My Little Caravan

One of the new personal structures coming with Rubicon is the Mobile Depot. This little structure will allow a limited amount of storage along with a personal fitting service so you can swap out ship modules while in space. The recently announced in-space changes to T3 subsystems will also be possible making this little structure potentially awesome. My friend splatus has already written about the three depots, along with their attributes, so I won't cover any of that in detail. I have been interested since these were announced to see how they would pan out for use in w-space. The main questions in my head were: does it appear on d-scan, can it be probed down, and how easily can it be shot. It was time to go to Singularity and find out.

No Dougal the depot is small... the Loki is far away.

Deploying the depot is simplicity itself. For the full wormhole experience I started cloaked and aligned to a celestial. In one fluid movement I decloaked, dragged the depot from my cargo into space, then warped off. No hanging around messing with right-click menus or anything. Once I landed I immediately about-turned to see if the depot had anchored properly to find it had.

The next thing was to answer my two questions about d-scan and probing. Warping off again I first launched Sisters core scanner probes and tried to find the signature. As expected I found nothing so swapped for Sisters combat probes. This time I got a weak signature but it was easy enough to whittle down the probe ranges before finally getting a 100% lock at the 1 AU probe range. Testing d-scan initially showed nothing on any of my presets. Digging a little revealed a new checkbox in the overview settings. Once I ticked that option the depot clearly appeared on d-scan.

Little bubbles of ping

New box to tick

At this point I was happy with how easy these things will be to find in space so the last remaining question was how easy are they to kill. From the screenshot I took it apparently took seven volleys from my cloaky loki to put the depot into reinforced mode. Something designed with damage in mind would be much quicker but, to be honest, seven volleys isn't exactly an ice age. Once reinforced a bright red reticule appears which is only visible when you are on-grid with the depot. I initially mis-read the countdown as 48 minutes but it's actually 48 hours before the structure leaves reinforced mode. While it was reinforced I was able to add and remove items from the storage space. I didn't think to try the refit option although I have read that will not work during the reinforced timer.

48 Hours!! Is Nick Nolte in there?

Given the ease by which I scanned this down I went to look for the meta versions of the basic depot. Unfortunately these were not seeded in the market on singularity. Discussions with some corp mates suggested scanning these meta objects will range from somewhat harder for the meta 2 'Wetu' depot to almost impossible for the meta 3 'Yurt' depot due to it's 1:1 sig to sensor strength ratio. If the meta items get seeded I'll give it a go, otherwise I look forward to trying to scan them down in space and hopefully shooting them 'just because I can'.