Once upon a time control towers were used to do reactions and get moon goo. Thanks to the athanor moon mining, miners can just wait for their corp to get the pull ready, put it on the calendrer, and get ready for the pop.
The way an athanor (and citadels) are defended is a 3 stage fight. Shields are fought on the attacker’s time, and will probably be lost. The defenders can choose a time of the day they want their armor and hull timer to come up and RNG is thrown into there. Apparently, at one point you could even designate what day of the week you wanted it to be attacked, which I think is just dumb. But the whole point of this timer was that the defenders could pick a time of the day when their members were awake. Or they could just leave it on 00:00 and not care if everyone was asleep, but then it would be on them.
The old control towers (POSes) used a timer for the majority of the shields and then the rest of shield would go down as well as armor and hull. The strontium bay was used to delay the second stage. However, it doesn’t seem to be a set time.
So how did defenders even make sure that the second stage was fought on their own terms? They couldn’t set a time. If the stront bay was maxed, someone could just bash it, see the timer, and if they don’t like it then do the math and attack at a time when second timer would be on their schedule. Australian corps would be able to knock down anything!
I’m assuming this wasn’t how it actually worked and the defenders had some way to make sure the next timer would be fought when their members were online.