I got home from work early on Friday and began settling in. It was a typical late Friday afternoon/early evening, with a low logged in player count across all of New Eden and nothing going on in my home system. I had just decided to get started working the rounds for my CSM campaign, finding wormhole groups to convo and chat with, when I ended up talking on Skype with Corbexx (a fellow CSM9 candidate, from No Holes Barred, one of the larger C6 PvP alliances and noted WH mercs).
The wormhole CSM candidates and the Chitsa have been using Skype to get to know eachother and chat about the campaigns - one of the recent topics that came up was the relative quietness of most wormhole corporations operating in C1 - C4 space. There are a lot of corporations there, but many of them try to avoid notice - partly because one of the big draws of w-space is being able to do your own thing and ignore most everyone else, and partly, some feel, because they don't want to draw the attention of an otherwise bored C5/C6 corp that will evict them for 'something to do'. One of the things I have heard a few times as I made my rounds was "If they want more people in w-space, why are there so many evictions?"
The short version is that evictions are a huge pain in the butt and a logistical challenge, requiring an entire fleet to dedicate several days to sitting in one place camping a hole and watching a timer slowly tick down. Nobody is evicted just for funsies - usually, you have to really piss someone off to warrant a full eviction.
Usually.
I bring this up because, during our conversation, Corbexx asked if I had done an invasion. I hadn't. Being the nice guy that he is, he then offered me the chance to tag along with NOHO on the invasion they were doing that weekend, so I could have first hand experience. I asked if that was what Ian was asking about in game, and got a moment of silence. Followed by a "What?"
In game, a guy I knew from a C4 alliance (The Amalgamation Initiative) had convo'd me. "I'm with a group...we're evicting some nullbears... I'm not supposed to be very specific, but, it's a nullbear corp that's part of a major null alliance you would definitely recognize and probably wouldn't mind blowing up." I relayed it to Corbexx and he told me that, no, it wasn't his op... so I mulled over a few rumors I had picked up, and I had it. "Oh. You're evicting goons, with Ragnarok." "That didn't take you long. I knew you were resourceful."
It turns out there were a few events going on in w-space: NOHO had an invasion they were launching, Ragnarok was evicting their group, and I didn't get details but there was at least a third invasion going on somewhere. Busy! Corbexx came into the convo in game, and Dmitry and Borsek (both of Ragnarok) hopped in as well in order to share the details, and off I went to a C5 pulsar to join their party with my Vexor Navy Issue.
I picked up some drones for Dmitry on the way, and soon enough I was heading up chain alongside a crew from Dropbears Anonymous. On grid, a pile of Ragnarok Ishtars were busily chipping away at the POS tower's shields, and glancing through the Fleet list and the tags on teamspeak showed that we had a scattering of people from Quebec Underdog League, The Dark Space Initiative, and Red Coat Conspiracy as well. I launched my own bouncers and began orbiting the anchor, and listened to the chatter on voice coms. A couple of Naglfars had been spotted in the hole earlier before they logged, and the Goons had at least three Chimeras, with two of them currently logged in and piloted inside of the POS we were shooting. There were a few other active ships as well, and we watched them moving things about in the POS as Ragnarok began bringing large mobile warp bubbles and planting them around the POS.
Eventually, before the tower went into reinforced mode, the Goons made their move. The chimeras in the POS warped out to a second POS, the other Goon capital ships logged in, and their fleet warped back to the first tower. The Goons had four Chimeras on field, two Naglfars, as well as a few T3's and other subcaps in their POS.
The capital ships landed in one of the bubbles, and the FC began calling orders. We started attacking one of the carriers, and although we had two dozen Ishtars and nearly as many Navy Vexors the four Chimeras kept everything up. We did volley out a couple of the subcaps that came out to help pop bubbles, but it looked like the carriers and dreadnoughts would slowboat their way back into the POS. The FC called for the carriers to be driven apart, with two of them bumped into the POS shields to break their targeting and the other two pushed further away. We took out a couple of subcaps that came out and more or less ignored the naglfars, letting our speed protect us from their guns. Still, the carriers were only barely losing shields, and it looked like it would take the rest of the night to even drop one of them.
However. I had earlier heard someone on coms mention that they were talking with Sky Syndicate, and that Sky was getting staged in high sec. When the carriers landed in the bubbles Ragnarok sent word to Sky, and our backup came up the chain.
In the firm belief that there is no kill like overkill (and that four Chimeras in a pulsar would take a lot of killing) Sky Syndicate brought plenty of firepower. There were about twenty five Sky Fighters and a couple of guys from End of the Line, and with the extra DPS and the extra energy neuts they brought we started cracking the carriers. They went down quickly, and one of the naglfars as well - the second had made it out of the bubbles, and warped off to a safe. We cleaned the last of the Goons off of the field, and then...
Erm.
There was an amusing incident. Short version, Sky got more kills than the Goons did, but what is a little friendly fire between allies? Somehow the full blue list hadn't been propagated, and if someone isn't blue or purple they get shot. S'how things work out in w-space.
First day killboard: https://zkillboard.com/related/31002136/201404120200/
(Of special note: Nota Ero from RCC's Laser Ferox <3. Also, Sky was on our side. Honest!)
A video from Sky Syndicate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_SzZORYyWI&feature=youtu.be
("Bring me everyone." "Everyone?" "EVERYOOOONNNNEEEE!!!")
Some screenshots from one of the guys in our fleet: http://imgur.com/a/WUwqg
The chain had collapsed when Sky exited, so I reshipped in Jita (Burn Jita had been postponed for some reason >.> ) while Ragnarok scanned out a new one. I made my way to the new entrance, and I heard on coms that the Goons had tried to loot and salvage the field; Ragnarok picked off the few who tried, then finished reinforcing the tower and hit the next one as well. I got back into the C5, helped tear down the Goon TCU, then hooked up with the hole control fleet and spent the next couple of hours chatting and watching the entrance hole. I ended up crashing from exhaustion about an hour before downtime, but the Dropbears were still going strong and Dmitry himself had been mainlining Red Bull all night.
Real Life had me busy the next morning, and extended Real Life Drama kept me from getting back in as early as I had planned; when I got back home, I logged into the C5 to find that things had stayed pretty quiet, with the Goons attempting to plant a third tower and Ragnarok blowing it to pieces early in the day but little else of note going on. I got back into place in the hole control fleet, and settled in to chill for the next twelve or so hours.
There were a couple of false alarms with new signatures showing up on the combat scanner, usually members of the Ragnarok fleet logging in, although at one point we jumped on a Caracal as it logged in - it was a prior owner of the wormhole that wasn't part of Goonswarm, and we escorted him to the exit without explosions. At one point, the Goons did try to get an orca to a safe spot and cloak it up in order to save some of their loot, but our combat scanners were on the ball and the guard fleet dropped onto the orca as it landed on grid.
https://zkillboard.com/detail/38151094/
Eventually I ducked out for dinner, came back to find things much the same, and the hole stayed relatively quiet until Sunday.
Nota's Laser Ferox, providing entertaining colors for the fleet to be hypnotized by: http://imgur.com/a/IUtB0
(Not my pics, from a reddit post)
On Sunday, as the towers neared the end of their reinforcement timer, the last active Goon in the hole began self destructing the nicer ships left in the POS and pulling the shinies off to take to safety in his cloaky, interdiction nullified tengu. Dmitry and the Goon bantered back and forth a bit, but eventually the tengu slipped off to a safe spot, the towers came out of reinforcement and were destroyed, and things were looted. Except for one of the Ship Maintenance Array wrecks that a friendly blew up. There is, apparently, ALWAYS things blowing up that shouldn't be exploded. :D
I should also mention at this point that one of the Quebec Underdog League scouts who had been with us Friday had been popping about on Sunday; there were a couple of times where his cheetah warped through, to calls of "Who's that Cheetah?! Is he blue??" and reassurances that, yes, QUL was with us it's cool. At one such surprise drop in the Cheetah did get pointed and its shields scratched, but damage was stopped before anyone even tagged armor.
This is important because, after the event was over and most of the Dropbears had made it out to k-space, QUL brought a fleet through into the C5. The hole control possee was taken aback and not sure how to respond... after all, we had been bashing the POS with them just the other day. We started asking what they were doing on coms and seeing if anyone knew what was up when they began locking our ships and blowing people up. I made it out, but only just; my poor Vexor Navy was quickly dropping through armor as my microwarp drive pushed me out of point range and I warped back to Ragnarok's staging POS.
Things were looking tight - most of the fleet was gone, down to twenty or so Ragnarok Ishtars, two or three Vexors, and a scimitar or two against an equal number of 100mn tengus and a squad of basilisks. We did have a chimera that had dropped from one of the Goon towers, and we fitted it up; the two naglffars that had been brought in on Saturday to help DPS the towers were brought online at our POS as well, but we knew the Goons still had at least two chimeras and a naglfar of their own (we had reason to believe that QUL was working with the Goons), and the FC suspected that QUL had a blingy carrier in the system as well - their C6 had been connected to the C5 (it was how Ragnarok got in) on Friday.
We warped the carrier and our drone boats to the hole at 100km, with the naglfars in reserve to counter escalate if the other capitals showed up; as it turns out, though, we didn't need to bother. Sniper ishtars are nuts, and any time QUL started closing the distance they came within drone range and began taking heavy damage. We evaporated a blackbird and a cruor into space dust, while the QUL tengus were beefy enough to shrug off the initial vollies and retreat back out of range; they dropped combat probes and for a little I thought they might warp off of the hole and then try to drop on us to reduce the range, but they ended up retreating back through the wormhole instead.
We moved our drone boats up to get optimal range on anyone coming back through the hole, and then warped the orca (full of Ragnarok's loot) onto the static; while we had the advantage at range, going after the tengus at point blank on the other side of the wormhole would be suicide. The orca jumped through and back, closing it off and shutting the door on QUL, and then we scanned out the new chain and I made my way home.
All in all, the weekend had a couple of fun fights, and a lot of time spent staring at d-scan and guarding a wormhole, chatting with other fleet members to stave off the boredom. Evictions are a pain in the butt.
Here's a write up from BBP, one of the Dropbears: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bravenewbies/comments/22yrvq/operation_beegone/
I've got another post cooking, with extended thoughts and musings, but egads this is enough typing for THIS post.
o7
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