Small Citadels and you: The Guide to nomadic every space living

NULL SEC

Imagine you’re a nullsec entity and don’t have to wait 24h timer to get a new staging stations to start an offensive and catch your foes by surprise, even if it’s just hit and run tactics.
Overpowered right? It can be balanced though:
Small Citadels could be relatively fragile and permanently vulnerable, making it risky to perform a drop of supplies to them for the staging. It would force a coordinated effort to stealthily drop multiple of them.
From there a medium citadel follow up drop could happen or no follow up at all. depending on if attackers see it worthwhile.

LOW SEC

Imagine you’re a Jump Frighter pilot and you get your personal tether station. New jump paths get opened.
Null Sec idea said how Small Citadels should be fragile not to overpower them. However Strontium Clathrates could be reintroduced as a fuel for reinforcement shield of Small Citadels, in case somebody wants to snipe a Small Citadel together with a JF. Strontium bay should be of a small size, to avoid the snipe but not to overpower Small Citadel’s Null Sec uses.

WORMHOLE SPACE

Imagine you’re a WH entity and you need a quick staging station in another wormhole.
You can’t make capital ships with it as was the case with POSes, you still can’t have medical clones in it, however you can have jump clones for swapping implants. Even if it’s reinforced (as long as it has Stront, same as in Low Sec part) assets can still be deployed and taken away.

Imagine you’re a WH entity in a known space roam. Now you can drop your Small Citadel 1000km from the entrance to the chain (of wormhole systems in which your home wormhole system is), so when you get podded on the roam, you don’t have to make 30 - 50 jumps to get back to your chain. If it’s Null Sec, are you worried about angry Null Sec entities that they will drop something on your Small Citadel? Find a quiet Null Sec system nearby your chain, or find Low Sec or High Sec system connected to your chain.

Imagine you are a miner, mining in wormholes. Compression array gets introduced, allowing you to to drop a Small Citadel 1000km from the Ore Anomaly and compress the ore on the spot.
Since Small Citadels are fragile, why not to make them the 1st citadels that can be anchored in Shattered wormholes? Make them require own corporation but work like Mobile Tractor Unit or a Mobile depot. It’s a something to discuss.

HIGH SEC

Imagine you are solo or small, rather poor corporation, often a miner. Now you can drop a Small Citadel 1000km from the belt you’re mining, within minutes.
You only mine for example Pyroxeres and make 1 type of hull for example Drake, buying the rest of minerals required. You consider what you mine to be free? Go with a Small Refinery and / or Small Engineering Complex.
Enjoy no 3 days of start up fuel required to do anything in your Small Citadel, just like in the POS days!

You get a wardec that’s more serious than purely trade hub wardec, or maybe it gets crowded in the ore belts? Unanchor your Small Citadel and move somewhere quiet, without even Code bothering you, since Small Citadels are a cargo too low of a value. Or otherwise arrange a public courier contract that will never require more space than a Deep Space Transport like Occator or Impel have.

Afterword

Small Citadels will be coming, void left with phasing out POSes must be filled. This thread is a taste of what new opportunities and challenges they may bring.
Personally I absolutely loved my solo industrialist days, with no need for 72h of fuel to start up a compression or reprocessing POS and 15 minutes only required to anchor a POS. I would very much love to see Small Citadels to be similar.

I think Medium Citadels should still be the best for the cost, outside of capital ship production, so I won’t mind things like amount of rigs available for Small Citadels being the double or triple amount compared to medium size citadels. I just don’t think solo players need that large of a variety of different things to cram in a Small Citadel.

If Small Citadels can be made so they work like MTUs and MDs, where every corp member can deploy them, also even in shattered wormhole systems it would be absolutely amazing for me.

They should be a player (not npc) corp thing though to avoid clutter and whining of wardeccers.

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I support this 100%.

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CCP have said they are not deliberately replacing every aspect of POS, and the lack of an instant staging platform certainly appears to be one thing they have intentionally left out.

They did say small citadels are coming they did also say that the function would be somewhat like current pos’s just without anything other than the shield.
They did not however stipulate a timeframe for small citadels.
I do hope they have the foresight to bring them out before the removal of pos’s.

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