We could stop now and call it a day. The Russians in our system would probably log in, discover the absence of their POS, and elect to leave. But I don't really want to leave that decision to them. I want to kill them and ideally pod them, so that they cannot scan out and let others back in. To do that, I have planned out a "bug zapper".
A bug zapper is a POS designed to kill people who log in at the site of a POS that used to be theirs. I got the idea from this article on The Mittani about a wormhole corp smashing another one. Quoting the author:
For those unfamiliar with the concept, bugzapper towers can be created by onlining a tower but never entering a password. This tactic keeps the tower from creating a forcefield, yet still allows you to anchor and online mods. Pilots logging in will not bounce off the non-existent forcefield, but will instead be gunned down by the POS. Bubbles were, of course, anchored around the towers...A bugzapper is just like a normal tower, except it has no force field. Because it lacks a force field, people who have logged off in that spot will warp right on it. You put warp bubbles around it to keep the "bugs" from warping off; there is a special rule on warp bubbles that if you are logging in, you ignore them (and thus warp right through and/or into them). Then, assuming the bugzapping POS has weapons, it will lock them and hopefully kill them. POSes cannot lock anything too quickly, taking perhaps 20 or 30 seconds. Once the POS has locked, the victim will have almost no chance assuming you've got him warp scrambled, webbed heavily, neuted, and have decent DPS.
Anyway, way back when we planned this operation I brought in a special load of POS parts, and this is what it was for. To set up my bug zapper. Now I do just that. This link that shows the design of my bug zapper, at the very handy IGB POS Planner. Here's what it looked like from nearby.
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| Hey, why is our force field off center? |
Setting up a POS takes a while, but nobody logs in while I am doing it. Finally it is done. By this time it is about 11:00pm, and there is some chance that an early-morning Russian might log in. (I observed one of them log in at 11:30 to kill sleepers one day.) So, I get in my cloaky Tengu and sit near the bug zapper. I don't want to miss podding anyone who does log in and get killed, not to mention whoring on the killmail. But an hour passes, and no Russians log in. Finally I say to hell with it, move out to a perch 150km from the bugzapper POS, and log out.
The next morning I log in hopefully, and check staticmapper for kills, but there are none. Rats. It is possible that the Russians did not log out at their POS. Certainly logging out at one's POS is highly convenient, and I mostly do it myself. But my POS is a large dickstar, and it is stronted. I am pretty sure I observed the Russians log out there myself, over the weekend. So I am still hopeful. But I have to go to work.
Some time after lunch at work I get a message from one of my corpies: he has looked at dotlan, and two kills and two podkills have happened in the past few hours. Oh yeah!Here are the kills: a Noctis and a PVE Tengu. Ouch. The podkills suggest that the guy had no way to scan out, and had to suicide. I do wonder why he logged in with the Tengu after the Noctis died. My guess is that he thought the Tengu could tank the bugzapper, which was true except that I onlined a neuting module for just this reason. Mwahahahaha.
A bit later, my buddy notices that there have been two more kills and podkills in our system, within the next hour after the first two. What happened there, I don't know. My best guess is that the "Russians" were actually one guy, who had brought in four characters on two accounts. Either he could not scan out on any of his characters in the ship they logged out in (which indicates very poor preparation), or maybe he simply did not want to take the time, preferring the pod express.
I didn't know you could bring a tower on-line without its force field. That's pretty sneaky, and clearly works to catch pilots unawares.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit weird that some corporations think it's okay to simply move in to a w-space system, but I guess we're a bit peculiar in being possessive about our systems. As I got in to a discussion before, it's not that we think we own the system, but more that trying to share a system with neutrals in a class of space where NBSI is pretty standard is awkward, to say the least.
Anyway, good job getting rid of the unwanted tower, and for getting the pilots out the painful way.