Running a starbase is an expensive hobby. Sure, you get the neat things that you attach to the tower (I like mobile labs, personally) but, like an American car, the fuel costs can be steep. What’s worse, unless you set up your tower in highsec, there’s the constant threat of some Germans blowing it up.
Heavy Fuel
A tower uses fuel blocks according to size, so with current prices of ~12000 isk per block, the weekly running cost of towers is:
- Small: 20.16M isk per week
- Medium: 40.32M per week
- Large: 80.64M per week
Ticket to Bribe
How much would you pay for the security of high sec for your tower? Relatively safe from senseless ganks, 100% safe from sieged dreadnaughts, and if you do get a wardec, your entire alliance can jump clone to Empire for a holiday.
Turns out, the price is quite reasonable. Leaving aside the one-off standings requirements needed to place a tower in highsec, the ongoing costs of highsec towers is only a miniscule percentage higher than lowsec. A tower only requires a single starbase charter per hour to get permission to stay online in high sec.
Let’s run some numbers. The weekly cost of these charters, on a per-tower basis is:
- Small: 252k isk per week
- Medium: 252k isk per week
- Large: 252k isk per week
Or putting it another way, the cost of doing your manufacturing business in highsec is between 1.25% and 0.32%, an absolute pittance.
Does that seem right to you?
Might be a pittance, but that completely discounts the effort needed to get the sec status up so the tower could be dropped in the first place. Also, there’s the issue of all the things you CAN’T do and build in high sec. The high sec pos is a great way to do some business when all the null sec elitists come up to high sec and take up all the research and manufacturing slots in every NPC station as far as the eye can see. Can’t eat your cake and have it too.
The only thing that you’d want to do in high sec that you are prevented from doing is reactions (both t2 and boosters).
I will say that no, the price of “security” seems light.
However, aren’t there differences in what components can be added to a POS in hisec as compared to low/null/wh? Aren’t there manufacturing activities that cannot proceed in hisec space ? I ask that as a POS owner from WH space.
There are a few modules you can’t deploy in high-sec, those being moon harvesters, reactions and a bunch of things that make no sense in highsec (capital ship assembly arrays, cyno beacons etc). Refinery arrays are also banned, but not really needed, considering how many stations are available in high-sec.