True Sansha Towers.......

And why you need to put fuel in....


Logged in a bit later than normal to John to sort out skills, when a corp mate in comm's asks if anyone would like to help him bash an offline Amarr control tower.

Ok I thought, nothing else to do, it was in a C2 wormhole in one of our systems. The Stratios with sentries, being the only combat ship I had that could put out serious damage with low mass. A C2 hole usually has a low mass limit, so the smaller the ship the better.

J134401 to be exact. With a Null Sec and a C6 static. Interesting layout.
Anyway, I was second in after the discoverer, and did the usual bookmark, Dscan and make a safe. Meanwhile Kristoff was shooting an Amarr Tower and asking people to warp to him.

While making a safe, was looking at Dscan and saw 4 other towers including a Medium True Sansha, so thought that need to look at them all to check status. Few moons, so found them all really fast. The small Galante towers were dead shells with no modules.
The True Sansha tower however was massive over kill. A Ship Maintenance Array(SMA), Corporate Hanger Array (CHA), several hardeners and about 45 True Sansha Small Beam and Pulse units and a dozen Shadow Serpentis small rail batteries. Then it clicked. No shield.....

Oh dear, I thought, what a shame....

Started into combat range and straight on comm's. Its not everyday that you find two undefended towers in system. Kristoff had either missed or ignored the True Sansha once he found the Amarr tower.

Kristoff and Zeus soon arrived and we popped the SMA and CHA in very short order. A fully fitted Oracle dropped, along with lots of junk from the CHA. Several high end corp skillbooks came out, unfortunately the kill mail does not list what was not dropped from the CHA, so we have no idea what was missed. After the skill books only one tech 2 module actually dropped.

One of our colleagues came into the hole in a capsule to retrieve the Oracle, while several of the alliance came in to help shoot the tower. The thought of all those faction modules for the taking was a big pull.

After about 30 mins there was a massive hostile spike of ships in the K space system that we had left, and we were asked to return for home defense. We all duly jumped back to discover our friends in N3 had cyno'd in half a dozen dreadnoughts and carriers, and were busy attacking a moon mining tower....

A Cynosural Field Generator (Cyno) is a module placed on a small fast, and cheap ship. when activated it uses fuel in the form of  Liquid Ozone. This when activated acts as a beacon to capital pilots in your fleet to allow capital ships to jump to the location. The activating ship cannot move, fire or activate modules for 10 minutes. In combat, often a death sentence.

A couple of bombers made solo runs and died messily and then N3, job done jumped out.

Because of my time zone it was gone midnight and I decided to log off, assuming the tower was going to be left. But no 12 enterprising souls spent the next 3 hours bashing the tower and killed it. They then brought in haulers and shipped out all the lovely faction modules. At Jita prices looked that each walked off with about 200 million and the knowledge that someone was going to be unhappy.

I was interested that despite shooting the tower for a while, I did not appear on the kill mail. Possibly due to the time elapsed between my last shot and the towers demise. Over 3 hours. Oh well

So Note to New Eden Security Services. DO NOT forget your fuel in a tower worth billions!


John