Flash Farm Fracking (Ingress, not Shale)
There has been a lot of discussion in the Ingress community since the introduction of the Fracker (see New Items) around the interplay of fracked portals and glyph-hacking. Now personally, I dislike glyph-hacking, not least because it requires such absolute focus from the agent that it forces them to ignore other elements of their environment. For example, nearby humans. People disappear from conversations in the middle of a sentence.
I was excited that the advent of fracking might bring a viable alternative to glyph-hacking at least as far as building inventory is concerned (no help with your Translator badge, obviously). So after a discussion in our Rochester Resistance Slack about how this might apply to a flash farm, I modeled some scenarios for how we might allow people to farm their fill with judicious use of hack mods, frackers and tap-hacking.
This table shows the number of hacks per portal you can get using two frackers, based on twenty different ways you might mod each portal. Each scenario supports up to a given number of agents; more agents will cause the frackers to expire prematurely from hitting the 150-hack limit.
A few of these scenarios have some interesting characteristics. Scenario 1 requires only one fracker per portal, as it will burn them out within the ten minutes. On the other hand it requires three Very Rare Heat Sink (VRHS) per portal, and this may not be acceptable. The VRHS has emerged as the most difficult mod to hack, and people are very interested in being able to conserve them. In that spirit, scenarios 5, 7 and 10 require two, one, and zero VRHS per portal respectively. Scenario 12 requires no VRHS and also no Very Rare Multi-Hack (VRMH). Another factor is, how many people are showing up. For a larger group, Scenarios 10 and 12 are better.
Consider Scenario 11 and place an AXA shield in the free slot, if you want to try to hold the farm for the four-hour reset time, and then cycle through it again. Don't forget to link it up thoroughly. I highly recommend Ingress-Maxfield for your strategy to do that. It doesn't take into account a lot of operational needs of BAF ops, but for small areas with up to a dozen portals or so, it's very nice. A full tutorial on using Maxfield is a future topic here.
Taking a break between frackers will have no ill effect on the results. Remember to recharge the portals during this break; they will each go to 50% when the first fracker expires.
With these ideas, or your own take on them, you can have everyone chatting merrily again at your next flash farm, and then soon enough everyone can get back to kvetching about the item cap.
Much thanks to Fev-Games, from which I extracted the cooldown times I used above.