Bashing a POS

Tuesday night is here.  Since Friday, we've been involuntarily sharing our system with a Russian interloper who set up a small POS.  Diplomatic outreach has failed.  We've planned an attack.  It's time to smash.  Our plan is to reinforce the POS tonight, and then see when it comes out.  After that we may have to fight to take it down, or perhaps the enemy will abandon it voluntarily.  It may come out of reinforced when we are at work, and then we'll have to bash it again.  This process could iterate several times.  That's one reason why I wanted massively more torpedoes than we'll need tonight.

I am on by 7:30.  There are only two signatures in the system, a gas site and our static.  A couple of us close our static.  Now we are sealed off from the rest of EVE.  All we have to do is keep an eye on the discovery scanner and we will be perfectly safe, except for people who are already in our system.  And we're pretty sure there are none of those, other than the probably sleeping Russians.

My corpies assemble promptly at 8:00pm.  This should be about 4:00am in Moscow, so we do not expect to see any enemy.  Most of us are flying Ravens with a full load of nova torpedoes and Valkyries: these will hit the small POS (which is Caldari) in its explosive resistance hole.

By 8:10 we are ready to go.  We warp to the enemy POS, lock its one defense, an ECM.  (This was onlined over the weekend, along with a corporate hangar array, a personal hangar array, and a ship maintenance array.)

The drones swarm the ECM, and our torpedoes smash into it.  The shields drop quickly, but the armor is considerable.  We have perhaps 4000 DPS total; the thing has 1.5 million hitpoints of armor.  To disable it takes about 5 minutes.  Fortunately, it never jams any of us.  Evidently the enemy has not configured their POS's "when to attack" settings very well.  (I retrospect I think we probably did not need to shoot it.)

Now we attack the tower.  And -- oops.  First problem: normal drones cannot attack towers.  The force field prevents them from getting close enough.  Welp.  Next time, we bring sentries.  Lesson learned.  Meanwhile, we apply a bit less damage than we hoped.  We each lose about 100 DPS out of 800.  So, it will be a bit longer.  We have to inflict is 3/4 of 12.5m hitpoints.  We settle in for the grim and boring structure grind.

We have about 3500 DPS or so.  The grind should take a bit less than an hour.  I give a monologue on what reinforced mode is and the game-design reason for it.  This kills maybe 3 minutes.  There's a lot of dead air.  I can see why people watch movies in operations like this.  Some guys talk golf.  We discuss more fully our course of action after we have reinforced the thing.  Will the enemy corp (which is several times our size) do anything?  The POS appears to be a "wildcat" operation, probably just one guy's alts, but that is hardly sure.  It may be a base for an invasion. And in any case a POS defense would be content for the other corp.  I figure I can always hire mercenaries if necessary to help squish it.  Obviously at this point we are not going to coexist.

Now the tower is down to 30%.  And 29%.  We perk up a little.  I have seen a reinforced tower a lot of times, but I have never reinforced one before.  Will there be some spiffy graphic?  Probably not, but I want to see it anyway.  28, 27, 26.  OK, now it is at 25%.  Shouldn't we see something?  Yes, I explain, a reinforced tower is visible in the entire system.  It is very obvious.  We're probably just at 25.9 and it requires 25.0 or something.

Then it goes to 24.

Allll riiight!  The enemy has neglected to stront their tower!  This means it will not go into reinforced mode; we can kill it tonight; now!

We still have about 20 minutes before killing it.  The grind continues, but I am much happier in the knowledge that we won't have to repeat it again and again.

We discuss what to do with the few POS parts.  We'll have to kill the ECM we disabled earlier.  But what about the other three parts?  The internet is at hand.  It seems that if we blow up the corporate hangar array, and probably also the personal hangar array, there is the normal 50% chance to drop.  If we don't hurt them, we can scoop them, but then 100% of their contents are destroyed.  Since we might want a personal hangar array, we decide to spare it and scoop it.  We don't need another CHA, so we decide to blow it up and hope for goodies.  The internet is not completely helpful: can we potentially get ships out of a ship maintenance array?  We think maybe yes, and anyway we don't need another, so we'll blow it up and hope a blingy missioning Tengu pops out.

Now we are through the shields, and there is another million armor and structure.  These go fast enough, and... boom!  A very big explosion.

Now we bring over an Iteron V, and it first scoops a giant secure container that was here.  This is, as expected, the enemy's loot can, and we score about 100m in various sleeper loot.  The Iteron also grabs the personal hangar array.  We blow up the other structures as planned, but nothing drops from any of them.

The site is now clean.  But I am not done.  I have a nasty plan.

To be continued...