Introduce a Licence item similar to the old starbase charters
Create two different types:
“Concord Outer Rim Extension” Licence
“Black Market Interface” Licence
Make BPs available to produce but limit materials to build them to say 100 ozone & 100 stront each make each licence in an online citadel last an hour.
When anchoring a citadel
Double base anchoring times
Without the licence the citadel remains off overview & sov holders dont get an alert
Using the licence halves the anchoring time but makes it visible on the overview to everyone & null sec owners get an alert
When Online but no Licence
Citadel is fully visible on overview
Market, Cloning & Industry systems are offline
Citadel is vulnerable 24/7
Only has 1, 7day long reinforcement cycle
When Online using a “CORE” Licence
Citadel is fully visible on overview
Market, Cloning & Industry systems are usable
Citadel has standard vulnerability windows
Only has 2, 1x 24hr & 1x7day long reinforcement cycles
Capital system citadels get and extra 1x 24hr RF cycle
When Online using a “Black Market” Licence
Citadel is not visible on overview
Market, Cloning & Industry systems are usable but market is limited to owning corp/alliance & cloning service has risks (eg 5% chance of losing a skill level) - it is a black market service after all!
Citadel has standard vulnerability windows
Only has 1, 7day long reinforcement cycle
This is hilariously broken considering that a group could effectively just keep trying to place an Astra in various low traffic systems until one stuck if there’s no alert and no overview info.
On the whole this feels like a really poor excuse for a “Make Citadels use fuel” thread, but with a bunch of unnecessary mechanics added on to the already questionable core idea. Especially how you’re hiding things that currently are and should remain configured by standings behind which physical item you put into a bay.
That sort of weird hack is something Eve circa 2005 used because it was the only way the devs could figure out to program it around Eve’s weird hacked together single-shard world setup. These days we can do so much better than tying config settings to fuel.
Simpler to use fuel as the tax method. Just keep a specific bay for Structure performance separate from the service module fuel and limited to a 45 day usage. No fuel no basic operations let alone advanced.
Fuel is fuel, it’s not a tax. Tax in Eve indicates ISK leaving the economy but fuel is sold between players.
Also any sort of 45 day limit is pretty pointless when personal cargo bays can hold infinite fuel, so you literally just need an Alpha account with the right permissions who can log in every 40 days and top up your fuel supply from his personal hangar.
Also the problem with making Citadels use fuel for everything is 1. the fuel market is already pretty heavily loaded what with increased Capital usage, and 2. Citadels already have a greater up front cost than POSes did, so effectively their fuel cost is up front. It takes something like a year of up time for an Astrahus to effectively cost less than a fully fueled Small POS stick.
Umm… what you proposed in terms of a license is simply a new product that can be sold between players.
Ozone and Stront are mined materials obtained from other players.
Starbase charters were purchased via LP and could be sold on the market
What you are proposing is not really removing ISK any more than fuel does.
So… if you are really looking for something which is not a commodity players build:
Upwell direct sells and delivers their super fuel to your Upwell structure (in normal space). You want the Structure to operate beyond docking then you pay X amount for X amount of fuel directly to Upwell who then delivers it to the structure in a form of reverse Asset Safety. The Upwell fuel cannot be removed from the structure if delivered directly.
The Upwell fuel can also be purchased from ubiquitous NPC suppliers in low sec and then transported by the player to the Citadel (how you fuel WH Upwell structures). It can also be resold by the player, but really, why unless the person is a gullible new owner.
The fuel purchased from Upwell suppliers is in batches of 28 days. If delivered directly you are effectively committing to at least 28 days of operation unless you bought from a low sec NPC supplier so you could manually add the fuel. I Upwell Fuel Core lasts 24 hours.
So… how is that instead?
Not sure if you thought I was the OP or not, but I’m not the OP.
Thats fine, since the reply applies to both 
Really we do not any of this crap.
A lot of people pushing this agenda for operational fuel and the like are just lazy idiots who wont get off their butts and change their way of thinking for how to deal with structures in Low and Null.
As for Highsec, who really cares except for those same people using “overview spam” as an excuse for the same agenda.
You all speak of boredom and Sins of a Solar Empire style entrenchment play like a plague.
Well what did you do in that game? You hit the Base and several others at the same time and forced the enemy fleet into a position of conflict, killed it then took out the Priority Station target.
NO, this idea is crap and needs to be sent down the garbage shute.
I’m also not in favor of his idea or in any way defending it.
I like the idea of being able to hide a citadel from the overview, but that’d be more of a service rig slot in my opinion.
But to address the other issues, I recall POS had two sinks: charters and fuel; both of which just really amount to fuel and fuel. Why not just tax them based on station crew payouts? I mean, crew don’t really exist, but tax is tax, might as well justify it in-game.
You can already do this, it’s called setting your Citadel to Private docking rights. Only Public Citadels (or Citadels you can dock at, rather) show up in the Overview.
Oh wow, thank you, that actually revives my interest in owning one.