Sucking moon goo from a POS.
Hmm, wait.. there is no moon go extraction on POS.
We have Moon Drills & Metanoxes.
My purpose is serving nothing… no butter for you.
Short fix?
Let me plug them to a Metanox and maybe Skyhooks
Fast dirty fix
Long fix?
Depends on the longterm vision
There are:
Skyhooks
Metanoxes
Moon Drills
^^ Target Extracting
and maybe:
Refinery (Reaction Goo.. would fit into the scope)
Engineering (maybe this is for another Story)
^^ Targets Jobs
and i would be happy to plug Siphon on them.
If you can directly see it, it will simply die.
So it need to have diffrent Versions
Visibile & fast extraction
We already have this with Skyhook raids and this would be a passive version of it and spread over the extraction structures.
Invisibile & slow extraction
^^ This one is little bit tricky but we could say you simple run a Mobile Observatory if you suspect something. Additional you could add another fitable module for Structures and or it occasionaly decloaks from time to time as it is flimsy tech. That could also be the version which you plug on a Refinery overtime to access the reaction goo.
Like after a succesfully run there is a notification send out which something odd happend in the production and may or may not want to check for it and even this could be rng about the detection.
There should be an alarm raising for every sucessfully haul… until you reach an limit which the chances are very high to get detected by Decloak or a notifcation which something is odd.
Note:
The version you can see is visiable on the DSCAN, but maybe only on 5 AU.
So you don´t see them directly.
The Invisibile version takes much longer and is more a sneaky approach but still can be spoted or will as written above detected itself.
I would love to have them back in the game and if people are lazy mainting their stuff to snatch some goodies out of it. Currently we only have the Skyhook raid.
If you have well mainted system than you spot this stuff faster and remove the threat.
You can bound it with the ADM or other factors to be in facor for the Siphon or the owner of the structure. Which means you could have them act diffrently in Low / Null and Wormhole Space.
There just need to be the right balance between the risk vs. effort
I still love the Merc DEN Gurilla idea so this could be also parked under the Deathless tech.
PS: if you go super crazy on it you make it a Ship xD
I support the re-invention of siphon units that can be placed between any automated extraction platform.
I don’t support “cloaky” versions or extracting from inside stations (aka reaction extracting). The simple deal should be: You can place it in open space, visible and the longer you let it stay there, the higher the chance someone notices it and kills it. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’d suggest a fix tho, to prevent “automated detection” via API/ESI checks that alert the Drills owning group if the received amounts don’t match expections:
EITHER limit/delay all drill-amount related API/ESI fetches to at least a 6 hour window (aka you can only remote-check the amounts via API/ESI every six hours and get no updates in between unless you manually do the check by flying to the structure)
OR randomize all drill values by +/- 25% each cycle so over a long time it equals out (aka mined amount stays the same), but per cycle no automated program can detect if a Siphon Unit has stolen parts of the stream.
na, this would create lots of false positives, because if a Siphon steals ~10% of the stream, you could get 110% but still the Siphon is active because that would have been a 120% cycle. Or you get 78% while no Siphon is actually active. You could even get 5 lower than average cycles in a row and then 7 above average cycles in a row without any siphon being present. Thats the funny thing about averages and a long timespan.
Point is, no immediate detection is possible, so anyone has a chance to steal from resource streams in rather inactive systems. Which is entirely the point, local presence should be rewarded.
The second thought would generate false positives but the pseudocode would not. If there’s a 25% variance in real vs average amount, then any cycle containing less than 75% material must have a siphon. It isn’t instant though, so you still make a good point.
One could even fine-tune it to make sure no cycle (even if a siphon unit is present) drops below 75%. So lets say the cycle would have been 75% (maximum -25% deviation) and a siphon unit is present (-10%), that single cycle is “adjusted” to be ~87% (buff of 12% total). So the final result would be a 77% cycle. Those 12% buff are stored internally and is automatically deducted from the next “good” cycle.
So lets say the next cycle is a 110% one, the 10% from the siphon unit and the 12% from the previous buff are deducted and it results in a 88% cycle.
That would leave no trace for an algorithm to alert anyone, you would only see over lets say 10 or more cycles a “tendency” down to -10% overall, but thats still no safe bet as it could simply be a “bad streak” which equals out later on. ^^
I like the idea to bring siphon units back and to allow them on Metenox moon drills.
I agree with Syzygium: no cloaking, just visible to anyone who visits the system and checks.
And no API warnings either, the suggested random variation in pulls sounds like a good way to make it impossible to immediately notice siphon activity.
Other options include having the siphon’s cut (and additional losses) get tallied when it is picked up, so it gives a nice hefty chunk out of the previous 2-4 hours of moon drill expected yield.
But even if you ignore the ESI-based detection bot problem, it would still work quite well.
After all, what is going to happen in response, other than the nullsecers near-instantly warping to the astra to tether/dock and immediately logging off so that its more challenging for you to open their profile in order to report them as bots?