No one likes a POS siege, but sometimes it's your only option.
For some time I've been on the look out for a C3 Red Giant effect Wormhole system with a HiSec static. The plan is to continue running my PI empire from it, whilst enjoying the 58% Smart Bomb bonus for my Disco Inferno Proteus so I can keep terrorizing hapless explorers that wander into my scope of effect. Well, as fortune would have it, the Sudden Buggery chain connected to such a system with a range of planets that could only have been better had I hand picked them. A little research showed that the system was occupied by an Industrial Corporation with little in the way of a killboard, but with a reasonably well defended POS, nonetheless. Whilst they might look like a ripe target at first glance, most Industrial Corporations are well connected to people who like to blow things up, so there was really no knowing what might turn up should we engage the tower.
In the absence of any substantive Corporation content in recent times, Trinkets gave the operation the green light and planning began.
The POS was a curious one. Six Energy Neutralizing batteries were online, leaving little powergrid left for the rest of the defences. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a tower designed to repel Capital Ships, despite being a Class 3 wormhole. The AU Timezone being what it is, participation in excess of a dozen people was unlikely, so we decided to use a 250km Cruise Raven doctrine with spider tanking abilities so we could dedicate as few pilots as possible to Logisitics. Mails go out, time lines were established and ships were prepared and moved to the staging system. Just before the go time, a siege tower was erected for resupply/AFK purposes and we warped to a 220km tactical bookmark above the POS.
That's when suddenly, nothing happened. Whoever had configured the tower's defences had made a grave error and it wouldn't shoot back. We ignored everything surrounding the tower and spent a couple of hours just on the tower itself, reinforcing it without even a hint of counter aggression.
Complacent with what had been done, we incapacitated a few of the defences just in case, then withdrew from the tower to wait out the timer.
I log in on Sunday morning to a flurry of activity. Eight of the pilots are online and busily shuffling ships to and from the HiSec exit. I'm not too concerned about it, it's the system I want, not everything they own. But when they reshipped to Guardians and moved to their defences, I could no longer just sit and watch. I called in Humang and we dropped a couple of Siege Ravens on the Guardians, driving them back into the force field. From this point on we observed a merry dance of ships being undocked and redocked, presumably removing anything of value from each one without any attempt at diplomacy. It's what I had expected though, it's pretty rare to find someone who knows when their goose is cooked and can swallow their pride long enough to broker an agreement.
With more blues logging in and a peculiar Basilisk wandering out of the Force field, we took another swing, again unable to prevent the cruiser from withdrawing. However, now he wanted to talk.
We invited the CEO onto our TeamSpeak to hash out the details of his withdrawal. He initially requested that we allow him to repair his POS and withdraw his assets and in exchange he will gift the POCOs to us. Although tempting, the prospect of reinforcing and destroying ten POCOs is somewhat nightmarish, it told me there was more at stake in his POS. So I held out, indicating to him that I thought there was more at play here. After all, there were three Ship Maintenance Arrays, I was suspicious that there were Capitals stored within them. My suspicions were confirmed when he offered two Archons in the deal also, 50% of all promised assets up front. We agreed, five of the POCOs were transferred and an Archon was delivered to our POS.
Now I just need him to remove about thirty moon locked small towers and we're set. :)
