The abyss stares back

Interbus 1 : Foo 0

Last night I took my first direct potshot at one of our wormhole's Interbus customs office.  I have organised them to be taken down before by proxy, but never participated before.

Now I fit an Eve ship like you would expect an industrialist to do so; A bit of reading and a bit of ISK; and no where near enough ship skills to do it 'properly', either character skills or player skills.  I used regular ammo; not wanting to buy hours worth of faction ammo.   Last night, I brought in about 800 dps to attack one, and allowing several hours before I went to bed.  Such an optimist.

Now according to Chruker's eve_online website an Interbus customs office has 10,000,000 shield; and regenerates moderately quickly. 

Item Data

Volume:	100,000,000 m3
Capacity:	35,000 m3
Mass:	5,000,000,000 kg
Radius:	8,000 m
Hitpoints:	2,000,000 HP
Signature Radius:	4,500 m
Armor Hitpoints:	2,500,000 HP
Shield Hitpoints:	10,000,000 HP

Other Attributes

Attribute Name	Value
shieldRechargeRate	50,000.00 Sec.
armorUniformity	0.75
shieldUniformity	0.75
structureUniformity	1

So, I make a recharged shield of 10,000,000 in 50,000 seconds to be about 200 shield repair per second.  I have however read that there is a peak repair rate of 500 shield repair per second, with a that peak occurring about 20%.  I am simply not yet informed enough to make a judgement about the accuracy of these numbers.  I also do not know whether the customs offices have resists or not; I have been told not; but still not sure.

What I do know is that those shield health bars move very very slowly.  The term 'break into a bank with sandpaper was mentioned a few times'.

We started off with a Drone Battleship and Battlecruiser; neither entirely set up as glass cannons.  We had a friendly ship help out for 1/2 an hour, which did help.  I realised that this was going to take a while, so 'quickly' gave a second toon a destroyer to help out.

After about 4 hours, my friend had to log off, with the customs office about 45% shields.  It is not entirely difficult to target one of these things; but  being aware enough to start shooting again after a reload is difficult. 

I started off the evening tired, and could easily have gone to bed at 10pm local.  After a herculean effort (primarily driven by coffee); about 1am local I got the shields down to 29%.  Then fell asleep.

I woke up again, to see the shields back up to about 32% cry, got them back to 30%; then threw in the towel and logged out.  Interbus + need for sleep won this round.

I acknowledge a certain lack of caution in falling asleep where I could be shot.  I have lost more than one ship that way.

When I woke up this morning and checked on the customs office; it was back up to 90% shields. sigh

Well, its off to EFT and google, to work out how I can squeeze out more damage from my ships; and to organise additional ships on my next bash attempt.

And this time I might bring faction ammo; expensive sure; but that extra damage may have made just enough difference to turn a miss into a hit.