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Revision as of 12:56, 20 September 2010
Contents
Overview
The POS and You guide gives a view into the world of Player Owned Starbases and how complicated and expensive they can be to run.
A Starbase, Player Owned Starbase, or most commonly POS, is a collection of structures that player Corporations may Anchor in the orbit of Moons. Starbases are not to be confused with the large 'dock-capable' Stations that orbit planets. A player cannot dock with a starbase, only make use of the external modules.
More confusion stems from the use of the acronym 'POS', which is sometimes elucidated as 'Player Owned Station', or 'Player Owned Structure'. No component of the starbase is a station. Player Owned Structure technically refers to the individual structures that make up a starbase. Worse still, players often refer to the central structure, the Control Tower as the POS on its own.
Officially, the term 'Player Owned Starbase' refers to the entire group of structures that make up a starbase.
A starbase fulfills many of the functions of stations, but externally. It is possible to store and refit ships, refine ore, or manufacture modules, ships and other items. A starbase plays an important role in the in-game economy, as they are the sole source of materials for Tech 2 ship manufacture. They are also required to build Motherships and Titans, and to process Combat Booster materials.
A starbase is used in the following capacities:
- To claim space for a Corporation or Alliance
- To mine resources from Moons
- To hold goods and materials in a time of war or for transportation
- To give players a safe place to go when under fire
- To provide an exclusive manufacturing or research center
Starbases are primarily used in security 0.3 and below systems for moon mining and reactions, for Sovereignty, for guarded Safespots, and for ore refining. A starbase may also be run in security 0.4 to 0.7 systems with the moon mining and material reaction functionality disabled. Their effective use is limited to guarded Safespots or manufacturing/R&D. starbase ship manufacturing capabilities are also limited, in 0.5 or higher systems, to Large Assembly Arrays. This disallows the starbase from making anything larger than a Battleship in 0.5 or higher security.
As items cannot be Anchored in space marked 0.8 or higher security, starbases can only be placed in 0.7 or less.
Requirements
Skills
You need the Anchoring skill to be able to anchor different starbase structures, you will also need the starbase role from your corporation to manage the control tower and operate structures like Refining Arrays and Ship Maintenance Array. Additional Requirements
Standings
In addition to the anchoring skill a corporation wishing to place a starbase in a high security system will also need faction standing with the faction owning sovereignty (ex. Gallente Federation in Essence systems). Corporation standing can be figured using all non-zero active member standings. Characters on inactive accounts don't count towards the total. In case you just created your corporation, it will take a few days to get correct faction standing for your corporation. Every DT the faction standing raises to the correct standing value. Be patient.
For empire space your corporation needs to have the following standing to be able to deploy a starbase in a certain solarsystem: 0.4 needs 4.0 faction standing 0.5 needs 5.0 faction standing 0.6 needs 6.0 faction standing 0.7 needs 7.0 faction standing
BUG (04-08-08): When looking at the faction standing for your corporation it will not show the correct value. Ask somebody else, that is not in your corporation, to check for the real faction standing OR (10-15-08) right click on your corporations standings and select 'Show Compositions'. This bug is due to the client caching the value of the standing for too long.
Common methods of quickly raising factional standing for this purpose are doing COSMOS missions and turning in certain tags to datacenter agents.
Defense
Structures
There are many structures available to build and customize a starbase. Each structure has a specific purpose and plays an important part of your base's operation and enhances its capabilities. Structures must be Anchored at you starbase and brought online via your Control Tower before they are operational. These structures must be bought on the market and transported into the orbit of a moon. As they are very large, they are often moved using an industrial hauler or (in lower security space) capital ship.
More detailed information can be found in POS Structures.
Uses of a POS and the Types
Moon Mining
A moon contains a certain configuration of minerals, and this does not change. They appear to be distributed randomly within regions, with high variance in mineral type from one region to another. They are broken down into Gasses and Metals, and in the database they have numerical rarity values. The 'abundance' of a mineral was planned to be used to harvest more than 100 units of ore per cycle, but that feature is not in-game yet and does not appear to be planned anymore, so effectively abundance (Promethium 2, for example) doesn't matter.
States (online etc)
Fueling + Transporting
A Control Tower runs on fuel. The fuels needed to keep a Control Tower online are trade goods and ice products. Your Control Tower has limited space for you to place these fuels in. The fuel units are consumed every hour for a Large CT, every 2 hours for a Medium CT, and every 4 hours for a Small CT.
Adding fuel to your control tower
* Right-click on the tower * Click 'Access Resources' * Drag and drop the Isotopes, Heavy Water, Liquid Ozone, and Strontium Clathrate you purchased along with the other necessary Robotics, Enriched Uranium, Mechanical Parts, Coolant and Oxygen.
starbases do not refuel themselves: they only take what's available inside the resource storage part of the CT. If a specific fuel like Liquid Ozone has run out, then your structures will start to go offline. Don't just shove tons of fuel in there, balance it out so everything has roughly the same amount of days supply.
If you run out of Isotopes, your whole Control Tower will go offline, shields will drop and you will be a sitting duck. This is precisely the reason why fuel is such a critical issue and should be the most important thing to take into consideration when planning your base. Ask yourself if your corp can mine/buy the required fuel regularly, how many members can have mining barges? Do you have easy access to ice belts?
Always mine in advance, have 1 months supply stored in your Corporate Hangar Array at the starbase. If you mine on the spur of the moment whenever you need fuel you will fall behind and risk leaving your base open to attack.
