now that moon materials are activelly mined via ships. those Mobile Siphon deployables have lost their purpose. unlike POS modules which are probably meant to be removed, the Mobile Siphons still have potential for doing something else.
here are some possible ways to give them a use as POSes get replaced by Upwell Structures:
A. draining materials from moon chunks during extraction:
this would be close to what they did before Lifeblood. instead of stealing the moon goo once the asteroid forms, they would steal a part of the material contained in the chunk before this gets converted into an asteroid field. it may not make a bit of sense but its the closest option to their original role.
B. stealing PI materials from POCOs:
basically the same function the had before but they would steal materials from POCOs instead. the tricky part is that since planetary exports/imports work instantly, you would have to steal the material from the POCO directly, which comes into more issues because PI storage in orbit is individual for each user.
basically it would mean changing the POCO mechanics to make it work.
C. portable moon harvesters:
a complete change of their role. instead of being used to steal the Moon Goo, they would be repurposed to harvest it. working as one time use, portable Moon Harvesting Array. the yield and mining time would be low compared to mining in an Athanor but it should be an alternative for mining goo without a dedicated structure. or perhaps to weaken the amount of materials in enemy moons by seeping out the goo from the source directly.
I think they are being removed, since you can just go find an ore-chunk and mine it. And for the B thing, you can already steal planetary-poo from everyone you catch collecting it.
A passive “stealer” module would be like introducing mines back to EVE.
If stealing PI from a POCO I would expect it not to work over time, but to be instantaneous during the transfer. You launch X units but only Y arrives at the POCO. The rest gets put in the siphons hold. Personally I think that would be a waste of time and CCP’s best option is to just retire them.
Not just that, but this sort of thing NEEDS to be ongrid with it’s target. That literally destroys any use they have of “sneaky” thievery to begin with. To begin with, they only worked on POSes because people would find sticks in use, but not constantly managed.
They were a good idea, in concept. In practice, totally useless.
If they drained moon chunks during extraction, you’d see every last corp in the world deploying these on their own moon chunks. There’s no way to stop them from doing this.
As you say, the PI change would require massive changes all-around for zero fun gained.
Passive mining is already a problem. CCP would never make it worse by adding what is literally an AFK mining platform. In regards to economic warfare, it’s far more effective to just go and shoot their miners.
Regarding economic warfare, I’m constantly ridiculed for this in my own corp (for obvious reasons, it’s an exceptionally inefficient use of time) but I think it would be hilarious to blops-drop on miners, kill them, then bridge in some prospects and scoop the ore and bridge out when the response fleet comes.