POS Defense in Wormholes C1-6

Not so recently, CCRES came into our wormhole, noticed an orca floating in the shields, killed all our defences and reinforced our tower in case we had forgotten to put strontium in a tower in a dread-accepting enviroment.

The fact that they felt that the lack of strontium was a possibility makes me lose a little faith in the foresight of the Eve wormhole community.

Recently, I was contacted by a CCRES member who told me that they put the PoS into reinforced mostly for fun. Acting on various word cues in his description, I managed to decypher THIS message:

“Our reason was far grander than a petty Orca and what we had in the corp hangar, for the legendary tales of your pvp prowess and twisted cunning in use of cloaky ships was so utterly terrifying that we could not just close the connecting WH but attacked your tower in hopes that having their ships destroyed by your considerable defenses, THEN closing the connecting WH with what few ships remained would be the only way to appease your unquantifiable wrath. Unfortunately, the tower’s defenses had been mostly offlined and unanchored into the corp hangar due to a spy, who after his two year infiltration campaign only now had the courage to act on his orders to mildly inconvenience you, then immediately killed himself out of fear and shame. We were thus forced to put the inconvenienced tower into full reinforced, to better reflect it’s former armed glory until a point in the future where you could reanchor your powerful and majestic defenses.”

Anyway, we had the full compliment so they settled for sending us a mail essentially saying:
“Hey, we put your pos in reinforced looking for free ships, you should probably try this configuration next time”
(For those interested they recommended dickstar)

After the reinforced timer ended we repped the PoS in a rorqual, orca and a few BSs which got MUCH faster once we realized the ending of reinforced meant that we could access the cap rechargers, power relays and energy xfer arrays in the corp hangar.

Anyway, this shite got me thinking. Wormhole territory is fast becoming a shifting battlefield. PoS takedowns, once the product of Amarr BS fleets that passed out at their keyboards firing at abandoned structures, are becoming more frequent and frankly, kinda alarming. Between a friend of mine getting attacked by two dreads w/ BS support fleet, Planet Risk owning then being owned by R&K, and CCRES’s “Stront check” of our PoS, I’d like to give an overview of PoS defense in a wormhole:

You’re screwed.

Here’s a little more detailed and less cynical view:

C1:
Size restrictions allow only battlecruiser hulls or smaller, but know that haulers, which can hold cap parts, large towers, fuel, x-large ship assembly arrays and everything else required to build a dread to kill your PoSes, can.
Recommended defenses:
Small guns, some medium guns anchored but not online. BC hulls or smaller usually means your only attackers will have poor dps, so hardeners are recommended. By the time they’ve built a dread you should already be gone >.>

C2-C3
Battleships are allowed in here, good for sites, bad when someone hates you, has a route to you and has a BS fleet handy can be a significant threat to your well-being. Build a carrier and rent/own/know someone who has a carrier pilot handy to scare off/murder/ambush attackers.
C4-C6
Carriers are “allowed” to jump in here, hence you should be prepared. Don’t ask me how, we still haven’t come up with a a counter to a carrier/dread with support fleet.

Essentially, the deeper you go, the more likley you are to be screwed, because the less time attackers have to invest in beating you into the ground. A battlecruiser takedown of a PoS is torture, a BS takedown isn’t much fun, and a dread-assisted takedown is about less than an hour, so an attacker’s time invested in making your life a living hell is much less than what it took for you to get two capitals, orcas, and the other thirty ships you’ve amassed over several months into the wormhole.

Point is, if someone wants you out of a specific hole, they can motivate you to get out. If you fit guns, they’ll wait for your offtime and have RR gangs. If you fit ECM, they’ll bring a dread and sensor boosters. If you go full hardeners, they’ll bring a dread again. If you find the most amazing awesome pos configuration ever, they’ll just starve you of fuel. They can activate all your sites with a scan ship every morning, camp your static, build a dread, any number of things in mind to make you think “boy, I wish they weren’t here or I wasn’t here”. The best defence, IMO, is two fold:

The first and more reasonable method is to have several friends and/or piles of isk to hire several friends. Eve is a spreadsheet game, but is refreshingly simple in combat calculations, which usually amount to “Whoever has the most experienced friends wins”.

The method that, us lacking large groups of friends and a general sense of comradery, is to be ready to be gone. Write the PoS off as already dead, and have the expensive gear in capital ships/industrials. When, not if, WHEN you get attacked by a superior force move to a deep safe you’ve created before deep safes were nerfed(before May 18), and/or make a safe in system and logoff in it. Then, scan your static, which, since you’ve been preparing for this exact situation for a while, goes to a C4 or higher WH and will close exactly after you pass your entire operation through it, once it’s been shoved into cap ships/orcas. If said static has a static C4 or higher, move in, setup the backup pos and either rebuild there or go through the next static.

The third method, that dedicated people of eve will probably do, and do better than me, is to want the hole more. Have an Orca/carrier cloak in system w/ lots of SB hulls, scan ships hulls, and fits. Get 5-10 people in. Proceed to activate every site after downtime, bomb the static periodically and generally make whoever tried to take your hole/lives in the hole you want wish they’d never heard of a local-lacking environment. Take 200 combat scan probes, launch seven, cloak. Repeat every 2 hours or so. Eventually, they will leave. Wait a week. If they come back, do it all again, if they don’t, setup a small pos and put a maint array/hangar in it. Have one big ship and one small ship for each pilot. Pilots logoff in big ships w/ scan ships/SBs in orca and CHEAP haulers/other ships in the small tower’s maint array. Don’t bother putting anything in the small tower’s corp hangar, as anyone who finds it will try to put it into reinforced, making removal of the stuff difficult. Don’t worry about defenses, again, if someone wants the tower dead, it’s dead. Make sure to have stront, and if the dudes come back lookin for trouble, unanchor the pos (using a cheap hauler w/ SB support), stuff it in the Orca and go back to step one. Repeat as necessary until they stop coming back and you feel safe enough to anchor a large pos and/or keep living out of orcas/capitals. Use any spare orcas/carriers to collapse the static at inoppertune times, and restock your equipment (using cheap haulers) at 5 am their time and/or downtime. Bubble the static and cloak SBs nearby.

People attack your wormhole because they’ve either been hired to do it, they want your sites, or they’re just bored. The bored will leave, the hired will eventually stop working for the hirer, and the people that want your sites won’t get your sites because you activated all the sites every downtime. An Orca, a few scan ships and SBs w/ fits is not expensive at all compared to WH sites, so you can make their lives irritating w/ very little expense on your end. The person who wins will eventually either be the person/people who get bored first. Or, someone runs out of money. Who’s gonna run out of money first, the people w/ covops cloaks or the people who can’t cloak while they fight sleepers or mine?