Mopping up

The main fighting is done and dusted.  Their POS is destroyed, along with most of their front line ships.  Their precious items hauler is destroyed in the flytrap.

We now have the joy of mopping up.  This means taking down the obviously insufficient small and medium POS.

To take down these POS, we also want to un-anchor our incapacitated modules.  A couple of repair modules on unskilled pilots will be fine?  Umm.  no.  I had previously taken down Customs Offices with barely sufficient DPS; Unlike a Customs Office with passive shield regeneration that must be overcome, each unit of armour repaired stays repaired. But there are so many units to be repaired.

So, position repair ships just outside the shield, lurk under POS guns, and try to pretend that you are not AFK.  If you ever find a T1 logi ship repairing POS guns, you can probably guess that they are paying as much attention as a miner.  The remaining POS guns are however another matter, they don't sleep so much.  Sometimes you really are at keyboard and actively spamming dscan, honest.

To put a module back online, you must repair not only armour but also hull.  Both must be at 100%.  Not 99.99999%, which still shows as 100% but is not.  Is there any way to display raw numbers rather than just the percentage?  I spent a lot of time not knowing what it was that I had to repair, having both hull and armour repairers on guns until the modules became 'anchored', so much more satisfying than 'incapacitated'. There are no hull repair drones, and the hull repair modules that I used seemed to be very close range.  5k is a long way from the safety of a POS forcefield.

Also, after repairing a module, make sure to restock it with ammo.  I spent way to long under the 'protection' of recently repaired and onlined guns, assuming that all those guns I had just repaired had their remaining ammo (hint : they did not).  A Hoarder with spare ammo put aside has its advantages.


Eventually I break down and set up some real repairing ships and repair drones.  Much much faster.  This time I really am at keyboard and almost always paying attention.

Once all the modules are repaired, start stripping modules.  While you can now launch modules and repair them from within the safety of your POS, no such luck with collecting them.  I used a small/fast/tanky industrial and spent a bit of time warping away then back to the next module. Faster than slowboating, though I also did my share of that.

Finally stripped all the modules and offlined them.  On the last small POS I was wondering what an SMA was still doing on my overview.  I had not picked it up before putting the POS offline.  No harm or loss done, though that was good fortune and not good management.

Fortunately, POCO shields regenerate themselves.