My Loot, Your Tears

NinjaFleet was on cloud nine following the epic salvage op that ended in a battleship kill and many tears. I was online the next night, putzing around, clearing out loot from the previous op, and just relaxing, when fellow ninja OzoneFriendly pipes up in alliance chat: Anyone want to take out a w-space POS?

Now, I had precious little experience with POS warfare, with my only actual sighting of a POS being the time I came in for the last 20 minutes of NinjaFleet wtfpwning an Eve-Uni POS that had been set up without guns. I was curious about the technical specifications of a POS with defenses put up. I was about to get a crash course.

OzoneFriendly gave me a warp-in to the wormhole, and then led me to the POS in question. While Ozone went to get something a bit more durable to test the range of the guns, I lurked in my Stealth Bomber and got a good look at the thing. The owner was a three-man corp full of young characters, so my assumption was that this was an alt corp running a POS for a more experienced player. Drat, no intel to be had there about the enemy’s ability to bring the pew should we decide to pop this thing.

While I was waiting for Ozone to return, two of the three POS owners logged in, made a fuel run in a bader, and logged off.

The guns were small Amarr lasers anchored in all six directions. Ozone did some testing and reported that the guns were barely hitting him at 68km, and not at all at 70. There were very few ninjas online at that point, and both he and I had a full day on Saturday, so it was decided that we would both log out in the system in CovOps ships with probe launchers, and the next day whoever happened to be on and could scrape together a sufficient fleet would attempt to do so without the other. I sent an eve-mail to the alliance with instructions to put together a ship that could hit at 70km, and wait for Ozone or myself to come online.

The next afternoon, I logged on to find that Ozone had not been available, but that several ninjas had begun preparations for attacking the POS. I made the announcement that hostilities would begin at 0130 Eve Time Sunday.

Jons Squire, Nin’ja Tamake, and I were the only ones to begin on time, and it was rocky. Nin’ja and I were both in Stealth Bombers, and within minutes of each other got careless and wandered into range of the fast-tracking guns, getting our ships insta-popped. Jons’ Eagle fared better, and he continued the fight while we went to grab replacement ships.

It took nearly two hours for the three of us to kill the first POS gun, but that includes initial set-up and replacing the loss of the two bombers. Nin’ja came back in another bomber. I returned with a bomber fitted with two rigs to increase the range of my torpedoes out to 80+ km, but neglected to check my targetting range, and was limited to shooting at 77km. This was fine at the time, and with more ninjas and friends of ninjas joining us, the guns started to go down faster.

As NinjaFleet was chewing through the guns, one of the owners of the POS logged on, undoubtedly to much surprise and annoyance at finding his mighty POS guns outranged by mostly Stealth Bomber frigates. He did something–I assume changed the frequency crystals for the lasers–and suddenly NinjaFleet found that what used to be a safe distance was now… not. Some ninjas got away with major damage. I alone lost a ship: my second rigged Stealth Bomber of the night. Ouch.

Looking at the information for the small laser batteries, I learned that they had a maximum engagement range of 90km. Period. I left in my pod, and once in hisec purchased and fitted a Caracal which I named “Screw You, POS Guns”. Even without explicit orders, most of NinjaFleet somehow ended up with range-fit Caracals instead of Stealth Bombers. Funny how rational self-interest works. :)

In time, we got the guns down. Everyone went back and switched to whatever they could find that would hit hardest at 15km, and for most of us, that meant climbing back into Bombers.

It took a while to knock down the shields on the POS, but it was uneventful. At 25%, the POS went into reinforced mode, and we got our questions answered about how much fuel the owners had placed in it: This POS would be invulnerable for about 40 hours. We marked it on our calendars and disbanded the fleet, with myself staying put in my cloaked bomber so that I could keep an eye on things and get us a new wormhole when the current one expired.

Sunday afternoon, while the POS was reinforced, I logged in to see what there was to see, and discovered that the owners had mounted five new guns: four medium turrets, and an additional small turret, which they left anchored but offline, presumably due to fitting limitations on the POS tower.

I looked at the specs on the medium turrets. Not good. They had an engagement range out to 300km, and could hit perfectly almost all the way out. I ran some numbers in Eve Fitting Tool, thinking that perhaps I could fit a Raven with cruise missiles to outrange the guns. It turns out I could, but my targeting range maxed out at 249km. Besides, my DPS would be no better than the Caracal and not everyone in NinjaFleet could afford such a specialized ship, much less have the skills to fly it. Then I remembered that this particular system limited ship sizes to cruiser hulls and below, anyway. I logged off in despair, and was somewhat gloomy for the rest of the evening and all day on Monday.

I got home from work just a few hours before the base was to come out of reinforced. I logged in and was staring at the troublesome POS when a thought occurred to me: Would it be possible for a frigate to speed-tank the medium turrets? I got out of the w-space system in my Bomber, switched it for a throwaway Tristan frigate with speed mods and one light missile launcher, and came back.

Just like the time I attacked the Typhoon in a Caracal, I was pretty certain going in that I was about to fail. I warped to the base, orbited one of the medium guns at 5km, engaged my afterburner to increase my orbit speed to about 700m/s, targeted the gun, and began firing.

The guns targeted me. I went ahead and pulled up my bookmarks folder to warp my pod back to the wormhole after my frigate was destroyed.

The first gun missed. So did the other three. Ten minutes later, they were still missing, while I poured ineffective light missiles into their shields.

Newly hopeful, I retrieved my Bomber and found that the same was true even at a slightly lower speed: the tracking on the medium guns is so poor that even if you don’t have perfect transversal velocity, they will not be able to hit you in a fast-moving frigate.

As more ninjas and friends got home from work, they joined in the fun in their own bombers. Geno110, a friend of TEARS, was an exception, flying his Zealot cruiser and typing “OW!” once in a while in fleet chat as the guns punished his larger ship.

About halfway through the second gun, a ninja brought it to my attention that, with a medium gun incapacitated and no longer sucking power from the POS tower, grid was available for the owner to re-enable the small gun that he had put up. This would have been a disaster: We can outrange the small guns, and outrun the large guns, but not both. That one solitary small turret had the potential to make all our hard work vanish into thin air. I ordered the fleet to cease fire on the medium turret and disable that anchored small gun ASAP.

Taking down the rest of the guns was uneventful, and soon the tower was out of reinforced and we were chipping away at its shields once again. At this point we had nearly a dozen ninjas, mostly in high-DPS stealth bombers, unloading torpedoes into the tower.

At this point, I felt really good. We were there in force, and there was no sign of the enemy. I mused in fleet chat that any enemy action which could derail the takedown would have to be so spectacular that I would not have regretted the opportunity just to see such an event. Unfortunately, it never happened, and within about 90 minutes the POS was down for the count.

We moved in quickly to unanchor the various POS structures that remained. They’re valued at about 200 million ISK, which is a lot of money but not really spectacular considering the 80 or so ninja-hours put into the effort, not to mention the loss of three stealth bombers. My usual policy is to divide the spoils evenly among all participants, but there’s talk of a ninja base in w-space, so the equipment may go to that effort unless I get strong objections. Of course, the non-TEARS members of the NinjaFleet in question will get their fair share in cash.

Special thanks to Geno110, who was not only involved for nearly all of both nights, but also recorded the POS takedown with some amusing music from a YouTube link that was passed around during the siege:

Lessons learned:

- POS Warfare can be really, really boring if you’re safe the whole time. If you’re not safe the whole time, it’s really, really stressful. I’m not sure which is worse, but either way, POS warfare sucks unless you enjoy talking to the people you’re flying with. Luckily, NinjaFleets are usually packed with great folks.

- The Stealth Bomber changes the game. None of the other members of NinjaFleet, even those with experience in POS warfare, had any idea that you could speed-tank medium and large POS guns. I guess you always could, but there wasn’t much point in it, with frigate damage being so low. With the newly-redesigned Stealth Bomber, however, you can be small, move fast, and bring battleship-sized pain, all at once. This has serious implications for anyone defending a POS: If you fit it with all small guns, we will outrange it. If you fit it with all medium/large guns, we will outrun it. You MUST either mix small and larger guns, or add a webber to your defenses, to slow down orbiting Bombers enough for your guns to track and kill them.

Even against a properly defended POS, this discovery might change the SOP for taking down the defenses. You only have to do traditional large-ship bombardment long enough to kill any of the relatively weak small turrets and webbers, after which you can swarm the medium/large guns with Bombers. Fleet members who are young and can’t fly much can always bring a rocket Kestrel to chomp on the turrets with.

- Items in hangars and labs don’t drop when you unanchor them. This made me a seriously sad panda, since the entire motivation on my part for the operation was to crack open that mobile lab array and hopefully scoop out a BPO.

- If you want to run a POS in w-space, pick a system that doesn’t allow battleships. Though creative thinking got us around that limitation, eliminating battleships from the equation makes it difficult to overpower a POS with brute force alone.

- Most folks in Eve are quite friendly, when you get right to it. I had a good conversation with the owner of the POS after NinjaFleet popped it, and we both talked about what we had learned from our perspective of the fight. We agreed at the end that it was worth the losses and time on both sides to learn about POS warfare, which is unfortunately not terribly well-documented outside of private alliance forums. Hopefully blog posts like this one can help those who are considering running or attacking a POS.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Combat, Wormholes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.