POS Gunning

Yesterday I had the opportunity to use my Starbase Defense Management skill for the first time.

Tribal Band had decided to reinforce 4TH's large tower in Ziriert causing us to raise an alliance CTA and posting a fleet op inviting the Provi bloc to join.

Tribal had reinforced the tower during a period where there were no CAIN command staff on and so the first we knew of it was when I logged on in the early morning. The tower had killed an Armageddon and Merlin on it's own but the assaulting Tribal fleet had no evidence of capitals with it.

We formed up a Hellcat fleet of around 40 people and headed to the POS. Intel we received suggested that Tribal were coming again with the same type of fleet but they might bring a couple of capitals as well.

The majority of our tower's guns were ready for use. Alongside the fleet we had 3 pos gunners ready, myself being one of them.
I took control of some large pulse laser batteries and had a simple task - shoot at the ships with the lowest transversal.

A couple of minutes before the tower came out of reinforced mode, Tribal bridged into local.
All of the enemy fleet were sub capitals and with the majority being Armageddons as we had expected.
At this point our fleet had taken place on the tower at close range and we waited for them to make their move.

Tribal's fleet warped in at about 20km away from our fleet at the tower and the battle started.
I will tell you, using pos guns is a pain. You have to use the gun on a target to make it lock and then use it again to make it shoot once it has a lock. If you want to change targets you have to tell the gun to unlock using the right click menu and then repeat this process.
The large pulse laser batteries I was commanding took about 25 seconds to lock a battleship and as I had to make sure they were shooting something with minimal transversal in order to be able to hit the target, it was a bit of a pain swapping targets at the start to find someone who was sitting still for me.

Luckily, some people were sitting still for me and my guns hit them hard. We also had our primaries being webbed and painted but usually by the time I locked them they were about to pop or had already done so.

The battle didn't last that long but was a fierce one. Tribal lost a huge number of their ships and although we lost some of ours, our Abaddons were more expensive which meant for every 1 ship we lost we needed to have killed two of their Armageddons to balance the isk war as well.
In the end we came out top, held the field and also saved the tower.

Although it was my first time pos gunning I can definitely see the benefits and will be contemplating taking the skill to V for the future.