POS’s explained by
Amiable Rashala
V1.0
2nd July 2007
For most
a player owned structure, or POS, will be something another member of their
corporation operates, but there are always things you need to know to help make
your corporation’s task of running them easier.
I aim to
help you understand a little about POS’s, their practical sides, their
different modules and what they do. And
also to help explain what some of the roles grantable allow more junior
members, or appointed operators, do with POS’s.
Anchoring, Power and Load
First
things first, let me explain what a POS is, a POS is a cluster of modules which
are anchored around a central tower.
This tower is called the Control Tower, and just like your ships a tower
only provides so much power and CPU to activate other modules around it.
So you
have to balance the defenses and the active modules of a POS, so as you can
achieve the task you set it.
Now,
unlike your ship fitting screen, there is not a way to see how much power and
CPU a module activated off of your control tower will take, so you need to
resort to knowing the details from the items themselves, for example, here are
the statistics for a Small Gallente Control Tower:
|
Gallente
Control Tower |
Small |
937,500 pg |
1,688 cpu |
And then
if we wanted to use this as a refinery, and we anchored an Intensive Refining
array:
|
Intensive
Refining Array |
Large |
750,000 pg |
4,000 cpu |
We would
see that the tower does not have enough CPU for this structure, and so we could
not online the structure.
The same
goes for defenses; we could not anchor a citadel launcher around a small tower,
as it can not activate the launcher.
Though we could fit other modules around this small tower. But with the fitting available being low,
what we might wish to do is have two sets of structures around the tower, one
set for say mining the moon, and another being the turret defenses.
If the
tower came under assault, we could offline the industrial modules, and so free
up the fitting of the tower, and then online the already anchored defensive
structures, and fight off the attack.
This
allows towers to be tactically employed and more effective.
Starbase Tactical Officer
Now, the
person able to online, and offline structures with a POS is a “Tactical
Starbase Officer”. This is a corporate
granted role. By default the CEO of a
corporation can also perform this role, as can pilots granted the “Director”
role.
However,
a “Tactical Starbase Officer” is one of the few corporation roles where you are
given the rights to activate and deactivate starbase modules without being
granted the ability to steal from the corporation, or to offline the whole
tower.
http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/skillsaccessories/skills/corporationmanagement/3373.asp
This is
an important role to consider for large alliances or corporations which hold
0.0 space. As granting this role and
having this skill allows pilots to defend tower, without actually giving them
the ability to sabotage your operations and turn the towers off.
I believe
this corporate skill is also required before you can take manual control over
POS Turrets (though I have, as yet, not confirmed this).
Fueling Towers
Another
new role which has been instigated with Revelations II is that of a star base
fuel operative, this allows people without any critical access to the control
of poses, to access their fuel hangars and refuel towers.
Which
brings me to explain how poses are run, to operate the tower you have to anchor
it around a moon, and have it online. To
bring a tower online you are required to insert fuel and materials to allow it
to run, these units are for the most part common to all kinds of towers, things
like Oxygen, Coolant, Mechanical Parts and Strontium Clathrates.
However,
each race’s towers use a couple of different fuel supplements, namely each
races tower uses a different Nitrogen isotope, and a different radioactive
element.
Isotopes from Ice
The key
to these different isotopes is the ice from which the fuel is refined; you see
from the ice in Gallente Space you will receive the isotope appropriate for a
This is
rather good in one respect, when one is close to empire and ice can be easily
gained. Or the appropriate fuel for your
tower brought to you from the lush markets of high security space.
But when
you are in deepest darkest 0.0 you only have to work with what forage you can
find around you, so for example in the drone regions, taking an Amar tower out
with you might be a bad strategic move, as all the ice in those regions is
Gallentean in origin. But taking a
Gallente tower would be very useful, as you can power it where you stand.
Now, the
ice itself is a whole other subject, but one important benefit from refining
ice at your tower is you receive 100% yield from the equipment. You only receive 50% at a station in Empire.
So, for
the most part the fuels come from the ice where you are, certainly that is the
most bulky asset to have to transport.
But mechanical parts, coolant and the radioactive fuels are bought from
NPC sources, and so a regular supply route would still be required, unless you
bought those commodities in bulk.
http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/manufactureresearch/materials/iceproducts/
In the
link here you will see the four different isotopes, so for example the Ice
found in the Gallente Federation will yield the Nitrogen Isotope, which is then
the isotope required by Gallente towers.
Strontium Clathrates &
Reinforced Mode
The way a
tower works is quite simple, the shields remain up as long as the tower has
fuel, if during that time the tower comes under attack, then the enemy’s task
is to take the shields down to or below 50%.
At that
point the tower goes into what is termed Reinforced Mode. During this time all the modules around a POS
go offline, and the tower stops burning its normal fuel. Instead it starts to use the stock of
Strontium Clathrates you stored within it.
The more
Strontium Clathrates you have stored the longer your tower will remain in this
mode. And while in this mode the tower
is invincible, but it can not be refueled.
So you must find a way to either relieve the tower and recharge its
shields or the enemy keep it under siege until all the power is gone, and they
can then finish the tower off and destroy it.
You can
help repair the shields with remote transfers, and once the towers shields get
to or above 51%, then the tower comes out of reinforced, your structures come
back online, and it reverts to burning it’s regular fuel again.
Now,
since the regular fuels and the strontium fuel both sit in the same hangar you
have to balance how much you want to fortify your tower to siege, and how long
you want to leave it to operate.
Empire
research pos’s will most likely never need any strontium, and so are the least logistics
heavy, those pos’s near a war zone will need constant tending.
The mission of Towers
The
mission you pick for your tower really serves to define what modules you
require. For instance, if you wish to mine moon minerals, three essential
items are going to be a Moon Harvester, a Coupling Array and a Silo.
Such a
set up would easily fit upon a small tower, but you must weigh up what other
modules you might want.
Another
role for a tower is as a death star
style outpost, you would dedicate the tower to weapons, ECM and shield
hardening arrays, so as any ship or fleet coming near would be destroyed. Poses in this set up are usually the first
asset an advancing POS Conquering alliance brings into residence. And these poses are generally the main reason
why warping to a moon can be a very terminal affair.
Acting as
a shipping port and depot is yet
another role, where ship maintenance arrays corporate hangars, General Storage
Silo’s and other useful ship maintenance structures are a boon. These points are on the whole just for the
owners, however, with the recent changes to jump technology, POS orientated
fleets have found the use of more and more ship port style POS’s viable, while
they plan where to set up outputs.
Within
the shipping port style POS’s there is also capitol ships to consider, any new POS being set up will have to
have sovereignty in their system to anchor capitol ship construction arrays,
the level of sovereignty I can not currently comment upon. However, capitol ship maintenance arrays will
require sovereignty level 1. Which means
you have had the most number of online POS towers within your system claiming
sovereignty for the last seven days.
And of
course from ship maintenance we also want to consider the factory side of pos operations,
there are different structures dedicated to the manufacture of different items,
for example there is a Drone Assembly Array, which will only allow you to build
drones.
The same
is true for ammunition, and ships.
http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/EN/starbasestructures/assemblyarrays/default.asp
As you
can see from the link, there are ship assembly arrays for differing sized
ships. These allow for the construction
of Tech 2 ships as well as Tech 1. The
biggest challenge with ship production at a pos is now arranging the modules
suitably to so as to delivery the ship to a hangar, and also the logistic
challenge of moving the materials into position.
But, ship
production at a POS is something for the very dedicated 0.0 inhabitant, and not
something I will go into further detail about here.
Defenses
As we
mentioned in Starbase Tactical Officer, a tower can have certain weapon systems
and defense augmentations arrayed around it, these include Cruise Missile,
Torpedo, Citadel Torpedo, Hybrid, Projectile and Energy Turrets.
Structures
like this have a limited amount of cargo capacity, and take the same charges as
your ship weapons do, so you have to keep the turrets supplied with ammunition.
This
re-supply is now a tactical problem for the defender, as the turrets lie
outside the tower’s defensive shield.
But with the ability to take control of a towers guns and concentrate
fire upon one target, it becomes possible to break the will of an assaulting
force much more easily than when the turrets are allowed to expend their fire
upon any target they see fit.
As part
of the defenses there are also shield hardening arrays. These do not directly benefit the modules of
the over all collection, but they do harden the shield of the tower to any one
particular type of damage, just as shield resistance amplifiers do on your
ships.
Additionally
a tower can have Stealth Array Emitters anchored around it, when online these
modules lower the towers signature radius, therefore making it harder to hit
from very long range, and also reducing the punch missiles and torpedo’s have
on the tower.
Electronic
Counter Measures are also available in the form of Tracking disruptor arrays,
ECM arrays (for each sensor type) and sensor dampening arrays.
I
personally like the combination of stealth arrays and sensor dampening
arrays. One makes the tower harder to
hit from range, and the other stops ships being able to lock onto to the tower
at extreme range, making for a very strong way of then bringing assaulting
ships into the range of even the smallest guns and so making breaking your
tower a very touch proposition.
Getting started with my own pos
The best
place to come to grips with a pos is on the test server, this will require you
to get onto the test server (see the CCP info about that), and then it will
require a 24 hours cooling off period for you to quit E-Uni.
Once you
are a solo player on the test server, you need to create your own corp, and
then get your tower and fuel out to a system you can launch it in.
Launching
a pos will require you to either have the reputation with the sovereignty
owners in high security space (also requires star base charters for that empire
as part of the fuel for the tower) or be in low security space. You then need the anchoring skill to level 1.
Since you
created your own 1 man corp, you are the CEO, and have all the rights to launch
a tower, fly out to a moon which has no other pos or cans within 100km of the
moon warp in point.
Then go
to the tower in your cargo, click “Launch for Corp” and wait, position the
tower with the green arrows (within 100km of the moon warp in point). And right click on the bundle in space and
click “Anchor”.
You will
now have to wait a while, so in the real server where there are busy pilots
trying to kill you, a cloak might be a very good asset. As you can not dock or warp off until the
tower is erected.
Once it
is present and stable you can fly within range and by right clicking on the
tower open the tower management page, on there you will be able to drop the
fuel you brought with you, and then choose to online the tower.
Once
online the tower shield will be protecting you, so make a book mark to that
spot inside, and off you trot to get the modules you want to play with.
Since
everything on the test server is 100 ISK, it makes testing out POS anchoring
and module configurations much easier.
Tips
And now,
a list of tips I can give to you as a POS commander: