





Islands Among the Stars: A Guide To Everything Wormhole.

Table of Contents







Of Scope and Purpose

The purpose of this guide is to take players who know little or nothing about Wormholes (also referred to as W-spaces and holes) or POS setup and defense to the point of being able to select, move in and stay in their Wspace.

Wormhole tactics will also be covered and will include information on how to take advantage of your island among the stars. It will not cover full explanations on how the game mechanics allow or will not allow certain things to happen as that would make the guide too vague or bloated to be useful.

It is not the intent of this guide to explain all the details about the numerous menus and submenus of POSs themselves but rather the strengths and weaknesses of various POS modules and why they work or do not work for wormholes.

This guide will work for any wormhole class, but it is generally written for a Class 4 Wspace or higher. There is always more than one way to skin a cat with Eve, but if you follow this guide to the letter your chances of success are about as good as it can be with any class of wormhole.



There are also multiple ways to colonize a wormhole. This guide will cover both transient and long term stays as well as raiding setups.



The majority of this guide is from my own experience from running a wormhole-based corporation in a Class 5 (Fusion Industries and The Hole Patrol). There is also a good portion that was derived from numerous other players and they have my full thanks and appreciation. Specific credits for various bits of information are still contained in the original threads linked below.

As with all Eve guides and advice, feel free to ignore what you want at your own peril.

Original thread links:

Wormhole Tactics and POS Defense: A guide to die for.

Moving into and keeping a Wormhole: A how to guide.

Wormhole and Exploration Site Fact Sheet.

Capital Ship Fact Sheet (Carriers)

Capital Ship Fact Sheet (Dreadnoughts)

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What Wormhole Life is Like

Got that dream of pulling in billions and coming out a superstar rich dude from some back water system? Good luck. I do know of some that pull in a billion a week, but they have to go through considerable play times and care to do it. I wrote this guide and I can tell you I’ve lost billions doing it. I’ve had good times and bad ones but I have also lost money in the process. Doing wormholes is just like everything else in Eve, it can make you and it can surely break you too.

If you are the typical Eve player that plays about 2-3 hours a day then perhaps wormholes are not for you. There can be considerable downtimes involved. A mistake can isolate and strand you deep in null sec. You can get podded quite unexpectedly as well. You can go days without anything to do. If you have no patience then do not do wormholes. You must be prepared to have all you need in the hole to take advantage of whatever comes along, else you just sit by and watch something to do despawn. If you do try wormholes, give it at least a month to see if you like it or not. If you go less than this then you are, perhaps, not getting the full effect. And always remember, the proper response to bad times is, “Thank you CCP, may I have another?”.

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The Goal of Your Hole

What you are looking for is profitability when the wormhole has “bottomed out”. Bottomed out means that you have been in there long enough that you have overtaken the natural spawn rate of exploration/combat sites and there is very little left to do. You will have to be prepared to take on anything that spawns or run the risk of corpmates leaving out of boredom.

That kind of capability usually requires a hearty mining setup as well as enough ships and people to tackle the most difficult magnetic or radar site you come across. In addition, your corpmates should automatically know to scan the system down if it has not yet been done and be able to share those bookmarks with everyone. Your corporation should know what to do about hostile wormholes with or without you.

You should develop a way of knowing who is and who is not in your wormhole. Everyone should be hitting the directional scanner more than when they came in from high sec. Regular fuel runs and a general plan on what to do when a hostile ship or fleet enters your wormhole should be known by every single member as well.

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Show Me the Money

So, you now know why you are going to try this, what about the rewards? This is a very difficult subject. On one end of the spectrum if you screw over your corpmates on purpose you’ll be playing Eve by yourself with constant wardecs. On the flip side, if you give up all of the profits then there will be nothing left for you or your corp. I cannot give you a definitive answer, no one can. How you decide to split up the loot and deal with those that are unhappy about how you did it is completely up to you. I will briefly outline some strategies that have worked for us in the past along with some that I came across while trying to tackle this very question. Some pros and cons will also be stated. Remember, you can’t please everyone all of the time.







The Even Split Method

Nice, clean and very easy. Take the total corpmates in your hole who even remotely pitches in and divide the ISK that many ways. The down side is that some members play a disproportionate amount to others, still further; some simply do not have the skills to pitch in like others can. This is best suited for a small gang of highly skilled players with consistent play times.







Running In a Pack Method

The ideal behind this is that you naturally already have clicks of people who have skill sets that complement each other and who happen to be on at the same time more often than not. From a wormhole standpoint, some teams would do mining while others would be raiding connected holes. The loot would be divided amongst those that pitched in for the particular event. To make this work the corporation itself would need a cut to take care of the fuel costs as well as pay for defense expenses. The ideal setup would be a medium sized group where most players get along with each other. You would also need to trust that these players would contribute to the corporation fund.







The Foreman Method

You pick enough players so that at any time one of them is on. This person is responsible for overseeing mining operations or raids on sites. The Foreman would then take note of who is doing what and for how long and formulate a cut based on that information. This requires a lot of attention and time on the part of the Foreman and generally makes playing Eve more of a chore than a pleasure. The up side is that your corporation members are encouraged to be active in order to make ISK. The down side is that if you do not have a Foreman logged in then no one wants to do a thing. This method works best when you have a medium to large group of players that may not have a close bond with each other.







Bunch of Boobs Method

Works for any corporation of any size. No rules just go and do something. Leadership is loose and/or nonexistent. Most corporations in Eve have only small amounts of this disorganized method while some absolutely thrive on it. This method works very well for very small corporations. It allows players to come and go as they please and to do whatever they want. The downside is that getting a group together could be painful. Resisting wardecs also becomes a problem. Players tend to do the same thing over and over again because they lack enough numbers or coordination to do anything else. Money is made mostly from the tax rate or from donations.







The Whole Enchilada Method

Perhaps the very opposite of the Bunch of Boobs method. This method works best when it is implemented early. You need a core group of players who know the game, know how to handle people and play regularly and reliably. This method of running a corporation can start small and grow rather quickly with no problems. Each core member is delegated a specific job/responsibility right from the beginning. New incoming members are groomed as replacements. These types of corporations can bloom into those that have their own websites, can take and hold null sec spaces and offer their members an obtainable goal. Monies earned from wormholes go into a master fund and the core members (directors by now) each receive a cut after fuel and expenses have been paid. What is left over is the given to the members as they see fit.

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Know When To Hold ‘Em, Know When to Fold ‘Em

Sad but true, wormholes eventually trickle out nothing for days on end. CCP has specifically stated that wormholes were not meant for long term habitation, this is what they probably meant by it. It is not known (as wormholes have not been around long enough) exactly how long this takes to occur. It could be related to a set “universal timer”, or it could be related to what Class of wormhole it is or it could have something to do with the price of tea in China. Our Class 5 was occupied for about four months only to run bone dry shortly before the Apocrypha 1.3 patch was implemented. Others claim this happens within a matter of weeks.

You will know you are bone dry when spawns are taking longer than 3 days to appear and are usually either small Ladar sites or outbound wormholes only. This is when things get rough and when paying for fuel becomes difficult to justify. Depending on the characteristics of your wormhole you might have the option of raiding nearby Wspaces or you might just have to pack up and go.

At the time of publication it is not known what “resets” a wormhole or even if there is such a mechanism. The general consensus after the release of Apocrypha 1.5 is that when a site despawns in wormhole X it respawns in wormhole Y. Further, wormholes X and Y are thought to be within the same “wormhole constellation”. A wormhole constellation is comprised of the same class of wormhole but that constellation could connect with a different constellation of a dissimilar class. All in all, when your hole runs dry you’d better start raiding your static wormhole because it will not be the same.

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Wormhole Selection

In order to select a wormhole to live in you must first know all there is to know about them. Make this guide a mandatory read for any who come in. Can you imagine what kind of trouble you can get into if the only guy in left with a scanning ship does not know what a static wormhole is, how to find it or how to understand how much mass it can allow? Knowledge is power and I offer it to you.

The first thing you must do is pay careful attention to any side effects a wormhole has on you. If you decide to set up in a wormhole that “bonuses” then be absolutely sure you have a strategy to make it work for you and not let it be something you just deal with. Make sure that all incoming members fully understand the wormhole before they choose what to bring in.

It would also help to understand how wormholes are connected. There are about 2,499 Wspaces currently in Eve. The entrances and exits all shift based on wormhole timers and/or allowable mass usage. It used to be that CCP setup wormholes that had around a six system path, meaning you could find that same wormhole anywhere within just six systems, that has however, been changed. Wormholes that can lead directly to other Kspaces from a Kspace can also appear. These usually connect you another race’s space, like from Caldari to Amarr space.

It is entirely possible to find an entrance to a Deadly wormhole from Kspace, including .9 systems (confirmed myself). I found our Class 5 via a direct low sec opening near Iges and slipped my carrier on in. What makes these higher end direct connections to Kspace rarer may not be just a simple case of CCP turning down their chances to spawn but maybe more related to the fact that the higher end wormholes are more often than not, buried within other wormholes. Just remember, there is no limit as to the combinations for which wormholes can connect to Kspaces. Anywhere, anytime and in any way is possible.

The class of wormhole you choose will dictate how many members you should bring, what size of POS and what types of ships. Generally speaking, bring everything no matter what.

Here is a link to the Evelopedia page on wormhole effects. I have also cross referenced (hold Ctrl while you left-click) the raw data in case you cannot link to it yourself.

Study it carefully as you might find yourself fighting in one against your will!

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Corpmate Selection

Presence - Call it a disturbance in the force but you cannot defend your wormhole if you are not there. It does not matter how well your POS is setup, a smart attacking force can take it down. To successfully defend any territory in Eve you must have multiple players in your corporation/alliance that are willing to commit to staying.

When selecting who gets into your high profit wormhole and who does not, you must balance against two things. You must balance the need for both defense and Presence against your need to make ISK. For a general rule of thumb try five minimum players. These players must know scanning, mining, PvP and a lot of game mechanics.

For every one skilled player you can have one unskilled player. You must be careful about how many new players you let in as they can cost you your wormhole if they are the last man standing.

You must trust all of them. Corp members are not protected from other corporation members in the game of Eve. If you have doubts, don't invite them. In addition, everyone should know why they are in the wormhole in the first place. Is it profit or a pirate platform or something else entirely? Be ONE on that.

So, as this applies to wormhole defense and colonization here are some things to look for when selecting wormhole corpmates:

What time zone they play in. You want a good mix of US and EU time zone players. When one side of the Earth is going to bed, the other half is getting up. The goal is to have someone in your wormhole 24 hours a day, seven days a week in order to spot hostiles or undesirable wormholes. How often do they play? It does no one any good to have corpmates that you must rely upon if they are flaky about when they can log in and how long they can stay. I'll take the 4 hours a day guy over the 30 minutes every other day guy any day. The ideal candidate is a level headed person with no job and stays logged in forever. Those with PvP experience. Not all of your corpmates need to be natural born killers, but some of them do. PvP in Eve is not something to learn while your POS is being taken down in front of your eyes. Try to mix PvP and PvE players. The PvE players will provide muscle power for the PvP players to flex under stressful conditions and the PvE players will be the ones running the money making processes. Consider the all important issue of unit cohesion. Nothing ruins a game like having a player who acts like a complete jackass. If you want a good defense then make certain that you will fight the enemy and not fight amongst yourselves. What ships they can fly. This is rather important. You want all corpmates to be able to fly something that can contribute to fending off hostile players. Eve is intentionally setup to have a mind boggling array of ships and modules to choose from. The rule of thumb here is variety. The more ships you can choose from the more likely it is that you will be able to exploit a hostile fleet's weakness. There is strength in numbers! Skill aside, it's hard to kill 30 ships with just one ship. This is really the heart of Presence within your wormhole. I hesitate to give you a minimum for defending your hole, but I'd not be caught dead in a hole without at least 5 pilots at the ready. Try to base this minimum amount by considering the maximum size of an incoming hostile fleet in terms of mass. Do you want to be 1:2 or 2:1 in terms of ships? Consider who your Directors are and the leadership roles. This goes to corporation structure and organization more so than to wormholes, but it is very, VERY important. Believe it or not there are actually professional studies on how guilds/corporations are formed, run and implemented within all MMOs. Where it counts as far as this guide is that you should have at least one guy with the ability to do it all. At least one (preferably 3 or more) need to be able to do everything there is with a POS. This person also needs access to funds and be able to trade independently of his Kspace counterparts. Remember, you are an island so you must be as self sufficient as possible.

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The Price of Wormhole Ventures

Before you dive in, know that a proper setup in a wormhole is not cheap. It is not cheap because you become an island in the ocean. In an emergency you need everything you could possibly need, else you risk losing all you have.

Below is a small list of most of the startup items:

POS Corporation Hangar Ship Maintenance Bay Defensive POS Modules Fuel for POS Battleships Support Cruisers Ship Modules Scanning Ships (T1 and T2) Mining Ships Gas Harvesting Ships Additional Skill Books Optional Equipment Stupid Mistakes TM

As the prices of most of the listed items fluctuate I cannot give you a more exact figure but if you have none of these then count on spending around 2 billion ISK, maybe more, depending on a great number of things.

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Holy Crap, It Closed Right Behind Me!

Never go into a wormhole whose description states that it is “on the verge” or says “…reaching the end of its lifetime” unless you have the ability to probe yourself out or otherwise make due with being in that wormhole for days on end if you cannot probe.

You cannot jump clone back into or even out of a wormhole. You can, however, blow yourself up to get out. If you do not have the time or patience to be found randomly then blowing up your own pod is indeed the only way out. Keep in mind that your ship will stay there for weeks. It is rare, but you could enter a system with a perfectly good ship floating in the middle of nowhere because someone came in without the ability to probe themselves back out again.

Moral of the story here is always have a ship that can probe! This could mean a dedicated scanning alt cloaked somewhere, or sacrificing your battleships’ fittings a bit to have a probe launcher or some other scheme. Keep in mind that the higher the Class of wormhole the harder the sigs tend to be in order to pinpoint them. It could be the case that a ship without additional means to boost scan strength will never be able to probe its way out even with probes!

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The Three Amigos

The following are the three main ways to use a corporation to take advantage of wormholes. They each have their strength and weaknesses and each require a different amount of starting capital.

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The Raiding Party

Not just a World of Warcraft thing after all! Most corporations start out here. This is when you send out ships to find any wormhole you can and mount a posse to go and get what you can. In general, most look for Class 1, 2 or 3 wormholes to do this raiding in because they give a very good risk to reward ratio. The problem with these types of wormholes and this type of raiding simply comes down to a matter of having the highest probability of getting ganked. Class 1 to 3 holes are everyone’s favorite and as you are just raiding you have no main means of defense and no safe haven to run to should you get probed out.







The Life of a Nomad

This one is very popular as it is a good compromise between needing starting capital and not having your ass hanging in the breeze when you conduct wormhole operations. A “POS in a box” requires only a low skilled pilot to max out an industrial to fit one small POS, one Corporate Hangar Array and one Ship Maintenance Bay along with 1 to 3 days worth of fuel. That player sets up the small POS while the others defend. When the shields go up the raiding begins!

These operations can last from a single day to whenever you get tired of running fuel or you get your POS sieged or your hole runs dry. This is very inexpensive (comparatively) and offers great protection but is extremely vulnerable to even small POS busting gangs. You could set up defenses, but then if you are going to go through that much trouble, you might as well go medium POS and setup enough defenses that even a large POS busting gang would not want to touch. As will all things in Eve, the more you want, the more it will cost you.







The Squatter Style

This is my preferred method. This is where you find a “just right” wormhole and set up permanent POS(s). The rest of the guide will be based off of this style as it requires the most knowledge and has the most risk. It is absolutely vital that you find a premium wormhole as you can be in there for 4 months before it runs dry. If you are lucky you can find one that has a static wormhole connecting to easier holes that you can raid at will. The down side to this setup is many. For starters you can forget doing high sec stuff. It’s a bear to get in and out of your hole all the time. There will be periods of time when nothing is going on for days and you have to have the patience to last. Fuel runs become extremely important and a gate camp will make you spit nails when they rummage through your wreckage and ask you what they are supposed to do with 1000 units of robotics.

The upside is that you have an extremely difficult POS to take down. You will also know your hole. After awhile you can guess where the next static will be and you will know how far out your scanners can detect other ships. If your corporation has sufficient numbers you can defend and raid and do the sites in your own hole without any problems.

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Skills You Should Not Go Without

Some of these skills as well as their level can be debated. You must keep in mind that not only is this guide written for a Class 4+ wormhole but it is also written to keep you alive.

Have Astrometics to level 4 and all of the other three scanning support skills to level 3. To be certain, have Astrometric Rangefinding, Astrometric Pinpointing and Astrometric Acquisition to level 3 each. You are not looking for the ability to just scan, you need to be able to scan quickly too. You must set a minimal ship level for your pilots to be able to fly in an exploration site. For a Class 5 it is Battleship or better. What good does it do to bring your favorite Navy Comet against 12 Sleeper Battleships? You must have all support skills needed to fly that ship minimum. All support skills to level 3 at the very least, preferably level 4 and 5. Have all of the support skills not just some of them. Starbase Defense Management. It is no secret that a POS on automatic cannot compete against a skilled attacking force. You will lose your POS for many reasons and not being able to take control of the guns is a sure way to lose it. It sucks to train it up I know, but hey, how else are you going to alpha strike a Battleship? You will need 3 or 4 regular players with Anchoring to level 3. At level 3 you can anchor any POS equipment. This comes in handy when the only guy with Anchoring at level 3 gets podded, or is not online and you need to anchor that one thing to get started. To make money you will need to be able to mine asteroids and gas. You can skip this, but you will not make a lot of money if you do. Get Gas Harvesting up to level 4, preferably 5, and as far as mining skills go you can have whatever level, just be able to contribute to the whole mining effort. Remote Repair skills. Do not underestimate the value of remote repair. Your pilots need to know how to fit and use them. Skill level 4 for armor and shields. Hull to level 3 is optional. OPTIONAL: If you wish to cash in on the salvage (and YES, it is worth it) then have at least Salvaging to level 4, preferably level 5. OPTIONAL: Propulsion Jamming to level 4. This allows you to use medium size warp bubbles. While not strictly necessary they do offer the ability to camp wormholes with much greater success and can even be used to ambush those coming or going to known sites or POSs.

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Ships You Should Bring

The following is an extensive list of ships. This list, when completed provides backups to your backups and allows you to have access to any ship to react to 99% of situations. This list is arguable, but I say again, this is your best chance of surviving out there.

You should have a T2 scanning ship with Sisters Scanner and a full complement of Sisters Scanning probes. Deck it out, spend the ISK, you will not regret it. This is huge. No one gets into our wormhole without the ability to scan. With this setup you will be able to cut down the amount of time and effort it takes to find whatever it is you need, be it a gas site or that all important direct to high sec opening that is allowing a hostile fleet to come knocking. Bring an additional two T1 scanning ships. Consider them the backups to you making a mistake with your T2. Put a cloak, scanner and probes on it. Just use regular equipment and you don't have to bother with rigs if you don't want to. You must have backup scanning ships on a per character basis. You never know when you will be the last man standing in your wormhole and have to find a way in for the other 100 members that got podded. A Capital ship. If you got one, bring it. It is a huge tactical advantage. An incoming force not only lacks a POS for defense but is also limited on the number of ships it can bring in against you. The odds of a hostile fleet bringing in another capital to fight you is very slim, so this gives you a high probability of being the only capital ship for billions of jumps. Capital ships also have a huge tanking ability that enables you to solo sites that you could not otherwise! Your battleship. You will need two. One can be a backup to the other but the real purpose of two is to have at least one fitted for immediate PvP combat. Should you get your only battleship popped it can take hours to get out of the wormhole, get a new ship, and drive it back. Rest assured that the second you get popped by a Sleeper there will be hostile players scanning down your wormhole. Your mining ships. Hulks are still the best, use a battleship if you have to, just be able to contribute. Bring T1 support cruisers rigged to run perma capped for remote shield repair and another one for remote armor repair. Keep these ships in the Ship Maintenance Bay and never use them for battles, they are meant as POS support only. Battleship remote repair setups are nice, but they lack the range bonuses needed to repair your POS. You will need Haulers. Two kinds, first is the throw away kind, no rigs, cheap, no sweat to lose. The second is a fully decked out transport with rigs and racing stripes. The former is for hauling ore in risky conditions and the later for running out goods and bringing in valuable cargo. You will need both kinds. OPTIONAL: For those who are serious about making money from mining bring in an extra Corporate Hangar Array and Ship Maintenance Bay with a Freighter. Keep the Freighter stored in that Ship Maintenance Bay with the power off so you don't use fuel. When you have a full load (which won't take long) and you have that once every other week high sec opening that fits that fat ship through you can take it all out and refine it at 100% instead of 65% or 75%. This requires significant expense, added risk and more patience but pays an extra 25% if you have the skills. OPTIONAL: For those with Salvaging at level 4 you should consider bringing in a dedicated salvaging ship. Drakes and Vexors, for example, make good dedicated salvaging ships. You cannot salvage the top of the line battleships without Salvaging to level 5, but you can with level 4 and a single Salvage Tackle rig! OPTIONAL: Orcas may take up half your Ship Maintenance Bay but they fit through more wormholes than a Freighter or Rorqual. Can't knock the bonuses either!

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What Is Out There

The following is a basic description of what to expect when you finally scan down that exploration site. Keep in mind that these sites have a Kspace counterpart but the ones you find in Wspace are much more difficult. A typical site found in a Class 6 wormhole can easily pop capital ships.

I HIGHLY suggest that if you want to find more information about a specific site, be it a regular Kspace or a Wspace site that you use this link:

http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=WormholeSpace

You should contribute to this site all you can!!







Magnetic Sites

Some known magnetic site data:

Forgotten Perimeter Coronation Platform (3 cans)

Forgotten Perimeter Habitation Coils (5 cans)

Forgotten Perimeter Power Array (4 cans, 1 frigate)

Forgotten Core Information Pen site. One Abandoned Talocan ship, Class 5 Wspace. (15 cans) - BRUTAL. Four battleships initially. Can opening spawned 6 battleships, 5 cruisers and 5 frigates.

Forgotten Perimeter Power Array - 4 Forgotten Sleeper Artifacts, Class 1 Awakened Patroller x2. I didn't bother to spend missiles on these to trigger the 2nd spawn

Forgotten Frontier Quarantine Outpost (7 cans, remote repair, webify, can drop some malfunctioning rather than just wrecked sections).

Using Carriers OR Dreadnoughts WILL spawn 6 additional Battleships if you use them on Magnetic sites in a Class 5 or 6. They are tougher to clear out than other sites. Consider tanking the spawns while opening the cans, there are waves of spawn. The second wave could be the web/scram or the remote repair gang. The remote repair variety allows a frigate to tank 9 Fighters! Magnometric and Radar sites, as well as anomalies, all seem to have four waves. The trigger for the next wave is usually the last of a type of frigate or cruiser. Be careful you don't kill it early. The attempt to open a can has a possibility to cause additional spawns. Rare and downright deadly at times. When a ship starts to open cans while tanking the spawn, the spawn concentrates on that ship and ignores other targets.

WARNING: When you tamper with a can and you leave the site, the entire site will despawn in under a minute! This has been confirmed multiple times for it happening in Wspace. Some use a cloaked covert ops alt to sit on the grid to keep it active, but cloaking devices in these rooms tend to fail on arrival. So, if you do try that, make sure the Sleepers are busy enough to be able to drive away from the entry point.







Radar Sites

Some known Radar site data:

Unsecured Perimeter Amplifier (4 cans, occasional frigate)

Unsecured Perimeter Communications Relay (8 cans, occasional frigate)

Unsecured Perimeter Information Center (3 cans)

Unsecured Perimeter Transponder Farm (? cans)

Unsecured Frontier Database (9 cans, 1 cruiser)

Unsecured Frontier Enclave Relay (15 cans)

Unsecured Frontier Receiver (7 cans)

One example from a Class 3 Frontier Radar site post Apocrypha 1.3 patch: 29 Propulsion Datacores

23 Offensive Datacores

36 Engineering Datacores

38 Defensive Datacores

3 Electronic Datacores

Salvage: 3 Neurovisional Input Matrix

Assorted salvage

First wave: A remote repair gang, 3 cruiser class, 5 frigates,

Second wave: 5 cruiser class, 1x battleship,

Third wave: 2 remote repair battleships with 4frigates

An Unsecured Frontier Receiver had a return of 70 datacores and had the same spawn. An average of about 110 datacores seems to be what these sites spawn now. For a rule of thumb try 35 datacores per site per wormhole Class. So a Class 1 would give around 35, a Class 3 around 105.

In a Class 5 wormhole we did a Frontier Unsecured Enclave Relay something. It had 15 cans. Three battleships where in the initial spawn. Killing the last battleship spawned two more battleships, four cruisers and five frigates that remote repaired like you would not believe. You can loot the cans while under fire from the spawn. Magnometric and radar sites, as well as anomalies, all seem to have four waves. The trigger for the next wave is usually the last of a type of frigate or cruiser. Be careful you don't kill it early. Triggers vary! Radar sites can have an Abandoned Talocan Battleship/Cruiser present (the source of T3 hull BPCs). The same site can spawn with or without the abandoned hull, this includes temporary despawns. When an abandoned battleship is present, the initial spawn defending the site will have one more advanced level Sleeper battleship guarding it. An equivalent extra guardian is likely present for abandoned cruisers. You will both hacking and salvaging to clean out the Abandoned Battleships.

WARNING: When you tamper with a can and you leave the site, the entire site will despawn in under a minute! This has been confirmed multiple times for it happening in Wspace. Some use a cloaked covert ops alt to sit on the grid to keep it active, but cloaking devices in these rooms tend to fail on arrival. So, if you do try that, make sure the Sleepers are busy enough to drive away from the entry point.







Gravimetric Sites

Gravimetric site names from worst to best:

Infrequent

Isolated

Ordinary

Uncommon

Unusual

Average

Unexceptional

Exceptional

Rarified

Gravimetric sites seem to be the most common exploration site spawning. Ore types present are dependent on the type of site, i.e. Average or Rarified. It is not dependent on the class of Wspace it spawns in. Using Capital ships on these sites do not spawn additional Sleeper ships. The NPCs in a gravity site are the easiest to deal with. Additional rocks can spawn in over the lifetime of the field. Average lifetime of a field is 3-5 days. An Exceptional field has all ore types including Mercoxit. The field is huge, 20 Hulks going at it for 24 hours will not clean it out. The lower the level of the site the less of each ore type it has per rock. The layout of each type of field is the same every time. The range between asteroids can be normal or very spread out. One field spanned 300km with rocks very spread out.







Ladar Sites

The order from worst to best for Ladar sites: Barren, Token, Minor, Ordinary, Sizeable, Bountiful, Vast, Vital and then Instrumental.

Types of gas and quantities:

Barren has 3000 C50 and 1500 C60

Token has 3000 C60 and 1500 C70

Minor has 3000 C70 and 1500 C72

Ordinary has 3000 C72 and 1500 C84

Sizeable has 3000 C84 and 1500 C50

Bountiful has 5000 C28 and 1000 C32

Vast has 1000 C28 and 5000 C32

Vital has 500 C320 and 6000 C540

Instrumental has 500 C540 and 6000 C320

Ladar sites can have ships or Sentry Towers as defense. The Sentry Towers are present on arrival. They always have two gas clouds. Ladar sites despawn within one hour of being completely drained. Using a capital ship on these sites do not spawn additional NPC ships. Upon initial arrival there will not be NPCs, they take a little while to spawn in. A well tanked battleship can solo these sites in a Class 5 Wspace. WARNING: The upper end sites like vital and instrumental can spawn two battleships which will annihilate most solo players attempting this site! Ladar sites compete with gravity sites as the most prolific spawns. The Vital and Instrumental Ladar sites have the potential to spawn two Sleeper Battleships that will web and scram, you are warned.







Combat Sites

The class of the system only determines what kinds of sites are likely to spawn; the jury is still out on whether or not it also affects the difficulty. Some reports that a frontier site in a Class 3 will actually have a few more ships if it spawns in a Class 5.

Perimeter sites are "easy": Checkpoint Hangar Camp ambush point

Frontier sites are "medium": Command Barracks Outpost fortification

Core sites are "hard": Core Stronghold Core Garrison Core Bastion Core Citadel

Core sites seldom appear in the lower Class wormholes, although they certainly can spawn there as well.

Combat sites always return 100% on the first try no matter what your skills are. You can also expect four waves with each wave possibly having a different survival strategy than the one before it. Remote repair and straight brute dps have so far been confirmed.

For your convenience I took down the ship counts for a C5 Core Garrison site. Four spawns with the last of a type being the trigger: 4 frigates 5 sentries 4 Battleships 6 Frigates 7 Cruisers 5 Battleships 4 Cruisers (Remote Rep)

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Just the Facts, Ma’am

The following lists are just point by point juicy facts about wormholes. They represent the latest and most provable facts gathered from two months of research including over 170 replies from various players. It is possible that some of them are slightly wrong or wrong altogether but so far they have withstood a lot of scrutiny.







Facts About All Wormhole Spaces

The normal despawn rate for an untouched site is about 3 or 4 days. Untouched means you found it, maybe warped in but did not engage anything or interact with anything. Clearing out a Gravity or Ladar site of NPC Sleepers in a Wspace cleans it out permanently. The NPCs do not respawn. The only known exception to this was after a server crash all of the sites respawned Sleeper ships. Bringing a Carrier or Dreadnought to a combat site in a Class 5 or 6 Wspace will spawn 6 additional battleships. The second capital will spawn in 8 more! Magnetic and Radar sites will respawn complete Sleeper waves after a downtime to include the reset of the capital ship “additional 6 Sleeper battleships” trigger! Magnetic and Radar sites do not spawn as much as Ladar and Gravimetric sites, which breed like horny bunnies in the spring time. Assigning Fighters to someone who then goes to a combat, magnetic or radar site will also cause 6 additional battleships to spawn. This may be for C4+ only. Orcas do not spawn the additional 6 battleships at any site or encounter. Confirmed: Bringing in 4 capital class ships spawned 28 additional Sleeper Battleships.







Wspace Behavior

Some Wspaces have effects on your ship both good and bad. Use a program called “Wormhole Thingie” to type in the Locus Signature (Jxxxxxx) of your Wspace to find out what it has. At the time of writing Wormhole Thingie does not always give the correct allowable mass for wormholes, so be careful using that information. An in game browser database is available by plugging in http://igb.bluesuntrust.com/wormhole.cfm into the address bar. Wspaces can be buried up to 3 or more Wspaces deep. This means that you would have to cross 3+ Wspaces to get out of Wspace and into the nearest Kspace! Wormhole Class is a numeric rating contained in the data dump that CCP put out. In short, wormholes leading to "unknown space" could lead to a class 1, 2 or 3 Wspace. One leading to a "dangerous unknown space" leads to a class 4 or 5 and a "deadly unknown space" wormhole always leads to a class 6 Wspace. A Class 1 Wspace does not allow anything bigger than a Battle Cruiser through. This is a ship based limitation and not a ship mass limitation. This is just like some low level mission acceleration gates will not allow a battleship through. Class 2 wormholes have a low mass restriction and will allow some battleships through and not others. If your ship has too much mass to fit through, try off-lining your armor plates (1600mm, 800mm etc.) or other mass adding equipment. Class 1 and 2 encounters are generally considered to be soloable. Class 3 is a maybe soloable situation. Class 5 and 6 can be solo'd only if you use a Capital Ship (Carrier OR a Dreadnought) but be prepared to sweat bullets as a class 5 can crack a carrier and eat drones severely. You can expect to lose 40,000m3 of drones. POSs behave as normal except you cannot claim Sovereignty and you cannot moon mine as no moons have minerals. Wormhole effects (Pulsars, Cataclysmic etc) are not applied to POSs or their weapons/defenses. This is difficult to prove and the actual case might be that some bonuses are applied to some modules, but not all of them. All Wspaces are 0.0 security. Players do not show up in local unless they chat there, so scan often with your directional scanner at max range and have it set to 360 degrees. Wspaces have a low exploration site spawn rate. With even a little bit of player interaction you can rapidly deplete a Wspace of all sites. POS presence or absence has no effect on respawn rates. They are just really slow naturally. Spans of no spawning in a wormhole have been up to 48 hours long. There are no Ice fields in any Wspace, on purpose by the developers.







Wormhole Behavior

Wspaces have had up to 7 confirmed wormholes active at one time. THEORY: Up to 4 outbound wormholes max with at least 3 inbound (K162) wormholes allowed. Certain wormholes are always present in a Wspace. They immediately respawn no matter what. These wormholes are referred to as “static” wormholes and always have the same designation (M267 for example). Some Wspaces are reported to have two “static” wormholes. The "color" of the wormhole indicates which color of system you are going into, i.e. a red wormhole means you go into red space and a blue wormhole puts you into a blue colored space. Use the website http://www.eve-metrics.com/wormholes to know what Class any given Wspace is (1 through 6) and to tell how much mass a wormhole can handle. All classes of Wspaces can open up to any class of Wspace, null sec, low sec or high sec directly. The “life cycle has not yet begun” statement means you found it within 1-2 minutes of spawning. “Probably won't last another day” means you have more than 25% of the wormhole's life left. Nearing the “end of its life” means it has less than 25% of its life left. Wormholes last for 16, 24, 36 or 48 hours. “This wormhole is stable and looks like it could last more than a day” means it will last longer than 24 hours or until its allowable mass is spent. “Has not yet had its stability reduced” means it has more than 45% of its remaining allowable mass left. “Has had its stability reduced”, “but not to a critical degree yet” means it has less than 45% of its remaining allowable mass left. "This wormhole has had its stability critically disrupted by the mass of numerous ships passing through and is on the verge of collapse." means it has less than 5% to 10% of its allowable mass left. The largest "to high sec" wormhole allows a ship of 1,000,000,000 kg mass to fit through. Capital ships can fit into Class 4, 5 or 6 wormholes only. You can BUILD one in a Wspace as well. It is possible to build a capital ship inside any wormhole with an X-Large Ship Assembly Array. CONCORD is the only entity that can prevent you from jumping through a wormhole. Jumping through the same wormhole twice starts a 4 minute timer during which you cannot jump back through. There is also a 30 second Session Change timer that starts when you jump through a wormhole. You cannot jump back through until that Session Change timer is up. The wormhole graphic physically gets smaller when you make it pass the 45% and the 5% allowable mass values. The maximum allowable mass for a wormhole not only takes into account the mass of your ships themselves, but also the mass added due to fitted modules. 1600mm plates tear a wormhole a new one and will throw off your mass count! Yes, you can fit a Dreadnought through some wormholes. Wormholes collapse when the allowable mass is reduced to zero or less than zero (negative). So, if the wormhole has 1kg of mass left you can jump through it with any ship that "fits" (fit meaning ship type for Class 1 and mass cap for the other Classes) in the wormhole. It will collapse when you are on the other side. The "polarity" timers that are 4 minutes long on wormholes are PER individual wormhole. So, if you jump two times back to back through wormhole XXXX you cannot jump back through it for 4 minutes but, if you jump through wormhole XXXX twice and immediately head for wormhole YYYY the timer will not exist and you may pass through wormhole YYYY twice before incurring a 4 minute timer for wormhole YYYY. Wormholes that are close to their end of life will have a more active graphic, it will be more energetic looking.







What We Know About Sleepers

We don’t know everything yet. One thing is for certain, CCP did a great job on making these ships very challenging. If you are not getting a challenge out of them then you need to step up a Class of wormhole. The AI has been documented in the dev blog section within the Eve Online website and is a very nice read for those tech buffs.

NPC warp scramble ability starts at the sites commonly spawned in Class 3 wormholes and above. At Class 5 every NPC webs and warp scrams, all of them! Some do not scram right away, but they are capable. Occasionally, you will get a more difficult site in a Class 2 that will have limited scram ability, it does happen. Tentative resists: Armor is 70/70/70/70 with hull being 0/0/0/0. NPCs in wormholes do get some wormhole effects applied to them. Not all effects have been verified. The large advanced Sleeper wrecks require Salvaging to level 5. Most other Sleeper wrecks you can do with level 3 or 4. You can do all Sleeper wrecks with your Salvage skill to level 4 and using Salvage Tackle rigs (at least one). Use any racial ECM jammer you want, Sleepers don’t care which you use, they said so. Using a Multispectral Jammer is only going to be less effective. Use racials. The amount of dps a common Class 5 magnetic site is in the range of 1250 with 76 resist per sleeper battleship per volley. You do the math. Some Sleepers can peg you 250km away. Confirmed scram ranges of 120km+ with webs to boot. Sleeper ships have a speed of 1000 m/s for battleships and 3000-3500 m/s for cruiser and frigates. Sleeper sensor strength is around 24 for battleships, lower class Sleepers are thought to be equally comparable to other player ship senor strengths of the same class. Sleepers do omni damage. Missiles do two types and their lasers do the other two types. They both hurt. Some tactics will include making the ship that warps in the primary even if they are already on another target. I see this as a hazing event. They can and will switch targets, this makes using weak logistic ships extremely risky. Their remote repair ability is very much on par with player remote repair ability. The will ignore nonthreatening targets that are on grid, like say those 30 shuttles you popped out in an attempt to get away. Don’t worry though; they will eventually get around to them after you are gone. They consider drones a high level of threat the further up the Class of wormhole you go.

This is what I personally know about Sleepers. 35% hull left. Closest call I’ve had and actually lived!

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Moving Into a Wormhole

The following pages detail how to pack up your stuff and get into a wormhole as safely as possible. Some will consider doing all of these steps unnecessary but I assure you that if you leave out any precaution then Mr. Murphy (who lives everywhere something can go wrong) will wake up and smack you around. Since you are likely to be carrying billions worth of ISK across who knows what security of space you would do well to go ahead and err on the side of caution.

We will start by doing an analysis of the equipment and some explaining of what is good and bad and ugly. We will also cover some general practices that everyone should know how to do when you have moved into the wormhole. We will touch on defensive modules but this will be explained later on in much greater detail. Right now I just want you to get the feel of what is important and what is not and why.







Pack Your Bags

Packing a transport or industrial seems like a mundane task that you have done countless times before. I have no doubt that you have. Let’s step it up a notch and put in some loss control. After you finish reading this guide and have an idea as to what you wish to bring make a master list of all items. Then, over the next few days, weeks or whatever span of time start to assemble these items in a central location. What you want to accomplish is a volume check of all the stuff you are bringing. You want to know the total m3. When you have that divide that number by the total amount of cargo space you have available. This will tell you how many trips you will have to make with all of your transporting ships pitching in. From this you can calculate the total mass you will spend just to get your stuff in the hole.

If you wish to increase the cargo capacity of a ship, buy the giant secure containers that have an internal volume of 3900 m3 but only take up 3000 m3 of cargo space.

The next step is crucial to minimize loss in case you get a transporting ship popped. Take the load and divide it equally between all of the transporting ships. Put the POS in one and then a bunch of non-essential items. Spread the fuel out equally among the ships. The POS defenses should also be split up. What you are looking for is to make it so that if one ship goes down you may still move into the wormhole and only have to deal with replacing a small amount of materials.

If, after doing your calculations you find that the entry wormhole will not allow all of your stuff, then you must be prepared to immediately scan down and find an exit. I strongly suggest getting in all of your equipment before you start to let in the other fighting ships. You want them all, of course, but between the two the fact becomes that your POSs shields can take a lot of damage. Enough damage for enough time for you to scan down and find another way in for your fleet. It’s a tough pickle, so use your best judgment.







Of POSs and Wormholes

The following is a list of general concerns and opinions based on my experience with running a wormhole based corporation. I realize that not everyone will be able to afford all of the equipment and will have to make sacrifices. Just don’t say I did not warn you about maximizing your chances for survival.

If you can't afford a POS don't try to settle in a wormhole. You will eventually lose your ship and all that you worked for. Besides that you will need ample storage and defense that only a POS can provide. Forget small POSs unless you are going for a roving or transient type of operation. They are too weak no matter what defenses you put on them. You will not be able to run structures that will make you money and defend them at the same time. Don't use them. Six battlecruisers can take down a small POS. Use a medium POS if your corporation is not planning on staying for more than two or three weeks tops. The longer you stay the more likely it is that you will encounter a hostile force where you need a lot of defenses. Mediums cannot do that and make you money at the same time as there is simply not enough CPU or Power Grid. Large POS, now we are talking. You can have an average defense while still processing gas or refining ore. It is expensive, sure, but with the right amount and level of corpmates you will still make a nice profit even after fuel costs. Use faction stuff or not? If you have the money, then yes go faction POS equipment if you can. Faction equipment takes up less power and CPU and hits harder than the non-faction counterpart. This equates into you being able to put up a lot more bang for the CPU/Power Grid. The secret to selecting the right POS is knowing that the visiting team has a mass limitation to overcome. This means that the tougher your POS is the less likely they are to even attempt a strike. ECM baby, use lots of it. Try 5 or 6 of each type, why? Again, the visiting enemy team simply cannot bring a lot of ships and if what they do bring can't lock onto you or your POS then all the better. Don't bring just enough, bring lots. If you can power 5 guns, then buy and anchor 10. If one is destroyed then you start to online the next. Attacking forces hate that. Bring two Corporate Hangar Arrays. If you mine or have a lot of corpmates you will need the room. Bring two Ship Maintenance Bays. Again, the more peeps you have, the more of these you will need, especially if you have a capital ship or even sub capital ships. Bring all of those money making machines like refineries or labs or reactors. Even if you won't be running them day and night, bring all you could possibly want while you can still get them in safely. FUEL FUEL FUEL. Bring twice the normal amount when you first move in. You never know when getting out of your hole will be too difficult to achieve, and don't forget the Strontium! Permission settings. Only the experienced corporation members should mess with the settings. A wrong setting could allow someone access to critical equipment, or even worse deny them access to critical equipment. Get it right the first time and don't mess with them again.







General Principles of Wormhole Living

Redundancy is king. Don't be afraid to bring 4+ of anything. Bring way more than one ship. Bring way more than just one setup for your ship. Bring way more than you need. Bring 3 of the same setup for your ship. You will get Podded. If you get popped and podded it's a long hard road to see your wormhole again. Entrances and exits get camped by hostile forces, sometimes you are shoot on sight to the only known way back in. You may even have to go 40+ jumps to dive back into the hole! Don’t get podded! Just don't. Everyone scans. You can't find your way out, your way in or find those lucrative exploration sites without these skills. Without scanning skills wormholes are just not possible. If someone exits the wormhole make sure they come back with a full cargo bay. Keep shopping lists handy for those on "shore leave". If nothing else, bring extra ammo or fuel back because you never know when you will need to siege an enemy POS or put up with the enemy camping the exits for days on end. Maybe it goes without saying, but no one goes AFK while setting up your POS. Wormholes can spawn entrances made by other players that were scanning for wormholes and can swap scanners for guns in under a minute. You will have no warning when another wormhole is formed.







Executing Some Wormhole Control

Every day you should scan. When you find an undesirable wormhole it should be an immediate priority to close it. Depending on the size of the wormhole you will need either multiple players or a lot of time on your hands (remember the four minute timer?). The basic concept is not rocket science, but it does require control in order to avoid stupid mistakes causing a corpmate to be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Follow these steps and keep careful track of the total mass.

Drive the largest mass ships you have through it and back. Each time you do this, keep track of the mass and pay attention to when the wormhole changes description. When it shrinks for the first time you leave one battleship cloaked on the hostile side with a bookmark leading to Kspace. Giving such a bookmark to all of the other ships is not a bad idea either. You then slowly tick down the wormholes allowable mass with big mass ships at first or small mass ships at first, either way can work, just be careful and drive only one ship through and back at a time. After enough mass has gone through the wormhole the description will change to say "...on the verge". The wormhole graphic will also shrink again. At this point a battleship will usually close it. Unless you have accurate records and know all mass that has passed through then you risk trapping a ship. Make sure that all of the passing ships are on the friendly side of the wormhole. Drive that last battleship through to the friendly side. If it closes then you are good, if not, don't fret and do not send more ships through. At this point it is very likely to close on the first ship to pass through it. And at any rate, the very next battleship going through will be trapped on your side of the wormhole for sure. If you have even half followed this guide you should be able to handle either scenario.







The Actual How To

The following is a step by step description of a method that provides a lot of security for the move and setup of your POS. I acknowledge that this is just one way to do it but, I say again, break from the guide at your own risk. If you wish to be more efficient you can start to assemble and pack while your corpmates are out scouting a wormhole as the finding of just the right place can take a very long time.

Send out multiple scanning ships only to the high, low and null sec systems you would feel comfortable passing transports through. The more systems you scan the better the odds of finding the right Class with the right side effects you are seeking. When you find a wormhole send in one ship that can scan and cloak. If you find another POS setup inside already abort that wormhole, get out and go on. There are thousands of wormholes, find one that will not make for a hot landing with you at the disadvantage. So you found the right class and effects with no POS and no other ships in it already. The next step is to scan it down completely. All anomalies and all signatures pinpointed and bookmarked. You never know when a hostile ship is being careless and engages a Ladar site not knowing that you are there. Knowing all the regular places that a hostile ship could be will greatly cut down on your response time and could stop you from losing your POS before it even goes up. The next step is to get your stuff inside. I should not have to tell you about the dangers of low sec or the gate camps that could annihilate your wormhole expedition before it even gets started, but I will anyways. You are warned. Use scouts to get your transports through, not escorts. Escorts tend to invite trouble and unwanted attention. Your escorts should be used as guards when you are inside the wormhole setting up. If a pirate sees you going through a wormhole he can slip inside and wait until you are trying to anchor your POS or worse. Do not underestimate the destruction one ship can do to you at this stage. You are at the wormhole entrance with some or all of your transports. Have a scout inside the wormhole. Then slip in your guards and then your transports. Remember, nothing can stop you from jumping through a wormhole (except for CONDORD), but there are jump timers that limit how fast you can jump back and forth from the same wormhole. Immediately warp to your new moon, anchor the POS and get those POS shields up ASAP. At this point no one is screwing around. Everyone is using 360 degree directional scanning every minute and your transports are cloaked and away (as in at another location) from the POS itself. Make sure everyone BOOKMARKS THE POS NOW. Once the shields are up you are in good shape. Anchor your Corporate Hangar Array while your corpmates are repping the POS shields to 100%. Have your transports dump everything into the Corporate Hangar Array while you anchor the Ship Maintenance Bay. At this point the defenses must go up. Online them as you go. How you setup the defenses is subjective and will be covered next. All defenses are up and online. At this time I suggest leaving everything else unanchored unless you are in need of the module. At this point you need to start bringing in all of those extras you did not want to bring in on the first wave and to bring in all of those stragglers and things forgotten. Load up; it's going to be a bumpy ride!

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But First, a Word About Diplomacy

Diplomacy is very much a matter of personal style and the level of knowledge of game mechanics. Be sure your wormhole buddies have selected a diplomat with an even head who knows what is at risk. The diplomat must also be able to calculate war based odds to determine how strong each side's position is. CHOOSE AND SPEAK WISELY, it could be the last step before you lose your hole. A diplomat must also acknowledge that some will want to fight to the death even if it makes no sense to do so.

Your corpmates must know that an organized force can setup a medium sized POS with ample defenses inside of 45 minutes. Because of this ninja ability you must and should be willing to use diplomacy before you attack. If you go guns blazing you risk making them mad enough that they will not talk, on the other hand, if you talk first you lose the element of surprise.

While a good portion of Eve is devoted to PvP this does not mean that all that enter your hole are hostile. Most will be explorers that luckily found you, talk a bit first to see if you can discover intent, hell, offer him a place in your corporation if you are so inclined.







And a Note On POS Ransoms

It sucks to have someone come into your house and tell you they’re going to burn it down if you don't pay up, but it happens in Eve a lot. When considering a ransom you should size up whether or not you could pop at least one hostile ship. If you can cost them, be sure that they pay an equal amount in ships as you would lose with the total cost of your POS. In other words, if your POS costs 1 Billion, can you take out 1 Billion worth of enemy? If you cannot, then you should consider the ransom.

Do not pay more in ransom than the net worth of all the assets you have in that POS and don't forget you have Strontium on your side (right?) that will cause the attacking fleet to have to scan out a new entrance and stick around a boring old wormhole for up to 1 day and 17 hours.

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POS Setup and Defense

What is it all about anyways, right? Why do you anchor a POS and put up billions for the privilege? POSs are for one thing a stronghold, and it is also the only real way to make money in a wormhole. POSs must balance two things for a corporation that sets up in a wormhole. One is to make that corporation money. This means things like refineries, hangars, manufacturing assemblies and many other modules that will take up valuable and scarce CPU or Power Grid from the other important thing to balance, defense.

Defending your POS is an absolute must, the question is, how do you do it? There will be more than just a dozen ways to do it, but in a wormhole it gets a little easier than say, defending one in low or null sec. Before we get into modules you must understand that any hole's real defense is that one, they are hard to find and two, they have limited access. Keep those points in mind when skimming through the modules.







Worthless POS modules

Stealth Emitters. I've never seen them used, but you can buy them. A directional scanner will still pick up everything, including your ships, so it is worthless.

System Scanning Arrays. Can you even get them anymore? They were taken out when CCP changed scanning with the Apocrypha expansion but in case they put them back in you need to know that it needs sovereignty which you will never get.

Capital ship Construction Array. Can't anchor due to no sovereignty.

Cynosural Jamming Array. No sovereignty and can't jump to a cynosural field in any wormhole anyway.

Jump Bridges. Can't use them in wormholes by dev design.

Moon Harvesting Arrays. There will be no moon harvesting in wormholes. This was specifically stated by the devs during the design and implementation phases.

Sensor Dampening Array. Why dampen their sensors at 150Km when you can jam them completely out to 200Km?







Essential POS Modules

Control Tower. The real question here is small, medium or large. This question was covered previously.

Corporate Hangar. This provides 1.4 million cubic meters of space. At least one is needed and you should expect to have more if you mine. Online only what you NEED as these suck up CPU and Power.

Ship Maintenance Bay. Allows you to fit on the fly and store your ships. Have at least one, more if you have large ships like an Orca or Carriers or Dreadnoughts to store.







Good Modules for Defense

ECM modules. As long as the target is within range (200 Km) the only thing that nullifies this defense tactic are Dreadnoughts in siege mode. They will jam the target with a racial base score of 45 points, and a non racial value of 15. Both are pretty damn good for jamming. These will randomly cycle without player control. Having just one of each is not effective. You need at least three, preferably six of each. They don't take up but 25 CPU each and will completely pacify a hostile ship. Remember, they can't bring a lot of ships.

Stasis Webification Battery. I'd say at least one active with one in reserve. These are best used to keep a hostile from getting out of range of a POS gun. Used with a POS warp scramble and the hostile will usually pop because holding them still increases the amount of damage they take when hit and they are not likely to be able to warp off.

Warp Scrambling Array. Quintessential here. Unless you can alpha strike a ship you need this. Keep one online and another one offline in reserves. The only time this becomes useless is if the hostile force comes so prepared that they never need to leave.

Energy Neutralizing Array. 50/50 on this one. Some ships are passive and you could drain their cap all day with no effect. The best way to use them is to have enough of them on one ship that they are darn near insta-drained. This module is very effective against active tankers. In some wormholes this is less effective (a wormhole with a cataclysm event for example) due to "bonuses" a ship receives.

Shield Hardening Arrays. 50/50. These will add 25% resistance to your POS WITH STACKING PENALTIES. Every POS has 0/0/25/50 resists. Where those resists are depends on which racial tower you use. These also take up a fair amount of CPU and Power, so the main thing these modules do for you is to increase the amount of time it takes to get your POS into reinforced mode. That is the bottom line. These are best used as "anchored but not onlined" modules. When a force starts attacking you can turn on the appropriate module.

Hybrid, Laser and Projectile Turrets. This is choice meat for good defense. They will work even when your POS is in reinforced mode as they pull no CPU. Covered later in more detail, it matters to a great degree as to what type of ammo you put in each!







Bad Modules for Defense

Missile Batteries. This is to include Cruise, Torpedo and Citadel Torpedoes. They may be slow but have massive damage. The problem with these is that when your POS goes into reinforced mode they STOP WORKING. This means that at 25% shields your enemies can just sit there forever and hit what is left of your defenses for free.







Principles of POS Defense Setups

Rule #1 - THERE IS NO PERFECT DEFENSE.

Rule #2 - A POS IS BETTER DEFENDED WHEN PLAYERS ARE CONTROLING THEM.

Rule #3 - A POS IS BETTER DEFENDED WHEN THERE IS A FLEET GUARDING THEM.

Rule #1 exists because of game balancing issues. If there was a perfect defense then everyone would know by now and that is all you would see. The fact of the matter is that there are so many ways to attack someone in Eve that for every offence there is a corresponding defense. Couple that idea with the fact that there are more than 400 ships in Eve and you begin to realize the scope of the POS defense problem. There are however, some very bad ways to defend your POS.







Some Really Bad Ways

All of the same size of guns. POS guns have ranges so if you only have the ability to hit me at 30km, I'm going to move to 35km and not lose a single ship.

Having only one type of defense. Having nothing but guns is a bad idea. The hostile fleet can do a straight forward adapt on your POS and have nothing else to worry about. All ECM and no guns means it is only a matter of time before they take down your POS. All neuts means they just need one more ship than you have neuts or use weapons that do not require energy to use or worse, use passive setups.

Using just enough. By this I mean you bring in only what you can power 24/7 and nothing more. When they are attacking they will simply kill one POS module and know that the worst is behind them. Scare the poo out of them and have 10 guns even if only 2 of them are capable of being powered. It is only 5 minutes to online the next one even while under fire.

Not paying attention to gun ranges. Some fleets will find your range and deliberately sit outside of it. Mix up your ranges or be prepared to change out ammo while under fire to be able to hit the attackers.

Crazy positioning of defenses. As with most things in Eve, there is a better way to do anything. Putting your defenses up in a willy-nilly way means they will be less effective than say, putting them up in the fashion I will describe later.







Some Really Good Ways

Keeping in mind Rule #1 here is how you should approach a good POS defense.

Use a mix of gun sizes and group them in a + shaped pattern. This means one in the middle and one on each end of the plus symbol. Like north, south, east, west and one in the middle. Put them just close enough that you can reach all five of them with one ship at the middle weapon to make loading easier and more unpredictable to the enemy. There are six places you should position an identical set of 5 around your POS. It is hard to describe, but put one set above, one below, one to the left, one to the right, one in back and the last in front. This ensures that a hostile fleet will not be able to gain a positional advantage on your POS. They will have to work at gaining it by blowing up your POS modules instead of just looking at it and figuring it out. Remember which guns have what ranges. This is very important only if you can take control of them. Mix your gun ranges within the sets. You want short, medium and long ranges. Most attacking forces will be right up on your POS due to the fact that using long range weapons usually takes more effort than using say, just using torpedoes which will do massive damage without the need for long range rigs/modules. Have guns and electronic warfare. Going strong on the electronic warfare or the guns instead is a matter of taste and guesswork. The important thing here is to have the mix so an attacking force has multiple headaches to deal with.







POS Defense Tactics

Wear them down! It takes a lot of time (usually!) to take down a POS. The more hours you add to their effort the more likely one of them must go to bed soon. Make them suffer, even if they take down your POS! Make them suffer even more. Make them lose at least ONE ship anyway you can. A fleet can usually accomplish this task, but if it is just you and your POS and you can't control the guns, good luck. Switch targets. The idea is that since it takes hours to bring down your POS the attacking force will eventually become complacent or inattentive. This is when you strike! Rapidly switch to a target you have never hit before and hit as hard as you can. You want to catch the off-guard noob! Puff up. Hey, it works for lizards! If you put out a bunch of mean ships inside your shields the enemy has no way of knowing if they are actually piloted or just sitting there...LOOK MEAN!

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Wormhole Tactics

Lots to say here, there will be a mix of tactics involving POSs and/or ships.

Camp the entrance wormhole. You must know where they are coming in at. If you don't know where your static wormhole is or if there is a new wormhole in town that you know nothing about then you have FAILED. You must scan your system often, at least once every 24 hours. Camping the entrance keeps them from using the remaining mass to bring in or out ships. Be very careful about using this tactic. They might just leave your POS alone and end the battle at the wormhole by podding every last one of you!

Close that wormhole. This is perhaps the best thing to do. Under fire though, it is very risky and stressful. You must evaluate your chance of successfully closing it without being on the wrong side of the hole or your POS will have one less defender.

Choke that chicken! Put that hole "on the verge"! This is the best defense for wormhole control while you are under attack. It is the best because at most they can get only one more battleship in and you can get one more ship out (with your goods for example). If you close the wormhole then a smart attacking fleet can scan out the next static wormhole and start to bring in a second volley of ships or use it as an escape route.

Warp Bubbles. Remember, this is double O baby! Double bubble the offending wormhole entrance. Make sure that the bubbles overlap each other with the wormhole inside the double layer. The idea is that from no angle can they instantly use the wormhole on arrival. Smalls are generally not good enough, mediums are where the fun starts and one well placed large could do it by itself. If you are sneaky you can warp from your POS to the wormhole at minus 100 km and drop the bubble. That way any POS hitting ship that must leave for any reason will get a nasty surprise!

Bubble your POS from every known object. Bubbles do not run out of fuel and they last past downtime. So put up smalls (or whatever size) between your POS and all planets or perhaps cosmic signatures (if you think they are staging in one). The idea is to put the bubble so that incoming ships are at optimal range for the majority of your POS weapons.

Have a LOT of spare modules available for your corpmates. If they did not bring what you told them to bring then make sure you flog them later. Nothing says loving like having access to any type of ship setup possible while your enemy has only what they are fitted with only.

Make SAFE SPOTS! This should be done well before anything has happened. It's standard practice for the majority of Eve veterans. The ideal safe spot is one that is not directly between any two warpable-to objects. You want them to be as far off the beaten path as possible. Remember, there are probes that can find you out to 256 AU, but the further away from everything the better the safe spot!

Recon type ships. As in any ship that can use the Covert Op Cloaking Device. These are extremely useful in POS defense. Not only can they scan down offending wormholes and provide useful intelligence in relative safety but they can provide warp in points for a clever fleet.

One good way to do this is to have your recon-type ship warp out to a safe spot and then cloak. Warp back to your POS at minus whatever so that you are sure to not uncloak yourself. At this point, start driving it close to vulnerable enemy ships. Upon reaching the optimal range for your defending fleet have them warp to the safe spot you have already bookmarked. When they are assembled at the safe spot, they use the Warp to Member option to warp to the waiting cloaked recon-type ship. The instant the defending fleet is in warp the cloaked ship warps away so as to not get decloaked and wind up in the line of fire that will ensue!

BOOKMARKS! Before you get attacked you should make sure everyone has a set of bookmarks to various strategic places around your POS. What is strategic? Your POS minus 100km is good to have; they will likely use that at some point. Perhaps you want a six point set based off of your POS gun arrangement that I described previously. It is difficult to guess what will be useful, but something is WAY better than nothing!

The sneaky hole control play. I love this one. Find that offending hole and drive ships through it and back. Do this WITHOUT changing the wormhole description of mass available! This can seriously throw off an incoming fleet. They think they have 500 million kg left but with your deviltry they really only have 200 million!

If you are attacked by players while in a combat site, don't fret. The Sleepers will aggress them the same as you in there.

If a hostile fleet decides to do combat sites in your hole (this DID happen to us) and you have a capital ship, then get in your capital, start the warp to the site and then cancel it after a few seconds. This makes 6 additional top of the line Sleeper battleships spawn out of nowhere right on top of them! This works for class 4, 5 and 6 only.

Skim the shields! Put your ships right on the edge, just enough to fight and plenty of closeness to the shields that should you get into trouble you can duck back in.

Drones don't like the shields. They don't navigate around them well AT ALL. They can also get stuck inside your shields and be deactivated because of it. Use this to your advantage.

A matter of choice. Some wormholes have constant direct to low, null or high sec static wormholes. These offer the inhabitants a great way to get in and out at will, but far worse is the fact that it allows Kspace pilots to come in at will. The best way to defend your wormhole is to pick one that is buried. These are generally the higher end wormholes (4, 5 and 6 Class). If you are two holes deep then it is very unlikely that you will be found as quickly as someone with a constant direct connection.

Don't go running around. As much as possible, stay in your hole. While trips to Kspace are inevitable due to fuel not being available you must know that every time you make use of an exit you run the risk of having an open door to your hole. All holes should be choked or closed if they are not to be used. You also will start to lose ships due to pirate/gatecamp activities, so don't leave home without good reason.

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Nasty Stuff They Can Do To Your Hole

The things that keep me up at night are as follows:

The spy. Yup, we all have to deal with them, but a spy in a wormhole is especially dangerous due to you being more isolated from help. A smart spy will know when most of you are offline for the night and give a hostile force the entrance system and perhaps even drop off a set of bookmarks to boot!

The logged off scanning ship. He gets in, cloaks up, makes a safe spot and logs out after adding your entire corporation to their address book. He occasionally logs back in, counts how many of you are online and when the timing is right he finds and gives a hostile fleet the way in.

The patient pirate. Gets in with a cloakable ship, waits for you to start a mining operation and then strikes. He gets a kill or two, warps off, cloaks and logs for a few days.

Direct Null sec openings. These are just as bad as high sec ones only they could drive your worst enemy through it, a Dreadnought with lots of Strontium for siege mode. Keep in mind they could bring in three capital ships if they don't care about getting them out the same way they got in!

Dreadnoughts in siege mode. They are immune to ECM and can repair like a son of a bitch. This is not to mention that they are designed to kill your POS.

The Ninja POS. This happened once. A medium POS went up with defenses inside of an hour. Constant harassment failed to stop this. Once the shields are up things get a lot harder for the home team.

Being attacked while players are out of the hole. Many players make their money or occasionally sow their wild oats outside of the hole. This absence of players is magically linked to causing an increase in the chance that you will be attacked right then and there.

Direct High sec openings. Every damn noob/corp/alliance wants to know what's in your hole. There is a constant flux of players in and out. This makes closing your hole difficult and ends safe mining/exploration efforts. Not to mention a hostile fleet of 2.3 billion mass could come through (around 23 battleships).

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Talk the Talk

I almost put this under diplomacy but left it here as it defiantly goes to defensive tactics. Be very careful about what you say and when.







Run Yer Mouth

File this under psychological warfare. The goal here is to get under the skin of your attackers and make them commit a grievous error and then capitalize on it. Try name calling, blackmail or extortion, hell tell them you'll kill a baby bunny if they don't leave. Do all of this in local. Whatever you do to deliberately piss them off just keep in mind CCP does have policies in place about verbal garbage.

It has been my experience that this tactic rarely works. It fails because Eve covers the globe and therefore you come across many different people and cultures without knowing a thing about their personal lives. This means that whatever you say is basically a shot in the dark at their temper. You'd have to know the attackers personally in order to make this a viable tactic.







Don't Run Yer Mouth

Nothing is more satisfying than ignoring all of the ransom offers they give and wiping the floor with them. Say nothing. This keeps them guessing as to who you are and how you are doing. In my experience, keeping your mouth shut and your fingers on the trigger gives you a much better chance at responding quickly to a situation. Think Terminator!

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The Pre-Fight Check off list

If you are ready to go do a Sleeper site, try using this check off list to avoid nasty surprises. Just before you are ready to hit the warp button you go down the list. Don’t skip anything.

Is the home system completely scanned?

Is the target system completely scanned?

Did you close/choke all other wormhole entrances?

Fleet is properly set up?

Everybody has insurance that wants insurance?

Everyone has a full drone bay?

Got all the ammo you need?

Is the ammo type correct?

Everyone has a bookmark to the POS?

Everyone has a bookmark to a safe spot?

Everyone has a bookmark to the site?

Got the correct modules, T2 not T1?

Do you have an “approved” ship setup?

Go over the plan for the first 2 minutes of the fight.

Add planets to the overview.

Everyone knows to communicate only important information.

Turn your damage modules on.

Go to the bathroom!

Make your watch list!

Set your orbit distance if you need to.

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How to do a More Secure Mining Op in a Wormhole:

First off, you must concede that there is not a way to be 100% secure in anything in Eve, especially when you are using mining vessels that are slow and weak to begin with. So, with that in mind here is one of several ways you can increase your odds of surviving a mining op in that fat juicy gravimetric field you just found.

Make sure you understand the system you will be mining in first and foremost. This means scanning down and pinpointing all wormholes. If you fail to find ALL THE WORMHOLES you can expect trouble to come through the one you did not find because there is a hostile wormhole corporation on the other side. It WILL happen, oh yes, it will.

After you have found all the wormholes make a decision on what to do about them. You can close them entirely (see other section in guide about how to do this) or you can merely choke them so that a hostile fleet is limited. You can also assign a recon to watch the hole while you mine away. If you do nothing, you get what you deserve. At the very least you ASSIGN someone to be the directional scanner guy/gal. This job is very very important. They are looking for hostile ships or probes. If you see either one, get the hell out ASAP.

So you have executed some hole control. Now you are ready to mine. If you are in your home system then however you want to haul/mine is up to you. If you have a wormhole between you and your POS then you must take into consideration mass restrictions. Here is how.

Take the mass of the ship that will be doing the hauling and compare it to the cubic meters of ore it can carry. The ship that has the lowest mass to cubic meters ratio is the ship you use. For example, a Bustard has 40 million kg of mass but can haul 30,000 m3. An Orca has 250 million kg and can haul 90k m3. Which is better? The Bustard is! Although the Orca can carry 3 times what the Bustard can it also sucks up almost twice the mass the Bustard would to do the same job!

Now you must consider what happens when a hostile ship does make it through and arrives at your mining site. In general if they use a warp bubble then you scatter from each other to force the bubble to pick a ship and the other can maybe get out. If you don’t carry some sort of ECM to jam the ships warp scramming your mining vessels then you’d better pay a ransom because you are done. You MUST have at least one ECM based ship on standby, that’s my biggest pearl of wisdom for mining ops.

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All About Carriers

I debated whether or not to put this information in this guide and decided to include it both as another way (as it is now in the Evelopedia) of preserving the information and also because having even one carrier in your hole with you is a very good thing. Not only have most players that will attack your hole never seen one, they have also never fought one. On top of that a single carrier can repair your POS, repair your fleet under fire and provide excellent support for running hard Sleeper sites. These carrier based facts are primarily for Kspace application but all rules for them still apply in Wspace. I kid you not, these ships are the chad!







Carriers in General

Price range is 700 million + for the carrier itself and another 230m for insurance (with about 730m payback). For T2 fittings and drones/fighters expect another 200-300m, for faction fittings expect another 500m+. On average, it's going to run you ABOUT 1.5 billion. Battleships can easily bump a massive carrier away from a station. The carrier 50% range increase bonus only applies to CAPITAL remote repair modules, NOT regular ones. A carrier can do level 5 missions like a hot knife through butter. My shields never went below 98%. EVERYONE WANTS A CAPITAL SHIP KILL MAIL. Remember that, EVERYONE wants one. FREAKIN EVERYONE! If your grandmother that doesn’t play Eve heard about their awesomeness, she’d want one too. At Carrier level 3 a capital remote repair module has 37.5 km range, at level 4 it is 45 km. The ability of a carrier to lock onto a target is VERY slow; most use a Sensor Booster II module with a scan script to speed it up. The sensor strength of a carrier is a base of 80; a faction battleship by comparison is only 27. Normal tanking ability of a carrier is between 2000-6000 dps. Triage mode can boost that to 16,000+ dps and be perma-capped. A personal best was tanking 26 ships at 3.45 million damage before succumbing to a couple of Dreadnoughts. Capital modules have a volume of 4 to 5 thousand m3 each. Carrier damage output is on par with a nicely fitted faction battleship but can do no damage at all without drones or smartbombs. Carriers have a million m3 of space to put ASSEMBLED ships inside it. For your convenience a Raven takes up about 486,000 m3. The only thing that can be in any stored ship’s cargo are charges. Carriers have about 3400+ m3 of cargo space and it is no different than any other ships cargo hold. Carriers have a CORPORATE HANGER BAY. When you open it, it looks just like the Corporate Hangar Array display of a POS and looks the same as the hangar in a station where you have an office at. It is real buggy too. As the pilot, you can turn on or off the ability to allow your fleet (all or none only) to access the Corporate Hangar Array of your carrier. If a fleeted ship is 1500 meters from you, they can swap out modules as if they were in a station. They can use your hangars at 5000 meters. You can dock a carrier at a station in low or null sec station; it is the Titan and the Motherships that cannot dock in a station. All capital ships (supers too) can be stored in a Capital Ship Maintenance Bay. Carriers can NOT fit any launchers or turret hard points as they have ZERO slots for them. Neuts, smartbombs, drone control units and remote reps are generally the best options for high slots. If you are disconnected with fighters out, they will warp to you and return to your drone bay automatically. Items in your carrier's Corporate Hangar Array do NOT show up in kill mails. You can open secure containers in your carrier’s Corporate Hangar Array, but you may not remove items from it. To scoop an unmanned ship in space the carrier needs to be 1500 meters from it. It will go into your Ship Maintenance Bay. Carriers CAN go through a wormhole, but only very large ones. Motherships and Titans are the ones that can NOT. The only implants that affect capital modules are the implants that SPECIFICALLY say they do, otherwise capitals are affected by normal implants the same as a non capital ships are. In other words, capital ship modules are exempt unless specified. You will never get any capital ship into high sec via a wormhole, sorry. Using a Carrier in a Class 4, 5 or 6 wormhole to do magnetic, combat or radar sites WILL spawn 6 ADDITIONAL Sleeper Battleships. Confirmed: 4 caps will spawn 28 additional Sleeper Battleships! You can NOT clone jump into or out of a wormhole via a player’s clone vat module, not that a super carrier (mothership) can even get into a wormhole to begin with.







Cynosural Fields and Carriers

A normal cynosural generator makes a cynosural field that EVERYONE in the system can instantly warp to. The ship making it cannot move or dock for the 5-10 minutes that the field will be active. Be sure to turn it OFF before it recycles or you will spend another 5-10 minutes frozen if you have the liquid ozone in your cargo hold. The ship generating a cynosural field is NOT invulnerable. A good tactic to use is to make the cynosural field with a throw away ship for low threat areas or use a tougher ship (carrier, battleships, etc.) if you think it will be a HOT landing. If you are popped while generating a cynosural field you can warp away in your pod. Liquid Ozone is the fuel for making a cynosural field and starts at 450 units with level 1 Cynosural Field Theory skill. It drops by 50 units with every level after level 1. You must be in a fleet to activate a cynosural field. You must also be in the fleet to jump TO a cynosural field. If you joined AFTER it was created, the cynosural field must be "re-broadcasted". It takes about a month to be able to use the covert ops cynosural generator. It does NOT appear on other player’s overview like the REGULAR cynosural generator does. It also makes an awesome black cloud that no one can see into! Only a ship that can FIT a Covert Ops Cynosural Generator module can jump through one. Capital ships can NOT lock onto one. Yes, Cynosural fields are the ONLY way a capital ship can get out of a Kspace system, they will NOT be able to use a standard gate. You cannot start a regular cynosural field while in high sec but you can jump to ANY regular cynosural field FROM high sec. You cannot start a covert ops cynosural field in high sec although you can jump TO a covert ops cynosural field FROM high sec. You CAN NOT eject while the regular cynosural is active. Some ships (Force Recon for example) get bonuses to Liquid Ozone consumption and a reduced timer for their cynosural field (5 minutes). The capital ship lands in a 5km wide bubble around the cynosural field. This means you could potentially "bounce" off a station and wind up away from the docking ring. Use your tactical overlay to verify you are at least 5km away from the station. If your cynosural ship gets popped while jumping ships are enroute they will land RANDOMLY in the cynosural's system at a speed which will take minutes to decrease from. You CAN NOT cloak with a cynosural field up. You CAN NOT Cynosural field yourself within the same system (anymore). You CAN self destruct while you have the Cynosural field up. A log off or disconnect with a Cynosural up means your ship STAYS until the Cynosural has run its course.







Jumping/Warping

Capital ship navigation for jumping is accessed via the Shortcuts tab in the Esc menu. It will tell you a number of things like distance in light years, fuel consumption and what jamming fields are active. Some use external jump planners you can find by searching the web for “jump planner, eve”. A good idea is to only jump to systems that have a station you can safely store your carrier in if you get into trouble upon arrival. Pop the cynosural field right at the station. A single warp scram can stop you from jumping AND warping. They take about 6 seconds to jump plus the load time for the new system. It takes about 30 seconds to go to warp. The starting jump range is 6.5 light years and get go up to 11.5 light years. The only skill that increases the jump range is the Jump Drive Calibration skill which takes about a month to start to train. Jump Drive Operation reduces the amount of capacitor you need to jump by 5% per level. At level 3 you need 80% capacitor power to jump. Jump Fuel Conservation reduces the amount of racial isotopes you need for any given length of jump. You must be in a fleet to jump to a cynosural field. You do NOT have to be in a fleet to jump to a Jump Beacon (0.0 only). You cannot jump a carrier into high sec. A capital ship in high sec means it was BUILT in a .5 system BEFORE they removed that ability. Capital ships can use Jump Bridges provided there is enough Liquid Ozone. You CAN NOT jump into or out of a Wspace







Carrier Tactics

Dock hugging is not just for care bears. Cloaking will break your control over drones AND fighters. If your fighters are set to follow an enemy through warp you can lose them if they warp to a hostile POS. Carriers make your fleet much more powerful, but are weak by themselves. Pay attention to cynosural fields being generated that are not your own because it will be a Dreadnought which are designed to kill other capital ships as well as POSs. Run away to fight another day but I doubt you will be able to. Do not sit your carrier in the exit path of a station; move it so that an exiting ship cannot ram it away from the stations docking range. Keep a variety of fighters so that you can do your best to match damage types to enemy ships natural weaknesses. Watching local is more important than ever, assume all of them will gang up against you (because they WILL). Keeping aligned to a station is always a good idea if you can. While you certainly have room for a lot of drones/fighters the current interface makes them difficult to use sometimes. Don't have any more drones than you really really need! Assign your fighters to ships that can not normally use drones. This maximizes the amount of drone/fighters your fleet can field. Keeping a "cynosural alt" account is common for capital ship pilots. Keep that alt in another system ready to drop a cynosural field.







Fighters/Drones

Compared to cruiser or larger ship types, Fighters do not fair well against frigates. You should carry light drones or webify a frigate. All fighters do the SAME amount of damage and the SAME amount of effective hit points, they only vary in the amount of armor, shield and hull hit points they have but all have the same total amount of points. They also vary in what type of damage they do and at what optimal range they do it at as well as their speeds. Firbolgs seem to be a favorite because of its particular mix of those factors. The ONLY skills that relates to fighters is the Fighters skill and the Carrier skill. Nothing else! Drones (which are not FIGHTERS) do not get the 200% range bonus. Without another module or skill level, drones have whatever range you always have with them. A full complement of fighters will cost 180 million + depending on what fighter and what carrier you use. You can set your fighters to follow a target if they warp out. A common tactic is for your enemy to warp to a POS where you automatically lose your fighters. Fighters will NOT follow you through a jump, but they WILL follow you through a warp. Fighters can be sluggish to respond to orders; I think this is a bug. Fighters have a universal volume of 5,000 m3 each. Average cost is 12-15 million each. As the carrier pilot you can Delegate your fighters to any number of ships in your fleet. This DOES count against THEIR drone control skill limit but NOT their bandwidth limit. The fighters will follow them through warp, but NOT a jump. When you assign someone fighters it is YOUR Fighters skill that gets applied, so your assigned fighters do the same amount of damage as usual. A fighter controller may return their assigned fighters via the "return control" option. The fighters will immediately warp to the owning carrier. With Carrier skill at level 5 and Advanced Drone Interfacing at level 5 a carrier can have up to 15 fighters, a mothership will have 25. Fighters cannot be warp scrammed and when the controller "relinquishes control" they automatically return to the carrier. You CAN NOT assign fighters to gang mates in a .4 system. Carrier pilots cannot monitor their fighters health if their fighters are not on the same grid.







Triage Mode

You CAN NOT use drones or fighters while you are in triage mode. You CAN NOT receive ANY type of remote rep while in triage mode. Triage mode eats Strontium Clathrates, 450 units at level 1, 50 less units per additional level. Triage mode lasts for 10 minutes and cannot be interrupted. Generally speaking you can tank 14,000 to 21,000 dps. Some carriers can be specifically fitted to do this in perma-cap mode while others will last only minutes before the cap burns out. Unless you have a very good plan, triage mode means you’re going to die. Your scan resolution jumps by 900% You can NOT move, dock, warp or jump at all while in triage mode. You gain the ability to target 4 more objects. You x4 your ability to repair yourself and remote repair others. (-50% duration along with 100% repair bonus) Your cap requirement for E-war modules while in triage mode makes them impossible to use.

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All About Dreadnoughts

While Dreadnoughts in wormholes are indeed a rare site this does not mean you will never come across one. I personally do not drive a Dreadnought so I asked Cambarus to make a thread on them. What is listed below is from his thread (linked near the beginning of the guide). I have cleared it up and organized it.

I'd suggest reading the carrier fact sheet first, as it contains several pointers that apply to dreadnoughts as well. This page will focus on things directly relating to dreadnoughts only.







General:

A dread costs about 1.5billion ISK. To fully buy, fit and insure one will most likely cost 2.5 billion total. As with carriers, everyone and their mother wants a dreadnought kill. Aside from the Moros, Dreadnoughts are extremely vulnerable to smaller ships, so flying one solo is not advised. Dreads are the bread and butter of any space holding alliance's fleet. Carriers are nice as well, but any big alliance wants more Dreadnoughts, as when you're fighting for space you're shooting towers, which involves Dreadnoughts, or defending towers by shooting Dreadnoughts, which involves, you guessed it, dreads.

The only pirate implants that affect capital ships are those in the Slave line. You get capital turrets by learning Large Turret to 5, Gunnery 5 and the corresponding XL turret you want to train. You get capital missiles by learning Torpedoes to 5 and Missile Launcher operation to 5. You get Capital Armor Repair by learning Repair Systems to 5, Hull Upgrades to 5, Mechanic to 5. You can use Siege Mode after you learn Weapons Upgrade to 5, Advanced Weapon Upgrades to 5 and Tactical Weapon Reconfiguration to 1. The navigation skills are the sam