For information on Personal Towers contact the logi-office channel in Test Discord
For information on Corporation Towers refer to TEST Command Forum
If this is going to be a staging tower or a Jump Bridge tower, consider finding a moon that would be an instaundock from the station in that system. This helps with getting off station grid faster if there are Reds on the station and helps to prevent bouncing on the station if the POS were to be behind the station.
In order to anchor a POS tower in any system that is 0.4 up through 0.7, the corporation that is putting up the POS tower must have high standings with the empire faction in control of the system. These racial standing requirements are based on the security level of the system (0.0 to 1.0) and not the “true-sec” rating of the system. Even if the true-sec of a 0.5 system is 0.48, your corporation will still need 5.00+ standings in order to anchor the POS tower.
Once the POS tower has been anchored, no further checks are done for the anchoring of modules or for putting the tower online.
Standings are re-calculated daily at downtime and is a straight average of the unmodified racial standings of everyone who has been in the corporation for at least seven downtimes. If a pilot does not have any standings at all with the racial faction, then they are not counted towards the standings. If a pilot has been in the corporation for fewer then seven days / downtimes, then they are not counted towards the standings.
To see which pilots are affecting the standings, go into the Corporate UI, the “Standings” tab and look at the “Liked By” tab. Right-click on a faction where the corporation has postive standings and choose “Show Composition”. You will be given a list of all of the pilots who are currently affecting your standings with that faction.
This is why corporations who are doing hi-sec POS towers will sometimes have to remove alts and members from the corporation who are dragging down their standings before putting up additional POS towers. It is also possible to buy existing corporations with high standings and anchor POS towers before the standings drop at the next downtime (or after seven days in some situations).
Requires standings with the faction that owns the region. If you are unsure as to which faction controls the system, you can look at the Sovereignty in the upper left corner of the screen. Or you can use 3rd party tools like DotLan maps which have a sovereignty overlay.
There are four different races (plus faction) and three different sizes of POS. Depending on the reason for the tower will greatly affect which race and size you choose. See Player-Owned Starbase Control Towers for more information.
Standard towers vs. Faction towers
Faction tower BPCs are currently not in the loot tables ingame due to CCP removing them over concerns about how common they were, particularly in hisec where they are unlikely to die. So, what's ingame now faction-towers wise is what's going to be in-game indefinitely, thus prices will likely continue to climb.
All POSs located in hi-sec space (0.5 to 0.7) require starbase charters in order to operate. These charters are race-specific based on the region where you are placing the POS and are bought with Loyalty Points from NPC corporations.
All size towers require 1 charter per hour.
Control towers consume a certain number of fuel blocks per hour. There are four types of blocks, one for each race, the difference being which kind of isotopes are used in their manufacture. They are manufactured like ammo (using a blueprint in a station or POS ammo or component assembly array, in batches of 40).
All blocks require Ice and Planetary Interaction products to manufacture.
The quantities are:
Faction towers use less (10% less for tier 1, 20% less for tier 2). You also get a 25% discount if your alliance holds sovereignty where the tower is anchored.
With a fully researched BPO, the materials required to make one batch of 40 blocks (and therefore to run a large tower for 1 hour) are:
There are two competing theories on tower selection vs fuel availability. Some POS owners will choose a tower based on the region in order to reduce the distance that isotopes will have to be hauled. Other POS owners will choose a tower based on attributes and are willing to haul isotopes from other regions. If you do not have access to an orca or freighter, you may wish to choose your tower type based on isotope availability within the region or neighboring regions. Some people just don't care and choose the tower based on what they are going to use it for. Those people import their fuel from high-sec.
Formerly, consumption of liquid ozone and heavy water was based on powergrid and CPU usage. With the switch to fuel blocks in Crucible 1.1 this is no longer the case and the quantities above hold regardless of what modules you have online. Generally heavy water is cheap, while liquid ozone is 3x to 4x more expensive due to its use in cynosural field generators (needed to use jump drives).
The fourth component that is refined from ice (besides isotopes, liquid ozone and heavy water) is Strontium Clathrates. Unlike the other fuels, Strontium Clathrates are only used when the POS is placed into reinforced mode. There is a separate fuel bay for Strontium Clathrates in the tower called the “stront bay”. As explained on the POS Warfare page (google it), you should always put at least 1 hour's worth of Strontium Clathrates into the stront bay.
As a general rule of thumb, if you put “N” units of Strontium Clathrates in your tower, you should keep a spare stock of “N” units Strontium Clathrates in a nearby location. That way, if the attackers leave you alone after the initial attack, you can quickly replenish the “stront bay”.
In addition to this, if you are timing your POS specifically so that it exits in a good timezone, you should have a small supply of stront within the POS shields enabling you to do this.
If you are putting up a personal tower, it is a good idea to fill the stront bay to max, allowing you the greatest amount of time to evac your things. if it is a Corp or Alliance tower, refer to someone important and they will tell you how much to put in, and how much to keep on standby.
| POS fuel usage per hour | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Tower size | Small | Medium | Large |
| Charters (Hi-Sec only) | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Fuel blocks | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| Coolant | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| Enriched Uranium | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Mechanical Parts | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Oxygen | 5 | 10 | 20 |
| Robotics | ¼ | ½ | 1 |
| Heavy Water | 37.5 | 75 | 150 |
| Racial Isotopes | 100 | 200 | 400 |
| Liquid Ozone | 37.5 | 75 | 150 |
| Strontium Clathrates (reinforced only) | 100 | 200 | 400 |
In order to allow people other than the CEO or Directors to manage the POS, you must hand out some corporate roles.
This role does not have any direct role on starbase equipment, but the starbase management panel's structure access tab may be used to grant access to some structures to users having this role.
Do not hand out this role lightly. People with this role can unanchor your POS structures or even the POS tower. They can change the POS force field password, bumping pilots suddenly out of the POS into the arms of waiting enemies.
Allows:
Allows:
Allows:
Before setting out to setup a shiny new POS tower, keep in mind the following points:
| Small | Medium | Large |
|---|---|---|
| 7.5 Min | 15 Min | 30 Min |
When the timer is up, warp back to the tower's bookmark at 0km. Now you can fuel the tower and put it online. You must be 'within 2500m' of the tower in order to access the fuel/stront bays. (This will uncloak you if you are using a Transport ship)
'Access Strontium Bay''Access Fuel Bay''Put Online'| Small | Medium | Large |
|---|---|---|
| 7.5 Min | 15 Min | 30 Min |
After the tower has finished going online, and for as long as the fuel holds out, the tower will now have a protective force field bubble around it. At which point you should warp back to the POS tower and finish the initial configuration. Most importantly: 'you must set a password before the shields will keep unwanted visitors outside the bubble'
'Manage''Allow corporation member usage''Allow alliance member usage''Apply''Use alliance standings''Attack if standing lower than and set the value to '0.1''Attack if at war''Apply'If you are deploying an Alliance tower, deployments are done with pre-sorted tower kits in the Logistics hangar. If you are doing a personal, PAC or Corp setup this may be different. After the initial tower setup and configuration is done, fill your Rorqual with these modules and as much fuel and stront as possible.
'NOTE:' You can put Stront in the Rorquals Fuel Bay.Once the Rorqual is loaded, have a cyno lit at least 170km from the tower, or at a friendly station, and jump your Rorqual in. Your Rorqual should have a 100MN warp drive fit. Warp to the tower and pulse the MWD for one cycle to speed up your warp time.
Once the tower is fueled, online and the shield is up, you can start anchoring modules. But first, keep in mind the following limitations and common mistakes:
To anchor a module:
'Launch for Corp''Anchor Structure'After anchoring, you can either leave the module offline or you can right-click the module to put it online and active. When moving the green box with the arrows, every “step” is about 960m. Most modules need to be placed a minimum of 1920m away from the nearest module (2 steps).
Anchoring modules (especially lots of them) is one of the most frustrating things. A good tip is to manually place the first two modules (top and side) and then to use the “Look At” function for every subsequent mod. If your POS doesn't look neat and pretty, people will ridicule you.
Once all your batteries are anchored, if they are guns, they will need ammo. This must be done by manually flying out and putting the ammo into each gun.
Each battery has two bays, the active bay and the storage bay. If your gun is offline when you add the ammo, the ammo will appear in the storage bay. As soon as the gun goes online, the ammo will be sucked into the active bay.
You cannot remove ammo from the active bay. Ever.
If you are setting up a moon miner, Liarali has created a lovely video showing you how to to properly set it up, including how to chain the silos (very important!).
One thing, as a POS fuel jockey, which will make your life easier are spreadsheets. Ideally, you should setup a spreadsheet such as the EVE POS Fueling (blank) and use it to track:
The spreadsheet should also have a feature where, if you tell it how much fuel is in the tower, that it will tell you how many units of each fuel type to take out to the tower to get a balanced fuel load.
You can also check the fuel amount and time left by being at the POS and using the Fuel tab in the POS Management window
If your tower gets shot, and you successfully stop it being destroyed after the reinforcement timer, you will need to rep the tower to above 50% shield (or leave it and let it replenish naturally). Once it is above 50% you will need to refill the Strontium bay with the correct amount of stront.
You can check the stront amount and time by being at the POS and using the Fuel tab in the POS Management window.
If your tower uses any gun batteries other than lasers, you will periodically need to go and refill the ammo on all the guns.
If your laser batteries use faction crystals, you'll need to replace these occasionally as well.
Eventually, all things must come to an end and it is time to tear down your tower, or move it to a new location, or just go on temporary hiatus.
Taking a tower down is faster then putting it up, but you should still allow a few hours if you have lots of modules anchored. You will need some sort of industrial ship (T1 industrial, T2 transport, orca, etc.) to scoop the modules to your cargo hold. If you are working on scooping up batteries outside the shield which are spread apart, then an afterburner module will be very useful.
Sometimes you'll want to save on fuel costs but not entirely abandon your location at the moon. This is done by unanchoring any expensive modules, then taking the tower offline. The POS shield will vanish and everything that was online will go offline. Note that since the tower is now defenseless, you should only mothball towers in hi-sec (or possibly player-controlled null-sec).
Example POS Setups - Sample setups. You may wish to also reference these informative pages:
Fueling calculators, POS fitting calculators, etc.