Sansha Speculation

The big feature of the Incursions expansion coming this November is the Sansha invasions or incursions into empire space (most likely low sec), hence the name of the release.

What these appear to be are multi-day PvE events where players can work together to fight off fleets of Sansha Nation ships that are trying to harvest the populations of worlds for their cause (which is unpleasant from all accounts... think the Borg with spikey ships).

The big news about this new feature is that the incursions will have a new Sansha's capital ship as the end goal of the event which has been referred to as a Sansha Mothership. This ship, when destroyed will possibly drop a BPC to build said ship.

Intrepid players exploring the new Singularity test server build have discovered models for this new ship and for Sansha fighter bombers which lends credence to the thought that this ship is a super carrier class or equivalent.

So, some thoughts:

- Supercarrier or Mothership? Its been called mothership multiple times in the press releases, but it remains to be seen if its the name of the Sansha supercarrier much like Wyvern is the name of the Caldari version, or if its a new class altogether.

- The test server rumours has the Sansha fighter bombers as doing Kinetic / Thermal damage and doing about 10% more damage than current fighter bombers. This makes them extremely valuable to supercarrier pilots as that increase in firepower is considerable.

- Also on the test server was Sansha missiles, also doing mixed kinetic and thermal damage.

- If the Sansha mothership follows normal pirate faction ships standards and is effectively a tech 1.5 supercarrier, even if that means a few percentage points of improvement over the normal supercarriers it will be in such high demand. This could mean it asking for 30 billion ISK for purchase once built and since the build costs are likely to be equivalent to regular supercarriers, that means a one run blueprint copy dropped from the NPC for this ship could be worth over 10 billion ISK, maybe even more. If you only get a fighter bomber BPC, it could be worth only hundreds of millions. Egads.

- If the Sansha mothership is a new class with remarkable abilities like using fighter bombers and something else "mothery", than the top price for such a ship (and its BPC) is unimaginable unless it drops a hell of a lot more often than I suspect I will.

- Some people have moaned that large alliances will use their cap fleets to roll these events up and hog the BPC drops. Only problem with that is an alliance might be hesitant to commit their capital fleet to a PvE event when nothing can prevent a hostile alliance from slipping in a cyno ship and hot dropping in the middle of the fight. Without the ability to deploy bubbles, gate camping to prevent covert ops from getting in system will be near impossible, so getting hot dropped becomes a serious issue. Not to mention counter hot drops.

And even if you manage to avoid getting hot dropped to ship, some ass in a covops is going to scoop the BPC from the wreck before you can lock him, you just know it.

Its going to be an interesting winter.