I have been involved in POS bashes before, both as aggressor and defender. At one point I had a medium POS reinforced by a 10 man gang in a C1. I learned the benefits of multiple POS gunners and what you can do in the event of an eviction attempt. Evacuate the expensive non-pvp ready assets and find some more guns.
If you can make a 50 man fleet that is partly competent against an unsupported tower, you can reinforce a large tower, come back 42 hours later and finish the job.
I have little surprise that even in wormhole space, you can make a 50 man fleet that is partly competent to reinforce an unsupported medium citadel, repeat in 24 hours, then repeat in another 24 hours.
The time commitment (DPS grind) is less on a medium citadel, but there is a requirement to show up in a much smaller window 3 times. A successful defender is not left with the 'joy' of repairing guns while feeling incredibly skittish.
Looking at the current page of zkillboard for Astrahus : https://zkillboard.com/ship/35832/
- There are 40 unfit citadels that were stillborn, and died unfit.
- https://zkillboard.com/kill/54325101/ is a partially fit, nullsec industry rigged citadel, ganked by 101 pilots
- https://zkillboard.com/kill/54317387/ is a twin neut, wormhole pvp rigged citadel, ganked by 14 pilots with twin guardians. A Large POS may have survived this better. Nothing except tower fittings is visible on zkillboard as having dropped.
- https://zkillboard.com/kill/54288932/ has a token fit in highsec, ganked by 19 pilots.
- https://zkillboard.com/kill/54254569/ is another partially fit, industry rigged highsec citadel, ganked by 19 pilots.
Of all of these citadels, one had a reasonable shot of being defended. The rest? Unless you have a defense fleet, don't deploy a citadel with someone in local, or with open wormholes in Jspace. When I previously read zkillboard I was seeing similar ratios.
If you are ganking with 101 moderately competant pilots without a significant number of experienced defenders, I don't expect either a citadel or a POS to have much luck.
As a potential defender, I am somewhat concerned about loot drops out of citadels. I did however support the call that wormholes should not have the full known space safety rules (and a small part of me thinks that they should not in known space either). I do want better mechanisms for citadel owners to forcibly clean wormhole citadels occasionally. If, as a citadel owner, I am pro-active about keeping loot limited, I want the tools to do so. I have not checked what is visible outside the citadel during any citadel shutdown timer, but would want this to not be a call to loot for a full 7 days.
So far, ganking of empty citadels looks like 'content' rather than 'loot' motivation. Sufficient numbers are being generally brought so that it probably does not matter what structure is being lived in.
(ninja edit on first line : like every corp that has based out of a POS )
(ninja edit on first line : like every corp that has based out of a POS )
Any thoughts on the other side of the equation - what the best low-cost bashing fit would look like?
ReplyDeleteThe fighters and ewar options of an astrahus are impressive. Carrier level damage potential backed up by long range ewar and neuts on an unjammable platform. Scary.
ReplyDelete@anonymous, when doing POS bashes previously, I used Meta laser fit sentry dominix. I have always liked drone boats for their flexibility.
ReplyDeleteIf you wanted even cheaper, shield fit sensor boosted sentry vexors with drone link augmenters, backed by a few dual large remote shield scythes (lots of capacitor rigs and lows).
There is a large difference to shooting on a pos with multiple gunners and a mis-configured unattended POS that does not shoot neutrals.
I am not sure about the difference in shooting a citadel and shooting a pos, hence my trawling through zkillboard to see what citadels are failing (and what are succeeding).
A defense fleet makes a huge difference to what the attackers need to bring.
The way I see it is, if a big enough gang wants your Astrahus gone, and you can't muster a decent defense fleet (and there are probably a lot of small WH corps that fall into this category), it's gone.
ReplyDeleteI would also think that if you are a big enough corp to muster a respectable defense fleet then you probably weren't so worried about the survivability of your citadel. If the attackers can bring enough to get through your fleet and citadel, they probably could have done the same to your POS (assuming competent attackers).
That being said, the quality of life increase is probably worth the investment. Keep your citadel asset footprint small and have a backup citadel logged off in a Viator.