Your corp ship maintenance array and you

/me shakes the sleeper crud off his space overalls

Welcome to another installment of "that part of EVE most of you avoid". As Potshot discusses his corporation's preparations for wormhole space operations, I thought I would go over some stuff that might prove interesting for people colonizing wormhole space.

Ok, having lost a good chunk of readership to either "ewww - no pvp" or "POS Ops", for the rest of you we're here to discuss ship logistics when you have a POS in wormhole space and you're either in the corp or in the alliance that that corp belongs to.

The first thing to understand is that EVE ships are rather specialized. This has it's good sides and it's bad sides. The good thing is that by diversifying your ships the individual pilot is less likely to be without the means to continue playing. The bad thing is that eventually you end up with quite a stable of ships to move around if you want to be able to do everything your character is capable of.

This isn't so bad in high sec, where the stations have effectively unlimited storage, but in wormhole space your storage is limited to what you anchor and on top of that there is the logistical issue of getting that stuff in and out.

Then there's the concept of access. If you're in the same corp as the POS, your CEO/Directors may or may not have setup certain access to certain features of the POS. They will usually at minimum provide you with access to a common storage area in any corp hangar array. If you're just part of the alliance and your corp doesn't have access, about the only thing you may have access to is cans floating in space and/or a ship maintenance array (which can be set to alliance use).

So there's the situation, On one had for effective operations in any space your average pilot will use several ships all fit differently. On the other hand there's limited space at a POS and also the logistics of moving all these ships both in and out.

One of the very first problems we ran into operating in wormhole space is that everyone went "oh I need me one of to make my wormhole existance more comfortable". When everyone does it, and throw in an orca or two, and suddenly that ship maintenance array is chuck full of ships that just sit there. And if you want to move the POS there's no guarantee that they left them in a state that is shoveable into an orca. And the spare battleships that accumulate - it was a mess.

One of the solutions we've found that works is the concept of "loaner ships". These are simple Tech 1 Metalevel 0 fit ships that are geared for specific purposes. What possible special purposes could their be in a wormhole? Scanning down a sight or an exit, sure all ships can do it but astrometrics frigates and cov-ops are best at it. Mining, sure the mining gurus will bring thier bling bling hulks, but it would be kind of neat if there were some spare Retrievers, Covetors or mining cruisers lying arround for the average pilot to go grab a little of that Arkonor over there. Salvaging, sure the specialists will have their tricked out tech 2 salavagers for those hard to crack Advanced Sleeper BS wrecks, but it would be nice to have actual salvage destroyers to clean up your tipical battle field quickly post encounter. Spare PvP ships for people who just lost their good ones or came into the pos in a hauler. Spare haulers so random pilots can help out if all they came in was a PvP ship.

You get the idea. So instead of every pilot bringing every conceivable ship they would need, we put up a policy of "bring only your combat ships to the POS and borrow the utility ships". Specialist pilots will bring their specialists ships but at least the rank and file will be able to accomplish quite a bit in wormhole space without having to stuff the ship maintenance arrays full of ships that just sit there and do nothing all the time.

Because you never know when the decision may be taken to move the POS, keeping the ships able to be moved by Orca (i.e. dont' put modules in the holds - just ammo) so it won't be left behind if a move happens when you're offline is kind of important.

Should there be interest I can post some examples of "standard fits" for specific purposes.