Moonlocking

If you have been living under a rock (generally known as "in Oasa or Outer Passage") you may be unaware of the term "moonlocking". It is where, generally, you try to deny the ability of someone to attack your wormhole efficiently via erecting an idle tower on each and every moon in system. In order for the attacker to erect a siege POS they must therefore destroy the idle tower on a moon, hence, all moons are locked up.

This is a practise used by large PVP alliances in C5's, because they have money, power, and the right mindset to fear a staging POS being put up in time for their eviction. Generally, though, it's of limited use as it buys you an hour or less, given people are going to evict you using a dozen or more dreads. That said, some people use small towers and have fuel and stront; they bet they can online the thing in 7.5 minutes and make use of a RF timer. Not sure how well this works.

Moonlocking also works in systems with a small number of moons. Sudden Buggery lived for a small length of time in a C3 w/ U210 where it was basically moonlocked by a previous resident and we just moved in to the sole remaining moon, jacked up a tower and lived semi-nomadically out of it, turning it off every day and living from a ghetto Orca. That was a while ago, and we were small. The system had 10 moons total. Some have less. This makes moonlocking viable for smaller corporations. Our current C4 has 63 moons, so that's a bit much.


I mean, we could moonlock our system...we have the money. But it's a C4, and they are painful to siege anyway, and valueless....but also, the whole nature of POSs is about to change so that you don't need to anchor on moons, hence moonlocking is about to be a thing of the past.

Very rarely, when a corporation folds or moved out, they might not jack down the towers. Or only one tower, c.f. the C3 we lived in. And sometimes, really unusually, the corp might just fail cascade or something, and the whole system is moonlocked completely.  

This is all a preamble to the Nightmare and Tempest Fleet Issue we found last night, beating on a large tower in a C2 which had 6 moons, and was moonlocked. These poor souls were reduced to beating on a tower for at least 2 hours before we got batphoned by Shilalasar after he'd tried "ganking" them in a Sacrilege solo, and failed. After discussing the unlikelihood of him actually achieving a gank of both of them in, well, anything short of a Vindicator, and even that being relatively risky given the need to pimp the balls out of it to tank 2 faction battleships, he caved and we humped 16 jumps in our new Cyclone semi-doctrine, and dogpiled them.

But not in a real wormholer kind of way. We didn't use 30 T3's or nothin'. That's almost a gentlemanly amount of people. In fact, you could accuse us of underplaying the whole gank, except that half the fleet didn't make it due to collapsed connections and being a few jumps out when we needed to tackle.

The irony of this is, of course, that these poor bastards dunked 1.7 billion inclusive of pod goo trying to clear a POS from a moonlocked system when there's currently dozens and dozens of empty systems with better PI floating about the place.

I mean, wormholes have been dead. Prolapse. has doubled in size due to merging in some corps and hoovering up a few stragglers, and in May we have so far got barely half the kills in April. Not from lack of trying, mind you. Just....hours and hours of rolling, probing, rolling and we see nothing.

Roll on summer in the Northern hemisphere, and eviction season, I say.