Compared to the effort required to safely procure the Azbel and thoughtfully decide on where to locate it, the actual anchoring process was almost anticlimactic.
I did a slow warp in my Freighter from the station to my bookmark, aligned to the direction I wanted the station undock to face (mid way between the home station and inbound gates), then I right clicked on the Azbel in the cargo hold and selected “Launch for Corporation”
The process is adequately documented by CCP and available to view on various YouTube videos.
You align the structure on a tactical overview with your ship at the centre.
The controls were easy enough. The only odd things about the process was that your ship blocked the deployment of the structure, making you move it further away from you, and the further you moved it away, the trickier it was to get your camera views just right.
I had already found other Azbel in the Structure browser, and done test undocks in various size ships to check if there was anything special about the different undocking points. There wasn’t.
Once I was happy with its alignment and selected the position button, I named the Structure, and set its reinforcement hour (which the game varies randomly +/- 2hrs) and its final reinforcement Day.
Once satisfied I selected Anchor, which put the structure in to a 15 minute “preparing to anchor” status. It is during this small window that someone could have given the Alliance a War Dec. The chance is small, but as I said in the last post, I waited to start the process when I had the system to myself.
Not wanting to leave a Freighter floating in space inviting questions or investigations, I then warped away, leaving an out of Alliance Alt cloaked and watching proceedings.
And this is where things got a little strange. After the structure had finished preparing and started to anchor, this is what my out of Alliance Alt saw:
An anchored but low power Azbel with my Corp and Alliance logos on it. (That is, I must admit, a little cool.) It did show the structure was anchoring and how long it had to go.
And this was what my Main saw when he warped back some time later – the version of the anchoring structure I was expecting to see:
Slowly over the next 24 hours my Main saw the structure come together. Unlike what my Alt was seeing, my main saw an “off” version of the structure, without undocking lights or my corporation or alliance logos.
It turned out – despite my nonchalance towards structures, I did find due to a small level of excitement that the anchor process seemed to drag.
Once it anchored the structure visually “turned on” and went into a 15-minute repair period.
During this time, I could not fit or fuel the Azbel, allowing anyone who had an active War Dec on me to kill it more easily.
The last step was to move in supplies and power it up. I’ll show more pictures of that process next time..
Evehermit 