Moon mining is a very complicated business, it’s also extremely expensive. To mine moons you need a POS (Player Owned Structure) in orbit around the moon. The POS is basically a Control Tower of Amaar/Caldari/Minmatar/Gallente design. The race type will determine what ice materials are used to keep the tower online and will give some basic bonuses related usually to the weapons associated to each race which is applied to any sentry guns you deploy to protect your POS.The POS for moon mining is also made up of a Reactor Array, a Moon Harvesting Array and a Silo. It is also advised to have a Coupling Array that can link the structures together. This can be useful when you wish to automate the transfer of materials from the harvester to the silo and from the silo to the reactor and back again.So why harvest a moon? Well you don’t get minerals or ice from moon harvesting instead you get metals (rare) and gasses (common) when these items are combined in the Reactor Array with the use of a blueprint you will get out ‘reactions’. Now ‘reactions’ can be further combined or used by manufacturers to make advanced components for advanced tech items.

So what does it take to run a POS well, you will need an Anchoring skill of at least 1, but to be able to deploy the more advanced items and defences you will that skill to be at about 4-5. In addition to this you will need to find a moon worth mining, for that you will need the following skills trained up to at least 3: Astrometrics, Survey, Science and Electronics. Though for best results you’d want these at 5. The reason for this is that this will allow you to operate Moon Scanner Probes. You load the probes into a Probe launcher and warp to a non-occupied moon. Fire the probe at the moon and after a set period of time (determined by the type of probe used) the results on abundancy of materials will be returned to your scanner (as long as you are still in the same system). You should note however that you can only scan moons in systems where the security rating is 0.3 or less.

So now you’ve found a Moon, you’ve got the tower and arrays and you’ve anchored them into place. What next? Well now you need to fuel the POS (I did say this was costly). The list below details what types of fuel you need.

The first part of the list is materials you can buy straight off the market (the units listed is how much is spent on average per hour):

• Enriched Uranium: 4 units
• Oxygen: 25 units
• Mechanical Parts: 5 units
• Coolant: 8 units
• Robotics: 1 unit

The next list is on Ice Products (products obtained from refining ice from Ice Asteroids) and the units used in an hour on average:

• Nitrogen Isotopes: 450 units (used by Caldari towers only)
• Helium Isotopes: 450 units (used by Amarr towers only)
• Oxygen Isotopes: 450 units (used by Gallente towers only)
• Hydrogen Isotopes: 450 units (used by Minmatar towers only)
• Liquid Ozone: 150 units (Control Tower’s CPU usage)
• Heavy Water: 150 units (Control Tower’s power usage)
• Strontium Clathrates: 250 units (’Reinforced Mode’)

‘Reinforced Mode’ should be described here. The designers of EVE Online were very clever in that they knew a POS could be attacked whilst a player was not online. To this end they came up with ‘Reinforced Mode’; if the shields on the POS drops it enters ‘Reinforced Mode’ and it becomes invulnerable but begins burning Strontium Clathrates at a rate of 250 an hour, which is considerable considering their cost and the amount of space they take up.

For additional information on running and setting up POSs please take a look at the following POS pdf Guide found on the EVE Online Official Forums in this POST which has been expertly put together and acts as my main reference guide when it comes setting up my POSs.