I can only see one potential drawback with changing this, and it only concerns carebears.

It is currently impossible to station-camp someone at Latos M-7

Because of the scale of the thing, the distance between the exit bays, and the limited radar and sight distance. If someone docks there and immediately undocks, they're home free. Unless you've got a huge team of people covering every single exit bay, that is. (good luck finding them all!)

+1 to make it a more "normal" capship station. Leave the fog and the asteroid field and put it out a ways so that its not immediately obvious to find, but 30km is hugely excessive.

@ TRS, then I misunderstood what you meant.

well either way, when you say the outfitting of a trident can be done at M-14, what you mean is this:

1) Haul all your turrets, ships, components to M14 in odia;
2) Fly 30k to Latos M7 to make your dent;
3) fly across 3 systems to dock with M14 with your trident; and
4) outfit your trident.

Round time circa 25 mins

As opposed to what could be merely:

1) Move all your turrets and ships to Latos M7;
2) Dock with M7, build trident and depart for your activity.

Closer to 5 minutes.

I'm torn. For those of us who have already built a trident, the 30k distance is ridiculous. For those buildling them now, the 30k distance serves as a HUGE protection.

If the docks are made closer to the sector entrance, the potential for interception of Trident builders increases dramatically. I suspect so will support tickets complaining of the change...

My question is: is there enough danger already present in greyspace for trident builders to justify the protection offered by the vast traverse of M7 as currently configured? Or isn't there? Or should/shouldn't there be?

All existing trident captains had the luxury of that protection, and were certainly thankful for it upon a number of occasions.

Would it be possible to provide two entry points in m7? One for Trident Builders (far off) and one for Trident Owners (close up)?

When you jump into m7 the protection is the fog, not the station distance. If somebody is in pursuit it doesn't matter whether the station is next to you or 30k away, they either have you or they lost you in fog. Moving it closer wont change that.

Yes it will change. Moving it closer makes camping the entrance worthwhile.

But the station size is so big that it's impossible to cover all the docking ports and even if you do the distance is so massive and the fog visibility is so low that you'd be hard pressed to even get someone coming in.

You're better off camping the spawn in point which is where I'd stolen high level capship parts before like an EHA from Boanerges back in the day.

Isn't the current dock marker for a permanent set of ports? Or does it alternate between several sets upon reentry?

Its for a permanent set of ports, but the ports are arranged in a big hub meaning depending on where you approach from you may not even see another person because they could be guarding the wrong entrance of the hub. The marker is in the center of the hub. Most people approach the same port because they come into the sector at the same point, but i've had times where i've tried to camp a port and people have just docked because theyve used a different port.

People can easily do this, and there's a big distance between the multiple ports. It's extremely difficult to camp the station regardless of the distance.

Right, well I disagree. I never found a set of ports difficult to camp, especially with one or two other people, and if the distance to reach them is trivialized it becomes more likely that people will do so. That may be fine, it being a corvus station in greyspace and all, but it still is worth mentioning.

30k in the fog to dock rules.
Everyone who decides to build a trident needs to go through this experience.
It's charismatic!

Is it possible to toss another station into the fog that doesn't appear(the way point i mean) until you join the trident owners club? Place that station 5k out from the roids. That station would be the support station for the ship yards where all the workers hangout and blow off steam. Or is multiple stations in a single sector impossible?

Just stopping by to say that undocking and having to fly 26000+ meter to redock to the same station is silly.

Well I agree the distance is to far to dock if the dock was closer the the roids it would be great leave the exit points far if you want to redock jump out of sector and back.

Moving the current station won't fix the fact that you're at the very least 15km from a docking bay when undock from the station. As Thor said, I can think of no other words to describe this except silly.

Yes it will, you can rewarp into the sector to get back to the dock in point.

Lame work-around the real problem though.

Well its not really a workaround, sometimes you jump out of b8 after a long chase in order to return to the center of the sector.

Sure it would be better to ditch capstation altogether for a smaller one but either way, the 30k haul is the main problem.