Multi Boxing is Hard

With a day off from work tomorrow I had some free hours to invest in the service of Bob post down time. Clearly Bob was pleased by this turn of events and immediately gifted me an Astero in our home system. What a splendid start to the evening! I moved on down the chain searching for more post down time activity and stumbled upon a C4 with a few active pilots shuttling goods around in a pair of Occators. The first instinct was to set up camp on the Lava planet customs office but it soon became evident that it wasn't PI goods they were moving, it was equipment from a pair of POS to their newly anchored Astrahus Citadel.

The POS towers and the Citadel were parked quite close together however, so setting up a drag bubble would be impossible without being spotted. Moreover, the Occators weren't moving simultaneously, with one idling on the undock of the Citadel as the other ferried goods back and forth. We surmised that the pilot was multiboxing both characters so we took a punt and set up a trap anyway, about 600 kilometres off of the Citadel, in full view of one of the Occators. Our Devoter then warped in, popped his bubble and waited. Several minutes passed as I watched over the other Occator idling in his POS and we were pretty close to calling it off when, unbelievably, the Occator began picking up speed. Sure enough, he was heading straight for our poorly concealed trap.

Yes, that really just happened. I mean, I can understand someone not checking D-Scan, but this guy was on grid with us on his other character. A second monitor could be a sound investment, lest people might think you're as dumb as a box of hammers.

In for a penny...

It seems the transients that have been lurking in my C1 PI Farm have called it a day since losing their POCO and defence fleet. It's been several days since there's been any sign of the Falcon that would occasionally uncloak to combat probe the system and considering how frequently he'd been probing up until this point, I'd say it's a fair assumption. The lack of a watch list leaves a fair degree of uncertainty of course, but I'm not losing sleep over it.

With the system seemingly secure some of my new Corpmates in Low-Class have expressed an interest in putting their PI farmers in system too. I've got fourteen planets to extract from, there's plenty to go around, so it's probably high time I bit the bullet and put up an Astrahus Citadel.

I thought I had it all figured out, anchor it about five minutes before downtime and no one would have the opportunity to interrupt it the following day but CCP, in their ultimate wisdom, have apparently closed that little loophole so a more conventional approach was needed. I began the anchoring process in US TZ Prime Time, when the glut of my new Corp mates would be online and also coinciding with a free Sunday morning for me or anyone else in the AU TZ. Moreover, I closed my only connection [to HiSec] and left it scanned but unspawned whilst I cleared every site from system bar the ore sites. I did this to discourage any would be explorers from poking around too much and stumbling upon my still anchoring station. It's not unheard of to go without transient connections for a few days at a time, with any luck a defence fleet would be entirely redundant.

Now, I've had loads of experience with setting up POS towers. I've assembled and destroyed all manner of set ups, had a highly memorable siege against La Division Bleu's large tower when they had at least three characters manning their weapons and even killed three Revelations, an Archon and a Bhaalgorn with a small tower in one memorable assault in LowSec, but these structures are utterly foreign to me. Fortunately, I was ably assisted by Kalseth with a fitting that was promised to be the Citadel version of a Dickstar. In the event of an assault on my Citadel it was unlikely that I'd have a character immediately available with the required fighter skills, so the prospect of a station that was going to be an utter nuisance to reinforce was an appealing one. In case you're curious, it looks something like this. ==>

Fighters are up to you. I'll probably load mine up with a mixture of Templars and Firbolgs but only because I've got quite a lot of them lying about.

For the purpose, it's quite ideal. I can set standings so that my out of corporation characters and friends  have secure access, it's significantly more formiddable than a small or medium tower, dramatically more defendable and, considering I really have no use for a market, refining or a clone bay, costs me nothing to run. Considering I'm such a tight wad that I used to mine my own ice for fuel, that's a significant ISK and time saver. Not to mention the amount of nanite paste I'll save...

Epistaxis is now in business and other than the outrageously long anchoring time, I can confidently say I'm very pleased with the result. Well played, CCP. This is a big step forward in player owned star bases.