POS Warfare

Like most people I keep control towers on my overview so that when I scan for people I can get a clue as to whether they are at a tower or not, but I soon came to learn that just because there is a mastodon, moon and tower on scan doesn’t mean that tower is operational, defended or that the mastodon is under the shields. In fact this time I unchecked use overview settings and discovered that in fact all there was at this moon was a mastodon and a tower, nothing else so I went in for a closer look. As I warped in with my alt I saw the mastodon warping off and the tower beginning its anchoring cycle. It may have been its onlining cycle, either way it was going to take 30 minutes. I can’t tell you from experience because anchoring, onlining or just plan dealing with POSes sounds like pure drivel to me.

Although the mastodon had just left I was betting that it would be back just before this timer expired to online the tower, which would be my only chance to take it down. Of course the real problem was that a mastodon not only has formidable defenses, but that it has +2 warp strength. As would become a common problem in the future I did not have enough points of warp disruption to keep it around when it did come. Fortunately this tower was at the most distant planet and the mastodons other tower (fully operational) was located at an inner planet so I knew he would be warping in from that direction. So what I did have was the full realign time of the mastodon plus any extra time I could buy from bumping him, which in a Hound would be next to nothing. My plan was in place, I positioned my self behind where I thought he would warp in, released the bomb as he came out of warp, torp’d him as best I could and bumped him after the bomb exploded. Miraculously enough, it worked. I was treated to about 5M in loot a 100M+ kill mail.