There is a thing in wormholes mostly, though I have seen an example or two in lowsec, of jacking up a tower and leaving the shield offline, and leaving out an SMA, CHA, and often a ship or two as bait. You coat the thing in guns and dissys and webs (and sometimes a neut) and put a tractor unit on field. The ships you leave on field, you fill their lows with cargo expanders and fill their holds, then turn off or using a depot you unfit the lows, so the hull is overloaded. If someone jumps in the ship to steal it, they cannot warp until they jettison cargo, by which time they are dead. Your prey are people who check d-scan for POSs without forcefields and come to farm the candy; their candy ends up in the tractor.
There's been a few guys from SWIFT who have lost pimp ships to these trap POSs. You can often farm the ships left on field, with bombers, and farm the tractors too, if you are pissed off for instance that your 650M ISK Loki has got blowed up.
Anyway, End of Life has a trap POS in their wormhole. I saw it, saw it was a trap POS and decided to farm their crap for lols. So I set up a warp-in 200km off the POS and grabbed my Golem which was nearby, and began shooting the tractor they'd left on field. It took 4 strafing runs.
The POS had something like 50 online small faction pulses and beams and a neut. The neut was, actually, the major problem as it capped me out and forced me to MJD away and GTFO.
On the 4th strafing run, sadly, i got tackled by some bombers, and lost the Golem. I guess I should have used a Raven, or maybe a Naga. Oh wells, space pixels got blown up.
The loss comes down to, firstly, a bit of bad luck. The tractor was left with 2% hull on the third run. Secondly, it comes down to me propensity to push the boundaries of what's achievable. I realistically out to have given up after the first run, due to the close shave it was and the neut pressure.
It's not like a typed our POS password into local like a pillock.
I've been in this exact system once and almost fell for the trap. If that can ease the pain of your loss, there were some guys who also lost expensive stuff to this tower, like tengu: https://zkillboard.com/kill/35825187/ or entire Protei gang: https://zkillboard.com/related/31000422/201401151900/
ReplyDeleteLel.
ReplyDeleteI had a chat with the owners of the tower, they were more concerned with how to improve it to prevent people like me doing what I did. Which was ultimately successful, sans the bombers.
The distinction I make, in my mind, as arbitrary as it is and however so linked to ego, is that I knew what I was doing, so i lost my ship taking a calculated risk. Far better than losing a 1.7B ISK PPVP Tengu trying to farm an SMA kill like a dickhead.