No Honor Among Thieves - Siphon Units in Rubicon

Hello capsuleers! This is CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends, here to tell you about Mobile Siphon Units. This is one of the four mobile structures coming out in Rubicon. The Mobile Siphon Unit is deployed close to Player Owned Structures (POS) and can steal resources from it. Before diving into some details, let’s start by looking at why this particular structure is being made.

We’ve been contemplating some sort of a moon raiding feature for awhile now. While the prices of high end moon mineral has fallen sharply after the rebalancing work in Odyssey, it is still something interesting and worthwhile. It also aligns itself well with our general intent to give players more ways to affect each other’s income than just through brute force. Finally, it allows us to strengthen asynchronous gameplay, where players can be interacting without having to necessarily be at the same place at the same time.

Now for some details. Note that all numbers and stats are subject to change.

• Rubicon will have one Mobile Siphon Unit. This will be a small version (20 m³), so carrying one, or even several, is not much of a constraint for most ships.
• The unit will have a BPO available in NPC stations. There is no tech II variant. Prices and material components are still being worked on, but should be in a ballpark of 10 million.
• Siphon units are deployed the same as other personal deployables, where you just need to deploy, there is no anchoring or onlining. Once deployed, a siphon unit cannot be scooped up again. The name of the player that deployed the siphon unit is visible in Show Info.
• Siphon units must be deployed close to a POS, outside of shields to a maximum distance of 50 kilometers from the control tower.
• Siphon units can be attacked and accessed with impunity, there are no criminal or suspect flags involved.
• Siphon units are not automatically attacked by POS guns. Players can take manual control of POS guns to shoot at a siphon unit.
• Siphon units have an EHP around 50-100k (exact numbers to be decided).
• The Small Mobile Siphon Unit in Rubicon can steal raw material (from Moon Harvester Arrays) and processed material (from Simple Reactor Arrays). It will prioritize raw material over processed material if both are available. It cannot steal alchemy output.
• The stealing happens on the production cycles (once per hour). What is stolen comes from the production, thus items in storage are never stolen directly.
• A siphon unit can only steal from the end of a chain. For example, if a POS has a two Moon Harvester Arrays that are both connected (through a Coupling Array/Silo) to an active Simple Reactor Array, then only the output from the Simple Reactor Array can be stolen. A siphon unit steals from a single chain each production cycle, so it cannot for instance steal both raw material and processed material at the same time.
• The Small Mobile Siphon Unit can steal 60 units of raw material or 25 units of processed material.
• It has a capacity of 1200 m³. If it is full, it stops stealing. Anybody can access the storage and take from it. It is not possible to put items into the storage. When you select a siphon unit, a bar shows you how full the unit is.
• More than one siphon unit can be deployed around the same POS. They steal in the order they were deployed.
• Siphon units also have a waste factor (assumed to be lost in transit). This wastes (destroys) a portion of what is stolen. The waste factor for the Small Mobile Siphon Unit is 20%.

This hopefully gives you a good overview of how siphon units will function. We’re looking into more versions of siphon units to add later (like in Rubicon 1.1). Larger variations would steal more, but take more room and potentially cost fuel to run. Other variations could steal additional types of materials, such as complex reactions or polymer reactions.

There’s more stuff to come from Team Super Friends, so keep your eyes open. Until then, let us know what you think in the feedback thread.

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