In low Sec, reshipping during a fight can be done if ships were prepared ahead of time since anyone who got their ship blown up can just warp to a place to restock. This can be done without resetting the home station to something inside the system.
Suppose there is a system with an Athanor armor timer, 3 gates, an NPC station, and an old control tower (POS) that is still fueled and has operational batteries. Both the NPC station and the control tower (POS) are 4 AU from the Athanor.
The old control tower (POS) is anchored by an older player who has some nostalgia for the pre-Athanor times and doesn’t remove it despite the fact that he can’t use it for moon goo.
Where should the defenders reship? The Athanor is the closest. This makes it the most obvious location. Also if some defenders are booshed away from their logi but not all of them are scrammed, anyone taking too much fire and going below 25% armor can warp back to the Athanor, wait, dock, repair, and come out.
The NPC station allows players to buy compact versions of modules if the FC hands out a ship and he finds his SP means he’s out of CPU. The number of times I’ve tried to help the blues and ran out of fitting happened so many times I’ve put some compacts of medium guns, reppers, shield extenders, afterburners, and neutralizers at some locations in case I need a quick refit and even after that I still ended up once showing up to a fight and finding I couldn’t online a Sensor Booster II and had to go shopping. Sometimes stuff can be found at NPC stations, although selection is limited in low sec systems. However, the odds of a replacement module being available at the Athanor is lower than at the NPC station, except that one time the FC thought to stock on compact and scoped modules (Oh funny, scoped neut uses less fitting space than tech IIs even though it’s not a compact).
What does the POS offer? Well, not much these days. There is a ship maintenance array, but it doesn’t have the repair option since you’re not docked. Anyone can stuff extra ships ahead of time and have them floating around in space inside the POS.
What else does the POS offer? Well let’s say it’s been anchored by someone blue to the Athanor owners. He’s set access to corp only so most of his alliance can’t even use it, but he is willing to temporarily change the password if others need to use it, so he says if they want to store ships there, he’ll change the password and give it to them. There are large and medium batteries not set to engage everything, but set to engage aggression. He says he’ll join the fight with whatever DPS ship Athanor owners want him to fight and store 2 spares in his POS and if all go down he’ll just sit in his POS and listen to comms. His corp thinks he’s kind of weird and say they’ll follow the Athanor owners for whatever they want to help defend.
Which of the three locations makes most sense for reshipping? There is the Athanor they are defending, which seems like the most obvious choice, the NPC station, and the rather old POS. I guess the structure they are defending is the most obvious choice.
If the athanor goes down after both fights and there are no more upwell structures in the system, does the bookmark to the POS have any value to the owner’s crop? Fitting services are offered at the NPC station. Using the bookmark as a safe seems dubious since I was told if you make safe bookmarks ahead of time, they should not be on grid with a celestial and POS needs to be placed by moons.
Funny thing the fight I suggested was a hypothetical, but the presence of a POS in a system with an NPC station is actually something I saw. It seemed to be set for anti-aggression since it didn’t shoot me, but when the guy chasing me webbed isntead of scrambling me, it didn’t like him. So it was apparently an active POS. There must be a fun story behind it.