Warped Pestilence
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Posted - 2009.04.20 14:36:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Bad Bobby
You could save yourself the bother of running your own POS and just take up a tennancy at one of mine. You just join one of my corps and gain access to my POS labs. You don't have to worry about fuel or defense, I deal with that. The only fees are charged when you use the slots, just like NPC ones.
The main reason I put up a tower is because empire slots are simply never available. If you only have a few blueprints to research, invent or copy, I would seriously look into research corps/alliances like this. The convenience can outweigh the trouble of keeping everything going yourself.
If you do want to maintain a tower, IMHO, I suggest just sticking with a small, non factional, Caldari tower as it is only non-factional small tower that will support x3 Advanced Labs. I have anchored and maintained all three sizes of towers before with the end result being one small Caldari that is online and a second small tower that I have just anchored in some far-off distant system. When needed, I can anchor whatever array I need and online this backup tower within a few minutes. My research alt shares the single small tower with one other RL friend and we are very happy with it. And with the max number of research jobs one single character can maintain being 11, there's no way you can use (at the same time) all the ME, PE, and other slots that 3 labs can offer.
The main reasons I found to use a medium/large tower are:
1. Resources. If you have more than one person using the tower, it will almost for sure require a medium/large tower to support their activities.
2. Protection. For anchoring in low/null sec space, or your corp tends to get wardeced, the firepower from a medium (much less a large) tower is such a huge difference from a small tower it's almost comical.
3. Future expansion. As mentioned, unanchoring any tower is a pain and security risk with you sitting there waiting for up to hours at a time for the tower to become ready for scoopage, so, if you think you will want to run assembly, refining, or, reactor arrays, definitely go with a medium at least.
The benefits of running a SMALL tower SOLO are:
1. Cost. With the price per fuel load being around half that of a medium
2. Target value. When someone does wardec you, the option of removing all the juicy labs and perhaps onlining a few more guns is A) fun to watch as the attackers struggle with not getting tower pwned, and, B) a less expensive loss if they are successful at popping the tower. I would rather have 100-120m ISK lost than double or triple that. And again, it will hopefully cost the attackers one (or a few) expensive battleships before it's all said and done. Along this note, I personally would never wardec a corp just so I could try and take out their one small tower that has a decent rack of weapons.
3. Quicker deployment, removal and fueling. A large tower will require multiple hauler trips or the use of a freighter (flying brick) just to refuel it every time. Anchoring and unanchoring a small is also much quicker, albeit still slow.
Small towers for sure have their place. Although this is most often only as a hisec research POS, they are fairly inexpensive (usually less than the cost of a tier 3 battleship) to purchase and depending on what you do with it, can be a wise investment.
And, yes, I too am posting this with an alt :P
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