other corp's POS. Long may you continue to do so.

    What is a BUGRY POS? I like the idea of defending with a single gunner, though I have sworn off small POS.

  2. Have my own answer on the BUGRY POS: your corp pos

    1. If you're ever in my wormhole you can sniff it out yourself. nothing too secret, but you don't advertise it in case people can calculate your vulnerabilities and want to take advantage of them. Which, by the way, I have seen your various POSs and they are pretty decent.

