First Time POS Builder (CCP Please)

As my regular readers might recall, I used to spend some time in a hole with an alt of a player in a prominent w-space corporation. He took me under his wing and taught me about industry and reactions in w-space. When he decided to stop, I was picked up by another knowledgeable individual who taught me even more.

I've recently gotten it into my head that it's my turn to start doing w-space industry. I've decided to focus on what I know best and that's gas reactions. I've decided to set myself up in a C1 with a high-sec static. I found one occupied with two other small corporations and with some diplomacy I got their blessing to set up a POS in their hole. Side note: it always amazes me how far you can get with a quick message. Even when English is not the first language, I've found people to be very friendly. I'm on good terms with one of my Polish neighbours now; this is why I love EVE.

First thing first, I had a decent connection and fired up my Orca alt to buy everything I needed and haul it down to the high sec system where my static was. I learned a few things. First, POS mods take up a lot of space. It took me two full Orca trips to get all my POS mods hauled, then two trips to get 2 weeks worth of POS fuel and another trip to get a full load of Stront. That's 5 trips in an Orca! I wish I had a freighter. Now, Bob was not pleased with me this day. I didn't notice the hole go EOL and vanish completely, meaning all of my hauling was for naught! I checked the new high-sec static and it was 40 jumps from my old static. Nope, not hauling things in today.

The next day I checked my static and Bob was smiling down on me, it was only 6 jumps from where all my stuff was sitting in a station. I grabbed the Orca and quickly moved everything, as I didn't want to lose this opportunity. Once I got there, I loaded up a bunch of stuff into my DST and headed for the moon I wanted to use. Here's where I ran into my first problem. I couldn't launch anything from my fleet hangar for the corporation, so I couldn't launch the tower. CCP, why?! I had to get my alt to quickly buy an Iteron V and cargo expanders and come grab the tower to launch it. Ridiculous. Then it took 30 minutes to anchor it and 30 more minutes to online the tower.

Once my tower was online, I went about and finished bringing the rest of the mods, fuel and stront in. Then I started anchoring some defenses. First of all, anchoring defenses is like playing the scanning game with probes but is less intuitive. Things work based on a green box that you would think would turn red if you put it over another module, but no, it doesn't work like that. How some people get all their mods lined up perfectly is beyond me, because it was too frustrating for me to deal with. I just put them roughly over where they needed to be.

Another limitation of anchoring is that you can only anchor/ online one thing at a time. This isn't a big deal for anchoring (because it takes seconds) but onlining takes a couple of minutes. I thought hey, I could online something and continue anchoring while I'm waiting so I could make the most of my time. Nope, can't anchor while the tower is onlining something. Come on CCP, there's no reason for that.

Eventually I just ran out of time, so I onlined some things and decided to come back to tackle it another day.

Lessons learned:

1. Can't use a fleet hangar to launch POS mods
2. POS mods take up a lot of room
3. Fuel blocks take up a lot of room
4. Anchoring/ onlining things takes forever

Things to do:

1. Bring in more fuel
2. Bring in gas
3. Set up reaction lines.

Til next time!