Corp Mechanics

On mumble today, some of my corp mates started asking me some questions about how corp mechanics work, such as hangars, roles, titles, etc...  Luckily, the E-UNI wiki has a nice primer on corp mechanics : http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Corporation_(Corp_Mechanics)

I thought I'd take a second to just review a bit about corp hangars, and how we work around some of the limitations.

Corporations are given 7 corporate hangar divisions (these show up as tabs) at every single office that they rented or corporate hangar they possess (pos/ship/etc..) in the Universe.  The corporation can then decide exactly what each individual member of the corporation has access to. We can also rename these divisions to something that helps explain what we use them for.

First, we can set access per division, so one person can get access to division 1 only, while another gets access to divisions 2 and 4.    Additionally, we have a small degree of control over at which locations the person gets access.  For example, I can give an EUNI member access to division 1 (alpha) at HQ, Based At, or Other.  HQ is fairly self-explanatory, as it only covers the hangars at the corporate headquarters.  Based at covers a single other station of my choosing, as I can set an individual to be officially based out of a single station (but only one).  Lastly, Other gives access to literally every other division 1 hangar in the entire universe.  Inside of that, we can decide what kind of access we want to give them.  The options are to allow them to see inside the hangar (Query), take items (Take), or remove containers (Container Take). Obviously, you can see that this is not the fine-tuned mechanism for access control that a lot of people would like.

To further complicate things, hangars have no in-built access logs.  Anything left on the hangar floor can be taken by any individual with no record of it.  One work around is to place security locked containers in the hangar.  These generate an access log for anyone that opens the hangar, locks, or unlocks an item. We keep everything in the containers locked, and ask that people just unlock, take what they need, and relock the items. Thus, we can have a record of anyone who takes anything from a container by seeing that they unlocked 9 items, and relocked 8.  We don't give out the ability to move containers from corporate hangars.  If people could remove containers, they could remove the access logs. This way, the logs are always kept secure.

Another method that is used is through the use of restricted passwords.  We have some hangars where 4 or 5 different groups of people have "Access" to the hangar, but everything the need is kept inside of passworded containers. The groups each have the passwords for the containers they need, and nothing else.  Periodically, someone has the fun job of resetting all passwords (in case they leaked) and mailing the new passwords to the necessary people.

This works great for items and packaged ships, but some items (such as rigged ships), can't be put in a hangar.  These can be taken by any player with access, which is why we don't put anything like that in the generally accessible hangars.

Hopefully, this gave a brief overview of how we use hangars.  If you have additional questions, ask in the comments.  Maybe I'll talk about roles/titles next.