We were shipping up in our home system, getting ready to pay a visit on some miners out a null connection we had to Wicked Creek. A few of our guys were ratting, and the miners had been next door - I'm not sure why they would stick around with hostiles active next door, but maybe our ratters would have lulled them into a sense of "Oh they're just here for PvE, we're safe." I was on my alt, in a Crow, and looking forward to some action - it had been a busy week IRL without a lot of play time.
We were taking our time getting organized, pulling out interceptors and assault frigates, and the ratters were coming back to reship as well when a gang swung through the null system. Since we had already been pulling our guys out, the rest of us moved up and sat on the hole to wait...
The null gang scanned down the wormhole, and one of their ihstars came through. We pounced on it. It bailed, but I followed after it and chased it down, keeping point even though it was moving pretty damned fast. The fleet caught it, and killed it, and we spent a while playing games on the hole with the rest of the null gang - we were pretty even on numbers, although I think they had a slight weight advantage. We were better coordinated, though, so they only poked a few times and didn't fully commit. With an EoL hole in the chain we didn't want to spend all night playing tag, so Kynric called for the inty (yay me!) to go +1 and hit the asteroid belt he saw activity at earlier.
Again, we had just had people ratting in this system. And our little murder gang had just whacked an ishtar and slicer next door. I thought that anyone mining the next system over had to be nuts to still be around, but hell, there might be someone there! I cheerfully warped to the outgate, jumped through, and called a grid clear as I hunted for the ore pocket anom. It took me longer than I was happy with to find it, because dear gods there were a crap ton of anoms in the system, but I found it and warped and landed on grid to find mining cans, but no miners.
There was, however, a vindicator.
A vindicator. :D :D
It was 40km off, so I quickly started closing distance (at an angle, of course) and called point. Kynric reminded me to mind the webs, which was something already at the front of my thoughts - with two 90% webs, I wouldn't be moving at all and the vindi would have large blasters that tracked like small blasters, so I carefully kept myself at the edge of my point range. The damned thing moved fast, breaking point a couple of times, but I kept getting it repointed before the pilot could hit warp. It was also shooting at me with 425mm rails. And Warrior IIs. I nearly died, but our logi caught me in time, and shortly after that we got a couple of webs (we had a Vigilant <3) on it and tore the battleship to pieces.
The gang we had been fighting with followed us, and started poking again; I dived onto their ishtar (the same pilot we already took down once) and pointed him, but he was burning at 2,500 m/s and pulled me out of range of the fleet; his drones popped my Crow and we scooped our loot and called it a night.
It was only after we were back in w-space that I pulled up the vindicator kill. I had heard mention of deadspace mods on coms, and sure enough, the Vindicator had a deadspace tank. It also had 425mm tech 1 railguns - not even meta.
And it had no webs. Now, I have certainly seen worse. It was probably the guy's belt ratter/anom sniper, operating out of web range, even though a Megathron or Megathron Navy would do the job just as well at less than half the cost. Still, if someone I knew was flying a vindicator without even one token web on it and meta 1 rails, I would cry.
This brings me to the current Blog Banter topic: fitting. I normally do not discuss fits, because so many people are so easily offended by a 'bad' or 'suboptimal' fit, and because there will almost always be someone there to tell you that You Are Wrong.
The banter asks, "How do we educate players on fitting? Do veteran players have a responsibility to teach new players on fitting? If they do, is there also a responsibility to teach other important Eve skills?"
In the newbie career missions, players are given a few random modules to fit to their ship. It doesn't really set a great precedent. Basic ship fitting is, in theory, very easy - utilize all of your slots, build to your hull's strengths, fit the right sized modules. Practical ship fitting is certainly a little more complicated, though, since you get into active tank v buffer, optimal ranges, capacitor limitations, how to counter common threats... concepts that are a little harder to convey in a text-based lecture format but are critical to competitive flying. They are also things that might not be immediately obvious to a newbro.
My first reaction is that of course players have no responsibility to reach out. If a new player asks for help they will find all kinds of veterans willing to help - the newbie just needs to realize they need a little advice and to ask for it. I still stand by that, but I do think newbros could use a little nudge in the right direction. In this case, it is in the best interest of their corp and the people they fly with to make sure they can contribute to the fleet - this is where fleet doctrines come in, and corp mates helping eachother out. In my experience the best doctrines are the ones that encourage players to understand the why behind a fit - even if the fleet is "Fly exactly this and only this", new players can still learn important lessons about why certain modules were selected, as long as they take the initiative to ask.
o7
-K
Showing posts with label PvP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PvP. Show all posts
Monday, June 23, 2014
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Seizing the Moment
Someone swore on coms. I silently agreed. The fleet had just made what is colloquially known as a 'whoopsie' - our five pilot frigate roam fleet had just (blind) jumped into a gatecamp of a dozen or more Space Monkies. "Hold cloak, hold cloak," the FC called out, in case anyone was about to panic. "Crap. OK. Burn back to the gate."
I was only 5k from the stargate; as other people began decloaking and moving, I set my ship to jump back through and pulsed my MWD, activating the gate just before a Crow could finish locking my Worm. "Well..." someone asked. "Now what?" "We'll forget the last desto. Let's head back home."
Since moving in to the C2 with Sky Fighters I've gone a lot of roams in null sec; our home has C5 and null static connections, and we've found a lot of fun action out roaming null in assault frigates, interceptors, and destroyers. Last night I had just gotten home late from a busy evening running errands and was logging in to run my PI and catch up on any important notices, when I heard a fleet organizing on coms. I finished logging in, pulled my Worm out of the hangar, and joined up.
We were running with an inexperienced scout, but people need to start somewhere; we were in Space Monkey Alliance territory and there were a lot of active ratting systems nearby, but we went a dozen or so jumps without being able to catch the ratters. Kynric started having connection trouble, and had to bail; one of the other fleet members stepped up and took over as FC, but fleet discipline suffered a little and coms grew cluttered.
That is probably why our scout accidentally ended up +2 from the fleet instead of +1, and how we blind jumped into the same gate camp fleet again on the way back - the scout wasn't in system to see local spike when they jump portaled ahead of us. Luckily they were slow on the lock; we made it back a system and tried to figure out what to do. Our wormhole chain exit was one system beyond them and we had to go through the system they were camping; we had two possible entrances to that one, though, so as our scout got in position we moved to the other connecting system. Their camp moved, anticipating us. They also had plenty of friendly pilots docked up in the system we were in, keeping tabs on our movements; we went back and forth, playing gate chicken for a while, until our scout announced they had pulled off from the gates and gone to an offgrid safe. We decided to chance it, jumping out of one system to send them to the other gate, then immediately turning around and jumping back in and warping to the camped gate. We went through. They were landing on grid, and I got bubbled; a couple of our pilots made it past, but I and one other had to try burning back to gate. I got scrammed, then webbed while I was 8k away; more and more of the fleet redboxed my Worm and my shields were bleeding.
I made it to the gate, though, at 4% shields remaining; my Worm has a beast of a tank, almost 13k EHP. <3 At that point, I was very, very glad I had spent the extra isk on tech 2 shield rigs and I was also very, very frustrated that I was still camped in out in null. We started discussion options like temp logging or just coming back tomorrow on coms, and I quietly fumed.
Then I realized how bad my mood was getting, and I decided to change it.
Define the moment, or else the moment will define you is a slogan I have tacked to my wall at work. Marketing people will tell you that perception is reality. In Eve, we use propaganda to rally ourselves and our friends and to demoralize enemies. No amount of propaganda will change the objective facts, but it can shape the way people feel about things - the way it is interpreted and experienced, which is arguably even more important. My spiritual advisor put it in a more tongue in cheek way: Pull the wool over your own eyes. Pick and choose what lies you'll believe, and if you don't find any you like, tell your own.
As cynical as that sounds, it's one of those things that works. I'll also note that Eve is quasi-famous for its bittervets. Every game has the bitter veteran players, and they absolutely have every reason to be bitter over things... but being bitter is a choice. I know veteran players who are still happily playing the game, because they don't let themselves get caught up in the crap. Some day I'll be angry and bitter, but until then I am going to keep deciding to be optimistic and enthusiastic.
The Space Monkies jumped a prober into the system we were in and started scanning, so I began bouncing safes and I re-evaluated my night. Yes, the roam had gone toes up. No, we had no kills, and I didn't even get to shoot anyone. Yea, we were being chased by far too many people for us to fight... but in the tactical game of maneuvering, we were holding our own. Not only had we escaped their gate camp three times now, but half the fleet got home already. Sure, we were now the hunted instead of the hunters, but I sure as hell wasn't anyone's easy prey... if they wanted my wreck, I would make them work for it.
My mood picked up. Things were going better, even if nothing had changed in game; I kept bouncing safes, and we talked options on coms. We had the guys that had slipped past, and another pilot or two from the home system were available now; we still didn't have the numbers to take their fleet head on, but we had ~options~. We knew what they had and where they had it.
A couple of the guys at home reshipped into rapid light missile caracals, figuring they could clear the interceptors and dictors pinning us down; if nothing else, it'd be a fun way to YOLO some cheap cruisers. We coordinated the elements of our fleet, and then made a charge towards the gate SMA was camping.
We cross jumped.
I don't know if it was the new pilots showing up in local or what, but the scout reported them jumping out as I and the other stranded pilot jumped in. o.o Not the conclusion we had planned on, but people were tired so we all went home and called it a night. The roam had been unsuccessful, but it was a fun night by the end of it and I went to bed happy.
o7
-K
I was only 5k from the stargate; as other people began decloaking and moving, I set my ship to jump back through and pulsed my MWD, activating the gate just before a Crow could finish locking my Worm. "Well..." someone asked. "Now what?" "We'll forget the last desto. Let's head back home."
Since moving in to the C2 with Sky Fighters I've gone a lot of roams in null sec; our home has C5 and null static connections, and we've found a lot of fun action out roaming null in assault frigates, interceptors, and destroyers. Last night I had just gotten home late from a busy evening running errands and was logging in to run my PI and catch up on any important notices, when I heard a fleet organizing on coms. I finished logging in, pulled my Worm out of the hangar, and joined up.
We were running with an inexperienced scout, but people need to start somewhere; we were in Space Monkey Alliance territory and there were a lot of active ratting systems nearby, but we went a dozen or so jumps without being able to catch the ratters. Kynric started having connection trouble, and had to bail; one of the other fleet members stepped up and took over as FC, but fleet discipline suffered a little and coms grew cluttered.
That is probably why our scout accidentally ended up +2 from the fleet instead of +1, and how we blind jumped into the same gate camp fleet again on the way back - the scout wasn't in system to see local spike when they jump portaled ahead of us. Luckily they were slow on the lock; we made it back a system and tried to figure out what to do. Our wormhole chain exit was one system beyond them and we had to go through the system they were camping; we had two possible entrances to that one, though, so as our scout got in position we moved to the other connecting system. Their camp moved, anticipating us. They also had plenty of friendly pilots docked up in the system we were in, keeping tabs on our movements; we went back and forth, playing gate chicken for a while, until our scout announced they had pulled off from the gates and gone to an offgrid safe. We decided to chance it, jumping out of one system to send them to the other gate, then immediately turning around and jumping back in and warping to the camped gate. We went through. They were landing on grid, and I got bubbled; a couple of our pilots made it past, but I and one other had to try burning back to gate. I got scrammed, then webbed while I was 8k away; more and more of the fleet redboxed my Worm and my shields were bleeding.
I made it to the gate, though, at 4% shields remaining; my Worm has a beast of a tank, almost 13k EHP. <3 At that point, I was very, very glad I had spent the extra isk on tech 2 shield rigs and I was also very, very frustrated that I was still camped in out in null. We started discussion options like temp logging or just coming back tomorrow on coms, and I quietly fumed.
Then I realized how bad my mood was getting, and I decided to change it.
Define the moment, or else the moment will define you is a slogan I have tacked to my wall at work. Marketing people will tell you that perception is reality. In Eve, we use propaganda to rally ourselves and our friends and to demoralize enemies. No amount of propaganda will change the objective facts, but it can shape the way people feel about things - the way it is interpreted and experienced, which is arguably even more important. My spiritual advisor put it in a more tongue in cheek way: Pull the wool over your own eyes. Pick and choose what lies you'll believe, and if you don't find any you like, tell your own.
As cynical as that sounds, it's one of those things that works. I'll also note that Eve is quasi-famous for its bittervets. Every game has the bitter veteran players, and they absolutely have every reason to be bitter over things... but being bitter is a choice. I know veteran players who are still happily playing the game, because they don't let themselves get caught up in the crap. Some day I'll be angry and bitter, but until then I am going to keep deciding to be optimistic and enthusiastic.
The Space Monkies jumped a prober into the system we were in and started scanning, so I began bouncing safes and I re-evaluated my night. Yes, the roam had gone toes up. No, we had no kills, and I didn't even get to shoot anyone. Yea, we were being chased by far too many people for us to fight... but in the tactical game of maneuvering, we were holding our own. Not only had we escaped their gate camp three times now, but half the fleet got home already. Sure, we were now the hunted instead of the hunters, but I sure as hell wasn't anyone's easy prey... if they wanted my wreck, I would make them work for it.
My mood picked up. Things were going better, even if nothing had changed in game; I kept bouncing safes, and we talked options on coms. We had the guys that had slipped past, and another pilot or two from the home system were available now; we still didn't have the numbers to take their fleet head on, but we had ~options~. We knew what they had and where they had it.
A couple of the guys at home reshipped into rapid light missile caracals, figuring they could clear the interceptors and dictors pinning us down; if nothing else, it'd be a fun way to YOLO some cheap cruisers. We coordinated the elements of our fleet, and then made a charge towards the gate SMA was camping.
We cross jumped.
I don't know if it was the new pilots showing up in local or what, but the scout reported them jumping out as I and the other stranded pilot jumped in. o.o Not the conclusion we had planned on, but people were tired so we all went home and called it a night. The roam had been unsuccessful, but it was a fun night by the end of it and I went to bed happy.
o7
-K
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Gila~
The new patch landed. When I logged in on patch day I had to reorganize my Rattlesnake's drone bay, then I went out to high sec and fitted out the Gila hull I had been sitting on. It took me a while, but eventually I found something I was happy enough with and drug it back home to play with later.
'Later' came yesterday. We were scouting down our chains, and the Bossman, Kynric, was working on a chain off of a nearby null sec system. The null connected to a C5-2 with a second C2 attached, and one of those C2's was a HS/C4. I duly noted the HS access in case I felt like bringing anything else in, and then Kynric announced the Domi on coms.
"Domi? Can you tackle it?" "Negative. It's in their POS... oh, it just warped. To the high sec hole. Maybe they're closing off the system, I'll sit on the hole and tackle it if it comes back polarized."
We began pulling the fleet together to come assist Kynric if he got the tackle, but five minutes ticked by without event. Then another few minutes. Then a Domi, flown by a second and previously unseen pilot, entered the C2.
They were active. We decided we'd hang out, just in case.
Kynric camped in the C2 for a while, observing their movements, then poked into the C2's C4 static. They were running sites. A Maelstrom and three RR tengus were working over the NPC Sleepers, while there were only five of us (including Kynric's scout Astero). "Can we take them?" one of my fellow Sky Fighters asked. "Not all at once, no," was the answer. "But the battleship will be slower, we might be able to snag it apart from the T3's. They might also split up if we jump them and people panic. Go ahead and ship up, I'll call out point as soon as I get it."
After a short inventory of what other pilots had in the hole (I have all my doctrine ships plus a few spares >.>) we settled on three Ishtars and my Gila; we wanted a Falcon to counter the RR tengus, but the only one online with a falcon in their hangar was the initial tackle. We started heading that way anyway, and were urged to move quicker when Kynric announced the fleet looked like it was aligning back to their home connection.
We hesitated for a little on the C5 to C2 connection, not wanting to tip off the pilots in the POS in the C2 that we were there; Kynric called for the fleet to move up, though, so we jumped into the C2 and were going to hold on the C4 hole when he reported they had landed on grid and he had tackle. We jumped through and the fight was on.
Grid loaded in the C4 - a Pulsar, I saw. We had the Maelstrom pointed and were quickly applying scrams, and the tengus had bugged out - all I could see with me were the Sky Fighter ishtars and Kynric's Astero. Kynric had to break off and bounce to drop aggro, and the Maelstrom had one hell of a tank. With all four of us going after it, though, the tank was breaking - until three of the tengus landed on the hole. Two began repping the Maelstrom, the third passed through. We were still taking the battleship down, but much slower now, and were facing a lot of pressure ourselves. Then the Maelstrom pilot broke engagement, jumping through the wormhole - freeing the Ishtars to turn their fire on the tengus, while I chased the Maelstrom through back into the C2 to point it and keep it in place. Kyra had a stealth bomber he had brought as well to keep eyes on that side, and we locked the Maelstrom down and I began attacking it again with my hammerheads. Unable to slip past to the POS, the Maelstrom jumped back into the C4; the rest of the fleet had been trying to catch the tengus, so the Maelstrom warped off to a safe and the two Tengus pulled out of scram range, following it.
I was polarized, so I sat in the C2 and waited, watching their POS, and counting down my timer. It had just finished when I saw the tengu pilot from earlier ship into an Armageddon, and another pilot came out in a Myrmidon. They landed on the hole, the Geddon locked me and my capacitor instantly vanished, while I heard that the battle had been joined again on the other side of the hole - they were trying to break through. My shields hit 10%, and then the Geddon jumped into the C4; I cursed a moment but followed it, getting away from the Myrmadon's drones and getting back with the rest of the fleet - the Maelstrom was holding tank against the Ishtars, and I wanted to add my DPS to what we had.
Things get a little hazy in my memory at that point. I remember we chased the Maelstrom and Tengus off of the hole in the C4 again - I think the Maelstrom was still polarized from it's first jump into the C2. The geddon neuted all of our points off, but when the Myrmidon followed me into the C4 pulsar it's active armor tank melted like butter. (https://zkillboard.com/kill/39313139/) A Navy Omen and another cruiser joined in from their side while we were brawling the battleships/tengus in the C4, and the whole group of them warped off to start bouncing safes in the C4. In the lull, Kynric ran home to swap his Astero for a Scimitar, another pilot went to swap their Ishtar for a Helios with combat probes, and another two Sky Fighters logged in and came to join us in a bomber and a Falcon.
Round Two, we chased them down at a couple of safes and then they made another dive for the hole (and their POS). The Maelstrom dived through the C2 and was caught again, so it dived back, so we took out the neuting Geddon (https://zkillboard.com/kill/39313431/) and were working on the tengus when two RR domi's landed on grid. DPS switched to the Domi's and they started breaking, then fell through into the C4 - which, if you have been counting the number of battleships that went through and back, and now had three more battleships in it, was within 'easily collapsible' range. The tengus went back with the Maelstrom again, while the other Trauma Ward cruisers took off - one of them came back in a Cheetah and slipped into the C4, probably in case they closed the hole extracting their battleships, while the other landed on grid at a perch in a falcon, then cloaked. We had two ishtars, my gila, a scimitar, a falcon and a couple of bombers, and their fleet had a super tanked Maelstrom, two RR Domi, two RR Tengu, and a falcon.
We held position, with one of the bombers scouting for their fleet in the C4.
The Maelstrom logged. It was joined by the other ships when their timers came up.
We grumbled, then decided to make a show of leaving; one of the bombers held back on the hole as hero tackle, though, and they bought it. We had just jumped out into the C5 and had just aligned away (in case they had eyes on the C5) when they started logging back in; we turned around to head back to the hole, but they got their fleet through and tore up the bomber, escaping just before we landed on grid. They left a scattering of Warrior II's in their haste to clear grid.
All in all, though, two kills to one bomber loss, and a LOT of fun brawling. I am also very much in love with this Gila fit.
o7
-K
(PS: Naglfar kill from the other day: https://zkillboard.com/kill/39232619/)
'Later' came yesterday. We were scouting down our chains, and the Bossman, Kynric, was working on a chain off of a nearby null sec system. The null connected to a C5-2 with a second C2 attached, and one of those C2's was a HS/C4. I duly noted the HS access in case I felt like bringing anything else in, and then Kynric announced the Domi on coms.
"Domi? Can you tackle it?" "Negative. It's in their POS... oh, it just warped. To the high sec hole. Maybe they're closing off the system, I'll sit on the hole and tackle it if it comes back polarized."
We began pulling the fleet together to come assist Kynric if he got the tackle, but five minutes ticked by without event. Then another few minutes. Then a Domi, flown by a second and previously unseen pilot, entered the C2.
They were active. We decided we'd hang out, just in case.
Kynric camped in the C2 for a while, observing their movements, then poked into the C2's C4 static. They were running sites. A Maelstrom and three RR tengus were working over the NPC Sleepers, while there were only five of us (including Kynric's scout Astero). "Can we take them?" one of my fellow Sky Fighters asked. "Not all at once, no," was the answer. "But the battleship will be slower, we might be able to snag it apart from the T3's. They might also split up if we jump them and people panic. Go ahead and ship up, I'll call out point as soon as I get it."
After a short inventory of what other pilots had in the hole (I have all my doctrine ships plus a few spares >.>) we settled on three Ishtars and my Gila; we wanted a Falcon to counter the RR tengus, but the only one online with a falcon in their hangar was the initial tackle. We started heading that way anyway, and were urged to move quicker when Kynric announced the fleet looked like it was aligning back to their home connection.
We hesitated for a little on the C5 to C2 connection, not wanting to tip off the pilots in the POS in the C2 that we were there; Kynric called for the fleet to move up, though, so we jumped into the C2 and were going to hold on the C4 hole when he reported they had landed on grid and he had tackle. We jumped through and the fight was on.
Grid loaded in the C4 - a Pulsar, I saw. We had the Maelstrom pointed and were quickly applying scrams, and the tengus had bugged out - all I could see with me were the Sky Fighter ishtars and Kynric's Astero. Kynric had to break off and bounce to drop aggro, and the Maelstrom had one hell of a tank. With all four of us going after it, though, the tank was breaking - until three of the tengus landed on the hole. Two began repping the Maelstrom, the third passed through. We were still taking the battleship down, but much slower now, and were facing a lot of pressure ourselves. Then the Maelstrom pilot broke engagement, jumping through the wormhole - freeing the Ishtars to turn their fire on the tengus, while I chased the Maelstrom through back into the C2 to point it and keep it in place. Kyra had a stealth bomber he had brought as well to keep eyes on that side, and we locked the Maelstrom down and I began attacking it again with my hammerheads. Unable to slip past to the POS, the Maelstrom jumped back into the C4; the rest of the fleet had been trying to catch the tengus, so the Maelstrom warped off to a safe and the two Tengus pulled out of scram range, following it.
I was polarized, so I sat in the C2 and waited, watching their POS, and counting down my timer. It had just finished when I saw the tengu pilot from earlier ship into an Armageddon, and another pilot came out in a Myrmidon. They landed on the hole, the Geddon locked me and my capacitor instantly vanished, while I heard that the battle had been joined again on the other side of the hole - they were trying to break through. My shields hit 10%, and then the Geddon jumped into the C4; I cursed a moment but followed it, getting away from the Myrmadon's drones and getting back with the rest of the fleet - the Maelstrom was holding tank against the Ishtars, and I wanted to add my DPS to what we had.
Things get a little hazy in my memory at that point. I remember we chased the Maelstrom and Tengus off of the hole in the C4 again - I think the Maelstrom was still polarized from it's first jump into the C2. The geddon neuted all of our points off, but when the Myrmidon followed me into the C4 pulsar it's active armor tank melted like butter. (https://zkillboard.com/kill/39313139/) A Navy Omen and another cruiser joined in from their side while we were brawling the battleships/tengus in the C4, and the whole group of them warped off to start bouncing safes in the C4. In the lull, Kynric ran home to swap his Astero for a Scimitar, another pilot went to swap their Ishtar for a Helios with combat probes, and another two Sky Fighters logged in and came to join us in a bomber and a Falcon.
Round Two, we chased them down at a couple of safes and then they made another dive for the hole (and their POS). The Maelstrom dived through the C2 and was caught again, so it dived back, so we took out the neuting Geddon (https://zkillboard.com/kill/39313431/) and were working on the tengus when two RR domi's landed on grid. DPS switched to the Domi's and they started breaking, then fell through into the C4 - which, if you have been counting the number of battleships that went through and back, and now had three more battleships in it, was within 'easily collapsible' range. The tengus went back with the Maelstrom again, while the other Trauma Ward cruisers took off - one of them came back in a Cheetah and slipped into the C4, probably in case they closed the hole extracting their battleships, while the other landed on grid at a perch in a falcon, then cloaked. We had two ishtars, my gila, a scimitar, a falcon and a couple of bombers, and their fleet had a super tanked Maelstrom, two RR Domi, two RR Tengu, and a falcon.
We held position, with one of the bombers scouting for their fleet in the C4.
The Maelstrom logged. It was joined by the other ships when their timers came up.
We grumbled, then decided to make a show of leaving; one of the bombers held back on the hole as hero tackle, though, and they bought it. We had just jumped out into the C5 and had just aligned away (in case they had eyes on the C5) when they started logging back in; we turned around to head back to the hole, but they got their fleet through and tore up the bomber, escaping just before we landed on grid. They left a scattering of Warrior II's in their haste to clear grid.
All in all, though, two kills to one bomber loss, and a LOT of fun brawling. I am also very much in love with this Gila fit.
o7
-K
(PS: Naglfar kill from the other day: https://zkillboard.com/kill/39232619/)
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Hooligans, Part 2
Yup, they came back!
This time, there was an explosion.
Short recap: a couple of weeks ago one of my friends in Eve scouted out a C3 wormhole and set up a POS for herself. She ran into some trouble with a group trying to extort isk from her, but who ran away when it looked like a fight might actually happen.
I moved my industrial alt corp into the C3 to keep an eye on things, setting up my own POS, and Saturday morning as I was updating sigs and checking the system I found a new medium control tower, fueled. It was the same corp from before.
I thought for a moment, considering what to do. It was shaping up to be a pretty busy day full of pew with the Sky Fighters, so I didn't want to pull Karen and a combat alt to camp a hole all day. The Devils hadn't shown any ships yet, so I didn't know if they'd even respond to a potential fight. Seiging a tower, even a medium one, is a pain in the butt so I wasn't about to drag in the heavy ships for that unless I felt I had to. I decided, at least for Saturday, to sit and watch and see what came up.
At one point I saw a Mammoth of theirs warp in to their POS and I put a bomber on the hole in case it left, but it sat there the rest of the night. It got late, and eventually, I decided it was time for bed. If they wanted to take a shot at the tower without any of my alts on, it was time for them to do it. If they reinforced anything, I'd at least have a time I could plan around.
This (Sunday) morning I got up, went through my normal routines, and eventually got around to logging into Eve to see what the damage was. As expected, there was a "Your tower is under attack!" notification waiting for me. A Naglfar had come after my tower. I checked my POS... and it was at 98% shields. I pulled up the list of modules. One of the two energy neutralizing batteries had been incapacitated. That seemed... very tame compared to what I had been expecting.
Out of curiosity, I pulled up my alt corp's kill reports - and there, like an early birthday present, was a killmail for the Devil's Naglfar! It had killed itself on my tower, somehow. If only I had been online at the time, I could have shot it with a civilian weapon on one of my alt's rookie ships... still, that really made my morning. The Naglfar had Large rigs on it instead of Capital so it had lived in the hole for a while, despite there being no live towers before my friend moved in. The Nag had a tech 2 shield tank (two adaptives, one thermic, and one EM ward) and lows full of gyrostabilizers, plus a tech 2 siege module, for about 2.6 billion isk including the hull. Those neuts must have just been too much. <3
I wrote an Eve-mail to the Devil's CEO to see if they were interested in arranging a peaceful solution to our disagreement over the ownership of the C3, and he replied saying that they had no interest in hanging around and would be extracting the rest of their assets shortly.
Of course, I don't believe that's the end of it... but for now, their POS is offline and I haven't seen any other ships. I brought a spare neut online to replace the incapped one, and realized I need to train one of my alts into a decent sized remote repper. >.> We'll see if anything else attacks tonight while I'm asleep.
o7
-K
This time, there was an explosion.
Short recap: a couple of weeks ago one of my friends in Eve scouted out a C3 wormhole and set up a POS for herself. She ran into some trouble with a group trying to extort isk from her, but who ran away when it looked like a fight might actually happen.
I moved my industrial alt corp into the C3 to keep an eye on things, setting up my own POS, and Saturday morning as I was updating sigs and checking the system I found a new medium control tower, fueled. It was the same corp from before.
I thought for a moment, considering what to do. It was shaping up to be a pretty busy day full of pew with the Sky Fighters, so I didn't want to pull Karen and a combat alt to camp a hole all day. The Devils hadn't shown any ships yet, so I didn't know if they'd even respond to a potential fight. Seiging a tower, even a medium one, is a pain in the butt so I wasn't about to drag in the heavy ships for that unless I felt I had to. I decided, at least for Saturday, to sit and watch and see what came up.
At one point I saw a Mammoth of theirs warp in to their POS and I put a bomber on the hole in case it left, but it sat there the rest of the night. It got late, and eventually, I decided it was time for bed. If they wanted to take a shot at the tower without any of my alts on, it was time for them to do it. If they reinforced anything, I'd at least have a time I could plan around.
This (Sunday) morning I got up, went through my normal routines, and eventually got around to logging into Eve to see what the damage was. As expected, there was a "Your tower is under attack!" notification waiting for me. A Naglfar had come after my tower. I checked my POS... and it was at 98% shields. I pulled up the list of modules. One of the two energy neutralizing batteries had been incapacitated. That seemed... very tame compared to what I had been expecting.
Out of curiosity, I pulled up my alt corp's kill reports - and there, like an early birthday present, was a killmail for the Devil's Naglfar! It had killed itself on my tower, somehow. If only I had been online at the time, I could have shot it with a civilian weapon on one of my alt's rookie ships... still, that really made my morning. The Naglfar had Large rigs on it instead of Capital so it had lived in the hole for a while, despite there being no live towers before my friend moved in. The Nag had a tech 2 shield tank (two adaptives, one thermic, and one EM ward) and lows full of gyrostabilizers, plus a tech 2 siege module, for about 2.6 billion isk including the hull. Those neuts must have just been too much. <3
I wrote an Eve-mail to the Devil's CEO to see if they were interested in arranging a peaceful solution to our disagreement over the ownership of the C3, and he replied saying that they had no interest in hanging around and would be extracting the rest of their assets shortly.
Of course, I don't believe that's the end of it... but for now, their POS is offline and I haven't seen any other ships. I brought a spare neut online to replace the incapped one, and realized I need to train one of my alts into a decent sized remote repper. >.> We'll see if anything else attacks tonight while I'm asleep.
o7
-K
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Bait Pros
It was early yesterday evening and I was double checking my Thorax fit for a roam Kynric, the Sky Fighters CEO, had said he wanted to do that night. I was checking my fit because my alternative 'fill in the time' project was "finish setting up your damned PI already, Karen, you need the income!" but the initial PI set up is a pain in the ass and I was putting it off. Again. >.>
Now, Kynric himself has labeled Sky Fighters as a small, scrubby C2 corporation. It is largely true, especially compared to where they were a couple months ago - a much smaller base of active pilots, flying cheaper ships (I saw some of the pre-split Sky Fighters corp fittings, and OMG. Just... OMG), but having a lot of fun doing it. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the corp's cultural emphasis on scouting, on having the intel advantage, on being the eyes in the darkness of w-space. We map huge chains of wormholes on Siggy, crossing k-space systems and finding ways to get everywhere. And we all have cloaky alts, and like leaving them around to watch things - so we can see things, like a Proteus approaching a high sec hole and jumping into a system down our chain, then moving into its POS.
The roam plan went on hold, and we quickly hashed out a plan to bait it out over coms. The pilot was still online, and had hopped ships a couple of times, indicating an active player that should (according to the player's kill board) be paying attention to d-scan and be willing to take the right bait. The first thought was to bring in a drake, like some high-sec diver, but the lack of combat sites in system quickly led to that one being rejected. Next up: go mine in their ore site. "Anyone have a retriever?" "..." Nope. A few of us had ventures in the home system, but those can be hard to catch, making it less appealing as bait; I was about to volunteer to try with my venture anyway when Kynric decided he may as well send his alt over in a Skiff.
I like the Skiff. And the Procurer. It has been ages since I've used one, but in my first month, when I was mining in high sec to buy my first Drake, I used a Procurer. I like the tank, and because it's always bait few people would mess with them. >.> And so here we were, with the Bait Skiff, mining someone's ore site.
The rest of the fleet assembled, and we waited to hear how it was going. The Proteus was still online, still active. Someone else logged in at the POS, and we saw an Anathema, a Helios, even a Redeemer. THAT had us drooling a bit... if the Redeemer came out to play along with the Proteus, it would be fun. Sadly, it looked like nothing would bite. Kynric had filled a jetcan with ore, and although we were giving him crap over it, I drug out a Misasmos and went to pick it up. Maybe that would make it seem more legitimate and they'd pounce. Even as I started heading towards the chain, scouts reported that the target pilot had gotten a Procurer of their own and sent it to the site. Counter bait! Of course, we didn't take it; we wanted them to think we were just one guy mining from high sec.
Sure enough, as my Miasmos entered warp towards the site, the Proteus pilot warped off, reshipped into a Flycatcher, and warped back towards the site. Huzzah! We both landed on grid. It bubbled us. Kynric's Skiff kicked out drones and 'defended' itself, and the rest of the crew got ready to swoop in as soon as the rest of the targets in the hole responded.
Except, they didn't. Kynric's drones chewed through the Flycatcher, putting it into armor, and it tried to break off; we ended up uncloaking a Rapier to snag it and keep it from getting away. The Flycatcher exploded. My Miasmos exited system. The Rapier recloaked.
The pod went back to its tower, hopped back into the Proteus, warped off and cloaked. "Great. The guy just got owned by a Skiff, hopefully he's pissed enough to come back. A Proteus can totally take a Rapier."
We waited. And waited. And nothing. I brought my Miasmos back, scooped the second jetcan, salvaged the Flycatcher's wreck, and still got no response. We called the op to get on with the roam. Guess he wasn't taking any more bait after that.
Now, Kynric himself has labeled Sky Fighters as a small, scrubby C2 corporation. It is largely true, especially compared to where they were a couple months ago - a much smaller base of active pilots, flying cheaper ships (I saw some of the pre-split Sky Fighters corp fittings, and OMG. Just... OMG), but having a lot of fun doing it. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the corp's cultural emphasis on scouting, on having the intel advantage, on being the eyes in the darkness of w-space. We map huge chains of wormholes on Siggy, crossing k-space systems and finding ways to get everywhere. And we all have cloaky alts, and like leaving them around to watch things - so we can see things, like a Proteus approaching a high sec hole and jumping into a system down our chain, then moving into its POS.
The roam plan went on hold, and we quickly hashed out a plan to bait it out over coms. The pilot was still online, and had hopped ships a couple of times, indicating an active player that should (according to the player's kill board) be paying attention to d-scan and be willing to take the right bait. The first thought was to bring in a drake, like some high-sec diver, but the lack of combat sites in system quickly led to that one being rejected. Next up: go mine in their ore site. "Anyone have a retriever?" "..." Nope. A few of us had ventures in the home system, but those can be hard to catch, making it less appealing as bait; I was about to volunteer to try with my venture anyway when Kynric decided he may as well send his alt over in a Skiff.
I like the Skiff. And the Procurer. It has been ages since I've used one, but in my first month, when I was mining in high sec to buy my first Drake, I used a Procurer. I like the tank, and because it's always bait few people would mess with them. >.> And so here we were, with the Bait Skiff, mining someone's ore site.
The rest of the fleet assembled, and we waited to hear how it was going. The Proteus was still online, still active. Someone else logged in at the POS, and we saw an Anathema, a Helios, even a Redeemer. THAT had us drooling a bit... if the Redeemer came out to play along with the Proteus, it would be fun. Sadly, it looked like nothing would bite. Kynric had filled a jetcan with ore, and although we were giving him crap over it, I drug out a Misasmos and went to pick it up. Maybe that would make it seem more legitimate and they'd pounce. Even as I started heading towards the chain, scouts reported that the target pilot had gotten a Procurer of their own and sent it to the site. Counter bait! Of course, we didn't take it; we wanted them to think we were just one guy mining from high sec.
Sure enough, as my Miasmos entered warp towards the site, the Proteus pilot warped off, reshipped into a Flycatcher, and warped back towards the site. Huzzah! We both landed on grid. It bubbled us. Kynric's Skiff kicked out drones and 'defended' itself, and the rest of the crew got ready to swoop in as soon as the rest of the targets in the hole responded.
Except, they didn't. Kynric's drones chewed through the Flycatcher, putting it into armor, and it tried to break off; we ended up uncloaking a Rapier to snag it and keep it from getting away. The Flycatcher exploded. My Miasmos exited system. The Rapier recloaked.
The pod went back to its tower, hopped back into the Proteus, warped off and cloaked. "Great. The guy just got owned by a Skiff, hopefully he's pissed enough to come back. A Proteus can totally take a Rapier."
We waited. And waited. And nothing. I brought my Miasmos back, scooped the second jetcan, salvaged the Flycatcher's wreck, and still got no response. We called the op to get on with the roam. Guess he wasn't taking any more bait after that.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Laziness
The two biggest killers in w-space are ignorance, and laziness. When someone doesn't know how to protect themselves, or just doesn't put in the effort... that is when you leave yourself open to wandering hunters.
I had one of those weekends these last few days, where I was kind of out of it and didn't take proper precautions. Whoops.
Let's see... Saturday, I lost a Crane. I had planned to get my industrial alt corp set up in a wormhole, making and exporting goods (I've settled on T2 frigates/ammo/some modules as a decent compromise between profit, and assets at risk in the hole) and because my friend had had some people haunting her system, I decided to plant my tower in there with her. I anchored my control tower, put the fuel and stront it, set it to online... then cloaked up next to it and wandered off to make dinner, assuming that the cloak would protect me until the force field came up, and that the force field would take care of me after.
I came back just as my Crane exploded. It looked like a cheetah had spotted the tower onlining, brought a friend for backup, and either swung by and managed to decloak me, or the forcefield going up killed the cloak module but not before the friend could blap me. Either way, I really should have safe spotted instead. Whoops!
Sunday my favorite ship, my Stratios, went kaboom; we were breaking down POCO's in our new system so we could land our own, and the static we had opened the night before was inhabited by One Percent. It opened pretty late at night and there were only four of us online, so we had started rolling the hole; they spotted us part way through, so we called it off and called it night. Earlier today we also had a C2 open into our system, and a few systems down that chain we saw some members of Ixstab running ships in from high sec.
Mistake 1: I brought a Stratios to a POCO bash because it was the ship I was already in, when a Vexor Navy would have done the job just as well and would have put 400 million isk less on the field.
Mistake 2: when the POCO came out of reinforced, only one of us logged in a dual-boxed scout. We decided a potential T3/guardian fleet from Ixstab was a bigger threat, so that scout was watching the C2 connection.
Mistake 3: we had seen no activity from One Percent., and although we were moving into the EU prime time, we assumed things would stay fairly quiet - that even if they jumped us, it'd be a group we could brawl with.
Mistake 4: when the gank came, it was sudden - nobody caught them on d-scan in warp, and the tengu and huginn were joined on grid quickly enough that we should have spotted the inbound fleet earlier. I know I wasn't watching d-scan close enough, and it seems we were all being a bit slow on it.
I was the first ship scrammed and taken down; I reshipped immediately and was ready to get back to the fight, but the FC was already calling for a disengage. The One Percent gang was large enough, with enough logi, that he didn't think we could take them. We ended up losing my Stratios, a Vexor Navy, and an Ishtar in the initial skirmish, without getting enough fire focused on their side to take anyone down.
Still, it is only a matter of time before we connect to them again, and next time I'll give a better showing. Until then, the expensive lesson has been taught again: when you're flying in w-space, don't be lazy.
o7
-K
I had one of those weekends these last few days, where I was kind of out of it and didn't take proper precautions. Whoops.
Let's see... Saturday, I lost a Crane. I had planned to get my industrial alt corp set up in a wormhole, making and exporting goods (I've settled on T2 frigates/ammo/some modules as a decent compromise between profit, and assets at risk in the hole) and because my friend had had some people haunting her system, I decided to plant my tower in there with her. I anchored my control tower, put the fuel and stront it, set it to online... then cloaked up next to it and wandered off to make dinner, assuming that the cloak would protect me until the force field came up, and that the force field would take care of me after.
I came back just as my Crane exploded. It looked like a cheetah had spotted the tower onlining, brought a friend for backup, and either swung by and managed to decloak me, or the forcefield going up killed the cloak module but not before the friend could blap me. Either way, I really should have safe spotted instead. Whoops!
Sunday my favorite ship, my Stratios, went kaboom; we were breaking down POCO's in our new system so we could land our own, and the static we had opened the night before was inhabited by One Percent. It opened pretty late at night and there were only four of us online, so we had started rolling the hole; they spotted us part way through, so we called it off and called it night. Earlier today we also had a C2 open into our system, and a few systems down that chain we saw some members of Ixstab running ships in from high sec.
Mistake 1: I brought a Stratios to a POCO bash because it was the ship I was already in, when a Vexor Navy would have done the job just as well and would have put 400 million isk less on the field.
Mistake 2: when the POCO came out of reinforced, only one of us logged in a dual-boxed scout. We decided a potential T3/guardian fleet from Ixstab was a bigger threat, so that scout was watching the C2 connection.
Mistake 3: we had seen no activity from One Percent., and although we were moving into the EU prime time, we assumed things would stay fairly quiet - that even if they jumped us, it'd be a group we could brawl with.
Mistake 4: when the gank came, it was sudden - nobody caught them on d-scan in warp, and the tengu and huginn were joined on grid quickly enough that we should have spotted the inbound fleet earlier. I know I wasn't watching d-scan close enough, and it seems we were all being a bit slow on it.
I was the first ship scrammed and taken down; I reshipped immediately and was ready to get back to the fight, but the FC was already calling for a disengage. The One Percent gang was large enough, with enough logi, that he didn't think we could take them. We ended up losing my Stratios, a Vexor Navy, and an Ishtar in the initial skirmish, without getting enough fire focused on their side to take anyone down.
Still, it is only a matter of time before we connect to them again, and next time I'll give a better showing. Until then, the expensive lesson has been taught again: when you're flying in w-space, don't be lazy.
o7
-K
Friday, May 16, 2014
Moving Again, and Moving Forward
Note: This one has been on my writing desk for a couple of weeks; I've added and updated a bit as I went, and didn't want to publish before we were all set up. :D
A while back I mentioned a project to open a C2 wormhole training corporation.
That project has been aborted; it didn't make it out of the initial setup phase before being abandoned due to reasons. I do not believe in spreading drama and so I shall not; there were simply some miscommunications on the leadership level that escalated poorly and led me to conclude that it was time for me to leave the alliance. I wish you guys at Infinite Anarchy the best, and when you find your pod under fire from my guns it's nothing personal, just w-space. :D
I am flying with Sky Fighters now; they lost a chunk of players when Rolled Out rolled out, and had just moved out of their old home system. I signed up just in time to join the scanning party - huzzah! So, after spending a day or so moving my ships out of the C2 Anarchist Asylum had set up in, I spent the next couple of days scouting wormhole chains with my covops alt while I consolidated assets with Karen.
I should probably add that I have been doing all of my high sec logistics under war dec - Infinite Anarchy was under wardec as I was moving out, and Sky Fighters had been decced shortly before I joined, which made my logistics work require a little more attention than usual. We even formed up a couple of times to hunt the WT's down, but they seem to want to dock up in station whenever a gang that is actually combat capable swings by. :shrug:
Sky found a few good systems to move into, and the plan was to begin cloaky bomber harassment last Friday after the Lazerhawk roam; however, on Thursday one of our scouts found an even better system, so plans changed, scouts were seeded, and Kynric decided to go straight for the eviction invasion of the new target system, without the harassment campaign first. Assets were moved through high sec, my Rattlesnake and a Paladin got into a brawl with a few war target proteusii (we ended up down a Domi), and by Saturday we had a seige tower, invasion orcas, and the big guns in the target system ready to start 'persuading' the prior residents to move out.
At first it looked like they'd try to pack up and ship out, but by the time we were ready to commence they were still dug in.
A while back I mentioned a project to open a C2 wormhole training corporation.
That project has been aborted; it didn't make it out of the initial setup phase before being abandoned due to reasons. I do not believe in spreading drama and so I shall not; there were simply some miscommunications on the leadership level that escalated poorly and led me to conclude that it was time for me to leave the alliance. I wish you guys at Infinite Anarchy the best, and when you find your pod under fire from my guns it's nothing personal, just w-space. :D
I am flying with Sky Fighters now; they lost a chunk of players when Rolled Out rolled out, and had just moved out of their old home system. I signed up just in time to join the scanning party - huzzah! So, after spending a day or so moving my ships out of the C2 Anarchist Asylum had set up in, I spent the next couple of days scouting wormhole chains with my covops alt while I consolidated assets with Karen.
I should probably add that I have been doing all of my high sec logistics under war dec - Infinite Anarchy was under wardec as I was moving out, and Sky Fighters had been decced shortly before I joined, which made my logistics work require a little more attention than usual. We even formed up a couple of times to hunt the WT's down, but they seem to want to dock up in station whenever a gang that is actually combat capable swings by. :shrug:
Sky found a few good systems to move into, and the plan was to begin cloaky bomber harassment last Friday after the Lazerhawk roam; however, on Thursday one of our scouts found an even better system, so plans changed, scouts were seeded, and Kynric decided to go straight for the eviction invasion of the new target system, without the harassment campaign first. Assets were moved through high sec, my Rattlesnake and a Paladin got into a brawl with a few war target proteusii (we ended up down a Domi), and by Saturday we had a seige tower, invasion orcas, and the big guns in the target system ready to start 'persuading' the prior residents to move out.
At first it looked like they'd try to pack up and ship out, but by the time we were ready to commence they were still dug in.
The Big Cat, ready to play
The guys we were kicking out were running a POS crammed with a double handful of hardeners (about 70% resistances across the board) and lots and lots of ECM, plus about a thousand DPS worth of lasers, a neut, and your usual requisite scrams. The ECM ruled out logi, and the DPS was enough to keep the usual POS Bash Ishtar/Gila/Dominix off field; we went at it with a pair of Vargurs and two Rattlesnakes. It was fun. I knew the marauders would be fine as long as they kept snacking on cap boosters, but I was rather impressed by the snake's massive ability to tank all of the things forever. Plus, I got to try out my Gecko super-heavy drones on the POS lasers and the neut. We left the ECM up, since it did more to help us against potential ganks than hurt us.
Over the rest of the week, we have been shipping in tower, setting up full defenses, and reinforcing POCO's. Soon, we'll be out marauding through C5 chains and blops-dropping into nullsec. Yay!
o7
-K
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Hooligans
This is not the blog post I had planned on writing today; however, there are :opsec: considerations so it'll have to wait longer. For a quick update, though, I am out with my new corp, Sky Fighters, Doing Things to People.
Yesterday evening was, in fact, full of Doing Things to certain specific people, but last night as I was getting ready to log out I caught a concerning message from a friend of mine - some random people had been camping her wormhole, and at first she wasn't terribly concerned as, well, they were horrible at it and it's not unkown for corps to camp k-space connections in the hope of a juicy gank. However, these guys were remarkably persistent - they had, apparently, been camping her hole for eight or so hours now, and one of them just declared ownership of her system and demanded that she pay rent.
Oh my.
My friend is a very new player to Eve, having started around the end of March. She has also been incredibly enthusiastic about w-space; actively exploring every day, earning her first plex as a newbie by running herons into nullsec and hacking sites, things like that. She's shied away from PvP since she is definitely more of a builder than a fighter, but when I was getting started on my newbie corp I actively recruited her for her awesome YOLO attitude and her motivation to get out and play the game instead of just sitting somewhere 'safe' all day. When the newbie corp failed to launch, she decided to go make her own corporation and do things her own way then, scouting out her own C3/LS hole, shelling out for a POS on her own (I helped her plan the defenses :D), and moving in the fuel and scanner alts and things she'll need to start operations. And, now that she has Things she wants to defend, she's looking at options to get herself set up for home defense PvP.
I am very proud of how she's doing. Like, seriously, I am tearing up a little writing this.
So, when I heard that some no-name bunch of punks were harassing my friend, I took an interest.
Like I said, they were actively camping her k-space connections (she had two low sec ones at the time), but they were horrible at it; one of her scout alts got podded out several times, but she didn't have trouble getting it back in. Once they anchored a couple of large bubbles and brought in a sabre she scaled down the transit activity, but she has everything she needed to sit them out for a couple of weeks.
Although no POS is unconquerable, we had made sure it would require a significant investment to try and bring it down - the hooligans made some threatening noises at her and growled about seigeing her POS, but they clearly didn't have the guns to do so at the time... and trying to starve someone out of a wormhole is a horrible thing to ask your pilots to do, since depending on the fuel reserves in the tower, you might be doing a lot of sitting and hole watching for two or even three months. So after a bit of baiting (what, going to feed your loki to my tower?), they threatened to drop a fleet of Marauders on her POS. That had us giggling.
Just in case you are unfamiliar with Marauders, and their prices, an *empty* hull runs about a billion isk. A properly fit one can cost as much as a dread. They are tough ships, but they are also huge targets. Especially if they're glued to a POS that will only shoot them, and not your friends who come to get on the killmails. :D
My friend baited them a bit more, running her scout (who couldn't cloak) between their camps to keep eyes on them and openly laughing at their attempts to charge her rent, hold her hostage, or threaten her tower. Have I mentioned that I really like her attitude?
Sadly, I was unable to come to help in person, being stuck in a remote piece of uncharted space; instead, I ended up sending one of my out of corp alts to keep an eye on things, and began poking some of my contacts to see if anyone was in the area and interested in ganking marauders, should they actually show up. I discovered that this group of hooligans had in fact managed to piss off another friend of mine to the point where he would gladly bring a dozen or two guys to kick the punks in the nuts and collect their sweet, sweet tears, so I put him in contact with Lori. Bane, one of my corpmates/the diplo for Sky Fighters, also caught wind of it all and helpfully decided to convo the aggressor's CEO to see if they wanted to talk.
The CEO tried to charge Bane a two billion isk ransom.
Their CEO. Tried to charge Bane. A two billion isk ransom.
That got some laughs out of us as well, and I think around that point Bane had got his scout into the C3. This was too much heat for the Rejects - they pulled stakes and scampered, growling about our Huge Fleet (that was still five jumps away, not sure how they would have seen that) and that the POS wasn't worth their time to bash. Bane ran a scout up the chain to their home system; I wouldn't be surprised if he demands a ransom from them tonight.
Shout out to everyone who had my back, you guys are great. Sorry they blueballed you and bailed. To the Rejects: don't be dicks, guys. Yea, we all play rough here in w-space, but when you get put on someone's shitlist they'll come looking for you if they get a good chance.
The evening was sadly lacking in explosions, but it felt like a nice bit of diplo pvp. And hey, I'll remember those guys; I've got a C5 static, so I'm sure I'll run into them again. :D
o7
-K
Yesterday evening was, in fact, full of Doing Things to certain specific people, but last night as I was getting ready to log out I caught a concerning message from a friend of mine - some random people had been camping her wormhole, and at first she wasn't terribly concerned as, well, they were horrible at it and it's not unkown for corps to camp k-space connections in the hope of a juicy gank. However, these guys were remarkably persistent - they had, apparently, been camping her hole for eight or so hours now, and one of them just declared ownership of her system and demanded that she pay rent.
Oh my.
My friend is a very new player to Eve, having started around the end of March. She has also been incredibly enthusiastic about w-space; actively exploring every day, earning her first plex as a newbie by running herons into nullsec and hacking sites, things like that. She's shied away from PvP since she is definitely more of a builder than a fighter, but when I was getting started on my newbie corp I actively recruited her for her awesome YOLO attitude and her motivation to get out and play the game instead of just sitting somewhere 'safe' all day. When the newbie corp failed to launch, she decided to go make her own corporation and do things her own way then, scouting out her own C3/LS hole, shelling out for a POS on her own (I helped her plan the defenses :D), and moving in the fuel and scanner alts and things she'll need to start operations. And, now that she has Things she wants to defend, she's looking at options to get herself set up for home defense PvP.
I am very proud of how she's doing. Like, seriously, I am tearing up a little writing this.
So, when I heard that some no-name bunch of punks were harassing my friend, I took an interest.
Like I said, they were actively camping her k-space connections (she had two low sec ones at the time), but they were horrible at it; one of her scout alts got podded out several times, but she didn't have trouble getting it back in. Once they anchored a couple of large bubbles and brought in a sabre she scaled down the transit activity, but she has everything she needed to sit them out for a couple of weeks.
Although no POS is unconquerable, we had made sure it would require a significant investment to try and bring it down - the hooligans made some threatening noises at her and growled about seigeing her POS, but they clearly didn't have the guns to do so at the time... and trying to starve someone out of a wormhole is a horrible thing to ask your pilots to do, since depending on the fuel reserves in the tower, you might be doing a lot of sitting and hole watching for two or even three months. So after a bit of baiting (what, going to feed your loki to my tower?), they threatened to drop a fleet of Marauders on her POS. That had us giggling.
Just in case you are unfamiliar with Marauders, and their prices, an *empty* hull runs about a billion isk. A properly fit one can cost as much as a dread. They are tough ships, but they are also huge targets. Especially if they're glued to a POS that will only shoot them, and not your friends who come to get on the killmails. :D
My friend baited them a bit more, running her scout (who couldn't cloak) between their camps to keep eyes on them and openly laughing at their attempts to charge her rent, hold her hostage, or threaten her tower. Have I mentioned that I really like her attitude?
Sadly, I was unable to come to help in person, being stuck in a remote piece of uncharted space; instead, I ended up sending one of my out of corp alts to keep an eye on things, and began poking some of my contacts to see if anyone was in the area and interested in ganking marauders, should they actually show up. I discovered that this group of hooligans had in fact managed to piss off another friend of mine to the point where he would gladly bring a dozen or two guys to kick the punks in the nuts and collect their sweet, sweet tears, so I put him in contact with Lori. Bane, one of my corpmates/the diplo for Sky Fighters, also caught wind of it all and helpfully decided to convo the aggressor's CEO to see if they wanted to talk.
The CEO tried to charge Bane a two billion isk ransom.
Their CEO. Tried to charge Bane. A two billion isk ransom.
That got some laughs out of us as well, and I think around that point Bane had got his scout into the C3. This was too much heat for the Rejects - they pulled stakes and scampered, growling about our Huge Fleet (that was still five jumps away, not sure how they would have seen that) and that the POS wasn't worth their time to bash. Bane ran a scout up the chain to their home system; I wouldn't be surprised if he demands a ransom from them tonight.
Shout out to everyone who had my back, you guys are great. Sorry they blueballed you and bailed. To the Rejects: don't be dicks, guys. Yea, we all play rough here in w-space, but when you get put on someone's shitlist they'll come looking for you if they get a good chance.
The evening was sadly lacking in explosions, but it felt like a nice bit of diplo pvp. And hey, I'll remember those guys; I've got a C5 static, so I'm sure I'll run into them again. :D
o7
-K
Sunday, May 11, 2014
In Memoral
On Friday, the Lazerhawks hosted a memorial roam/fleet welping in honor of DJ Destruction, one of their pilots who recently passed away. All interested wormholers were invited, and told to bring battleships with lasers. Lots of lasers.
All of the lasers.
By the time we left the staging system there were a hundred some pilots in fleet, and we paused on the first out gate for some words in memory of DJ. He sounded like a great guy to fly with, and I am very sorry for his loss.
In proper wake fashion, shots were called for, and then the fleet started went up on Twitch and we set destination for a known low sec staging system, ready for a brawl. It didn't take long for the targets to become aware of the Twitch stream - after only a few systems, one of their guys was spectating our fleet as we hopped gate to gate in a controlled, stately manner. It was no surprise that, by the time we were ready to enter our target system, a fleet had formed up to greet us - Ninja Unicorns With Huge Horns, Psychotic Tendencies, and assorted other allies.
We had a fleet of brawling Abbadons, Armageddons, and Random Laser Shit. We jumped into a fleet of Navy Apocs with some miscellaneous support (a smattering of pirate battleships, a few dreads, and some carriers). They were just far enough off the gate that we had to switch from the close range ammo, so we dropped cloak, reloaded, and engaged. The FC (ForgetMyFace) began calling targets, and our cynos went up; a team of five triage archons, a moros, and a revelation landed on our side.
The battle was ridiculously fun. The Psychotic logi carriers did a great job of keeping their ships up when they could catch them, but the combined fire from our lasers melted through quite a few battleships throughout the fight, while our dreads worked on chewing down the opposing seige dreads (we killed a moros!) and then got to work on their carriers. The fight took a dive though when Psychotic Tendancies called in supercarrier support; three Nyxs and a Wyvern dropped on field (escalation!) and it was pretty much game over at that point; the dreads exploded, the archons began going down one after another, and after the last capital on our side was dead we got the order to warp out to a station in system.
'Good fights' were exchanged in local, and it had been an excellent fight; many things exploded in fond memory of a fallen pilot, and we explained the purpose of the roam in local. The brawlees commiserated, and we were informed that the battleships left in the fleet were free to go without being camped. The fleet extracted to our staging system, our hosts thanked us, and most of the fleet began heading for their home holes.
However. There were a few of us that decided we had signed up to welp our battleships, and we weren't going home until the insurance had been paid out. A new (and quite drunk) FC was appointed, our fleet was marshaled, and the FC announced our desto. "Fuck it. Desto is VFK. YOLO. Holy jesus. Come on, scrubs, move out!"
The trip to VFK was chaotic, messy, drunken, and highly amusing. We barely saw anyone on the way, but there were about fifty to sixty other pilots (compared to our dozenish leftover battleships) online in VFK itself. We all warped to the station and, lacking other targets, opened fire; then our scout found an offline POS in system, so we all warped to that instead and began bashing it. We chatted amicably in /Local with the Goons that were on hand, and watched as the local pilot count spiked, and spiked again.
Eventually, they jumped on us, and I could hear many of the guys in fleet giggling - a swarm of sabres, flycatchers, and other small stuff landed on us and space was filled with warp bubbles and disco lights. We began popping them, but within thirty seconds a giant fleet of capitals dropped on us; we laughed on coms and continued free-firing on the smaller targets. The thirty-ish slowcat archons and two dozen naglfars ripped our fleet to pieces, but we actually came very close to breaking even on isk lost.
So, as we were getting blobbed off the field, we waved to the Goons and offered 'gf's in local, then took the high sec express. It was a night that will be remembered.
All of the lasers.
By the time we left the staging system there were a hundred some pilots in fleet, and we paused on the first out gate for some words in memory of DJ. He sounded like a great guy to fly with, and I am very sorry for his loss.
In proper wake fashion, shots were called for, and then the fleet started went up on Twitch and we set destination for a known low sec staging system, ready for a brawl. It didn't take long for the targets to become aware of the Twitch stream - after only a few systems, one of their guys was spectating our fleet as we hopped gate to gate in a controlled, stately manner. It was no surprise that, by the time we were ready to enter our target system, a fleet had formed up to greet us - Ninja Unicorns With Huge Horns, Psychotic Tendencies, and assorted other allies.
We had a fleet of brawling Abbadons, Armageddons, and Random Laser Shit. We jumped into a fleet of Navy Apocs with some miscellaneous support (a smattering of pirate battleships, a few dreads, and some carriers). They were just far enough off the gate that we had to switch from the close range ammo, so we dropped cloak, reloaded, and engaged. The FC (ForgetMyFace) began calling targets, and our cynos went up; a team of five triage archons, a moros, and a revelation landed on our side.
The battle was ridiculously fun. The Psychotic logi carriers did a great job of keeping their ships up when they could catch them, but the combined fire from our lasers melted through quite a few battleships throughout the fight, while our dreads worked on chewing down the opposing seige dreads (we killed a moros!) and then got to work on their carriers. The fight took a dive though when Psychotic Tendancies called in supercarrier support; three Nyxs and a Wyvern dropped on field (escalation!) and it was pretty much game over at that point; the dreads exploded, the archons began going down one after another, and after the last capital on our side was dead we got the order to warp out to a station in system.
'Good fights' were exchanged in local, and it had been an excellent fight; many things exploded in fond memory of a fallen pilot, and we explained the purpose of the roam in local. The brawlees commiserated, and we were informed that the battleships left in the fleet were free to go without being camped. The fleet extracted to our staging system, our hosts thanked us, and most of the fleet began heading for their home holes.
However. There were a few of us that decided we had signed up to welp our battleships, and we weren't going home until the insurance had been paid out. A new (and quite drunk) FC was appointed, our fleet was marshaled, and the FC announced our desto. "Fuck it. Desto is VFK. YOLO. Holy jesus. Come on, scrubs, move out!"
The trip to VFK was chaotic, messy, drunken, and highly amusing. We barely saw anyone on the way, but there were about fifty to sixty other pilots (compared to our dozenish leftover battleships) online in VFK itself. We all warped to the station and, lacking other targets, opened fire; then our scout found an offline POS in system, so we all warped to that instead and began bashing it. We chatted amicably in /Local with the Goons that were on hand, and watched as the local pilot count spiked, and spiked again.
Eventually, they jumped on us, and I could hear many of the guys in fleet giggling - a swarm of sabres, flycatchers, and other small stuff landed on us and space was filled with warp bubbles and disco lights. We began popping them, but within thirty seconds a giant fleet of capitals dropped on us; we laughed on coms and continued free-firing on the smaller targets. The thirty-ish slowcat archons and two dozen naglfars ripped our fleet to pieces, but we actually came very close to breaking even on isk lost.
So, as we were getting blobbed off the field, we waved to the Goons and offered 'gf's in local, then took the high sec express. It was a night that will be remembered.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
The OTHER New Project
First, a note on the latest Eve Dev blog posts in regards to industry: <insert little-girl-getting-a-pony-squeal here>
Although I am not happy that the POS assembly lines are being pushed back attention-wise, and I am a little wary about how manufacturing in systems without any stations/outposts will work (Will we still have teams? Will it become cheaper to manufacture in a cluttered high sec system with -50% costs due to station bonuses?), I still think it is an overall positive change. The UI and usability cleanup alone is amazing; as a newer player, I have had many arguments with the industry UI, trying to bully it into doing what I want. This will be great.
And now, the 'screw industry, GIVE ME BLOOD' berserker Karen demands I stop talking about lame stuff and move on to the other new project I have started.
I spent all day at work yesterday checking my phone, watching for notifications that my POS might be under attack. I was up until 3 AM in the morning Sunday night/Monday morning, setting up a new large Amarr control tower and anchoring/onlining defenses. I got maybe a third of the things I wanted up and online before I crashed due to exhaustion, and although I didn't have anything inside the bubble aside from an (empty) tayra, the tower, and the hardeners (YES HARDENERS GO *INSIDE* THE BUBBLE) I still worried.
Last night, I got the rest of the defenses online and the bare necessities of storage put up. If you glance at the 'About the author' box in the top left corner, you will see that I moved out of Sin Factory's C5 wormhole; I am now the CEO of a new w-space corporation, Anarchist Asylum, based out of a C2.
I love w-space. I am passionate about it. I want to spread Bob's blessings to many people, new players in particular; at the moment I have about a dozen newer players in corp, with half a dozen of them highly active. :) I will also freely admit that a couple of them were sniped from the 'holy god brand new player' (as one put it) help channel, selected for inquisitiveness about PvP and wormholes. I'm getting them trained up, and trying to instill a Proper Wormholer Attitude in my trainees - we will give no mercy, no fucks, and all of the fights we can.
Anyway, still a little administrative work to take care of tonight, assigning titles and roles now that I know I have it done right, and then to secure the POS fuel for the rest of the month... and then some hopefully fun and hilarious cruiser/frigate roams.
If you have a nice cruiser gang fit you feel like sharing, look me up in game. We're experimenting with stuff. :D
See you in space, cowboys.
o7
Although I am not happy that the POS assembly lines are being pushed back attention-wise, and I am a little wary about how manufacturing in systems without any stations/outposts will work (Will we still have teams? Will it become cheaper to manufacture in a cluttered high sec system with -50% costs due to station bonuses?), I still think it is an overall positive change. The UI and usability cleanup alone is amazing; as a newer player, I have had many arguments with the industry UI, trying to bully it into doing what I want. This will be great.
And now, the 'screw industry, GIVE ME BLOOD' berserker Karen demands I stop talking about lame stuff and move on to the other new project I have started.
I spent all day at work yesterday checking my phone, watching for notifications that my POS might be under attack. I was up until 3 AM in the morning Sunday night/Monday morning, setting up a new large Amarr control tower and anchoring/onlining defenses. I got maybe a third of the things I wanted up and online before I crashed due to exhaustion, and although I didn't have anything inside the bubble aside from an (empty) tayra, the tower, and the hardeners (YES HARDENERS GO *INSIDE* THE BUBBLE) I still worried.
Last night, I got the rest of the defenses online and the bare necessities of storage put up. If you glance at the 'About the author' box in the top left corner, you will see that I moved out of Sin Factory's C5 wormhole; I am now the CEO of a new w-space corporation, Anarchist Asylum, based out of a C2.
I love w-space. I am passionate about it. I want to spread Bob's blessings to many people, new players in particular; at the moment I have about a dozen newer players in corp, with half a dozen of them highly active. :) I will also freely admit that a couple of them were sniped from the 'holy god brand new player' (as one put it) help channel, selected for inquisitiveness about PvP and wormholes. I'm getting them trained up, and trying to instill a Proper Wormholer Attitude in my trainees - we will give no mercy, no fucks, and all of the fights we can.
Anyway, still a little administrative work to take care of tonight, assigning titles and roles now that I know I have it done right, and then to secure the POS fuel for the rest of the month... and then some hopefully fun and hilarious cruiser/frigate roams.
If you have a nice cruiser gang fit you feel like sharing, look me up in game. We're experimenting with stuff. :D
See you in space, cowboys.
o7
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Evictions, E-Honor, and the Metagame Part 1: BeeGone
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
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
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Surprise! \o/
There are three things a scout can say that will get a fleet mobilized quicker than anything else in w-space:
I logged back in.
The first report had them at a mining anomaly, but when Tak moved in to get a better look he saw that they were past it, at a cosmic signature; he moved out of scan range and dropped probes, nailed down the signature, pulled his probes and warped in right as the orca jumped back into the C4 from the C4's static, popping the hole. They were closing down their system, and our static was the only other hole on the signature list.
I had shipped into my Vexor Navy, while Nate grabbed his Ishtar and Sabre. The two of us moved to our static hole and cloaked up within jump range, forming the ambush fleet; I logged my covops alt in as well and put her just off the hole in a bomber, giving us a third long point if needed (or extra DPS if they brought the scorpion and it had to die quickly). The 911 ping went out, as well, and we sat on the hole and waited while Takusen watched their POS, where a third pilot was sitting in an orca as well.
They had probes out in their system - it was a fourth pilot in a buzzard, we saw after he jumped the hole into our system. The hole activated, and I almost held my breath for a moment - after about ten second the buzzard dropped the jump cloak, 8km away from my vexor, and reapproached the wormhole.
"I want to yell "BOO!" at him in Local so bad right now," Nate muttered on coms. We laughed. The guy hadn't even scouted out our hole before he jumped back into the C4.
One of our corpmates had responded to the 911 and logged in both of his characters, getting into tengus; I brought my own tengu alt online as well, giving us three of the T3's in reserve. All in all, it had shaped up into a rather nice little gang; I really wanted those orcas, but hopefully the fact that they had a K162 from an occupied C5 would trip enough flags that they'd send an escort for us to duke it out with as well.
It took them long enough to decide. Tak watched the pilots at the POS bring out a pair of orcas, one of the orcas swap to a Tempest Fleet Issue, the Scorpion hovered around... we imagined the conversation they might be having, and patiently waited them out.
Just as Nate was about to have the tengus move up to our static and log out, the buzzard came back through into our hole. We quickly logged the tengus off where they were, in the POS, to keep them from showing up when the buzzard scouted them out; this time he cloaked up and we assume he warped off to have an actual look around. And we remembered that one of our pilots had gone AFK for the night with her pod floating in a POS. Whoops. >.>
That didn't deter them, though, and Takusen reported that both orcas had entered warp, heading towards our static.
The scorpion was still behind at the POS.
"Alright, log the tengus back in and get to the C4. Vexors, jump through and hold cloak."
I was the only vexor in the ambush fleet, but I wasn't about to nit pick with explosions to be had; Nate and I jumped our ships through, Taksuen warped his loki back to the K162 side of the wormhole, and after dropping a warp bubble on our side of the hole Nate ran his sabre through as well. I put my tengu back in fleet even before the e-warp ended, and immediately jumped to our side of the static. Hitting the bubble, but the tengus weren't going through; they were there to keep the orcas from breaking through and getting loose in our system.
The two orcas landed on grid, and the sabre dropped a bubble immediately. Nate and I dropped the jump cloak and kicked out our sentry drones, getting the DPS going on the primary while pointing both of the orcas as well; Takusen doubled up his scram with my point on the secondary orca, and we got to work.
The scorpion landed 100km away from the action and began locking us up to try and jam; the primary orca jumped through the hole, but between the tengus and and the HIC bubble it quickly jumped back into the C4. I pushed my bomber through the static into the C4 and began burning towards the scorpion, afterburner on; I was hoping I could point it and keep it in the fight as well.
The scorpion got a few jams off, but I was able to relock the second orca and reapply my point before Nate had to refresh the sabre's bubble; the second orca jumped into our C5 while we were getting the first one into structure. The bubble in the C5 had dropped, so the orca began aligning away from the hole; the three tengus quickly pounced on it, and just as quickly we realized that none of the three had a point on them.
I had Karen in my vexor on my PC's main screen, my tengu on the second monitor, and my alt's bomber on my laptop; the bomber wasn't too far from the hole at this point, so I turned her around and jumped back into the C5. She burned towards the orca and began getting a lock so I could put her long point on it; it had taken too long to get her into the system, though, and the orca made it into warp before the lock finalized. It was that close.
Back in the C4, the first orca was dead and the scorpion had warped back to their POS; we pulled our drones in and orbited the K162 just in case. In the C5, we gave chase.
"Did you see where it warped to?" Nate asked. Of course I was watching it warp away, but Jij answered first. "Yea, it looks like they warped to the sun." "Well, warp to the sun then and finish it off."
So I warped my bomber to planet 1. *shifty eyes*
To be fair, both planet one and the sun were in line with the warp path the orca took, but personally I wouldn't warp to a system's sun unless I had friends waiting there for me. I also had my bomber land at 100k from the planet's warp point; I almost never warp to a planet at zero.
Orcas are sloooow. My bomber was already on grid, and I was already feeling slightly disappointed that the grid was empty, when the orca warped in and landed. It turns out the pilot had warped in at 0, so I called it out on coms (over the report of nothing at the sun) and burned in towards it. I missed the window between end-of-warp and cloak activation, so I couldn't lock the orca, but three tengus, Tak's loki, and the sabre all landed on the planet at 0 and quickly bumped the orca out of cloak. It exploded.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22734226
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22734224
We got the pods as well, at a couple hundred million each.
It was an hour after I had originally told myself I had to go to bed and logged out the first time, which had already been an hour after my bedtime, so although Nate invited the pilots left in the C4 to chat us up in our public channel I only hung around a little before I took off for bed. It had certainly been worth staying up.
o7
- "Miners on d-scan, in an ore site."
- "Hey, an active orca."
- "Carrier on grid, alone."
I logged back in.
The first report had them at a mining anomaly, but when Tak moved in to get a better look he saw that they were past it, at a cosmic signature; he moved out of scan range and dropped probes, nailed down the signature, pulled his probes and warped in right as the orca jumped back into the C4 from the C4's static, popping the hole. They were closing down their system, and our static was the only other hole on the signature list.
I had shipped into my Vexor Navy, while Nate grabbed his Ishtar and Sabre. The two of us moved to our static hole and cloaked up within jump range, forming the ambush fleet; I logged my covops alt in as well and put her just off the hole in a bomber, giving us a third long point if needed (or extra DPS if they brought the scorpion and it had to die quickly). The 911 ping went out, as well, and we sat on the hole and waited while Takusen watched their POS, where a third pilot was sitting in an orca as well.
They had probes out in their system - it was a fourth pilot in a buzzard, we saw after he jumped the hole into our system. The hole activated, and I almost held my breath for a moment - after about ten second the buzzard dropped the jump cloak, 8km away from my vexor, and reapproached the wormhole.
"I want to yell "BOO!" at him in Local so bad right now," Nate muttered on coms. We laughed. The guy hadn't even scouted out our hole before he jumped back into the C4.
One of our corpmates had responded to the 911 and logged in both of his characters, getting into tengus; I brought my own tengu alt online as well, giving us three of the T3's in reserve. All in all, it had shaped up into a rather nice little gang; I really wanted those orcas, but hopefully the fact that they had a K162 from an occupied C5 would trip enough flags that they'd send an escort for us to duke it out with as well.
It took them long enough to decide. Tak watched the pilots at the POS bring out a pair of orcas, one of the orcas swap to a Tempest Fleet Issue, the Scorpion hovered around... we imagined the conversation they might be having, and patiently waited them out.
Just as Nate was about to have the tengus move up to our static and log out, the buzzard came back through into our hole. We quickly logged the tengus off where they were, in the POS, to keep them from showing up when the buzzard scouted them out; this time he cloaked up and we assume he warped off to have an actual look around. And we remembered that one of our pilots had gone AFK for the night with her pod floating in a POS. Whoops. >.>
That didn't deter them, though, and Takusen reported that both orcas had entered warp, heading towards our static.
The scorpion was still behind at the POS.
"Alright, log the tengus back in and get to the C4. Vexors, jump through and hold cloak."
I was the only vexor in the ambush fleet, but I wasn't about to nit pick with explosions to be had; Nate and I jumped our ships through, Taksuen warped his loki back to the K162 side of the wormhole, and after dropping a warp bubble on our side of the hole Nate ran his sabre through as well. I put my tengu back in fleet even before the e-warp ended, and immediately jumped to our side of the static. Hitting the bubble, but the tengus weren't going through; they were there to keep the orcas from breaking through and getting loose in our system.
The two orcas landed on grid, and the sabre dropped a bubble immediately. Nate and I dropped the jump cloak and kicked out our sentry drones, getting the DPS going on the primary while pointing both of the orcas as well; Takusen doubled up his scram with my point on the secondary orca, and we got to work.
The scorpion landed 100km away from the action and began locking us up to try and jam; the primary orca jumped through the hole, but between the tengus and and the HIC bubble it quickly jumped back into the C4. I pushed my bomber through the static into the C4 and began burning towards the scorpion, afterburner on; I was hoping I could point it and keep it in the fight as well.
The scorpion got a few jams off, but I was able to relock the second orca and reapply my point before Nate had to refresh the sabre's bubble; the second orca jumped into our C5 while we were getting the first one into structure. The bubble in the C5 had dropped, so the orca began aligning away from the hole; the three tengus quickly pounced on it, and just as quickly we realized that none of the three had a point on them.
I had Karen in my vexor on my PC's main screen, my tengu on the second monitor, and my alt's bomber on my laptop; the bomber wasn't too far from the hole at this point, so I turned her around and jumped back into the C5. She burned towards the orca and began getting a lock so I could put her long point on it; it had taken too long to get her into the system, though, and the orca made it into warp before the lock finalized. It was that close.
Back in the C4, the first orca was dead and the scorpion had warped back to their POS; we pulled our drones in and orbited the K162 just in case. In the C5, we gave chase.
"Did you see where it warped to?" Nate asked. Of course I was watching it warp away, but Jij answered first. "Yea, it looks like they warped to the sun." "Well, warp to the sun then and finish it off."
So I warped my bomber to planet 1. *shifty eyes*
To be fair, both planet one and the sun were in line with the warp path the orca took, but personally I wouldn't warp to a system's sun unless I had friends waiting there for me. I also had my bomber land at 100k from the planet's warp point; I almost never warp to a planet at zero.
Orcas are sloooow. My bomber was already on grid, and I was already feeling slightly disappointed that the grid was empty, when the orca warped in and landed. It turns out the pilot had warped in at 0, so I called it out on coms (over the report of nothing at the sun) and burned in towards it. I missed the window between end-of-warp and cloak activation, so I couldn't lock the orca, but three tengus, Tak's loki, and the sabre all landed on the planet at 0 and quickly bumped the orca out of cloak. It exploded.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22734226
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22734224
We got the pods as well, at a couple hundred million each.
It was an hour after I had originally told myself I had to go to bed and logged out the first time, which had already been an hour after my bedtime, so although Nate invited the pilots left in the C4 to chat us up in our public channel I only hung around a little before I took off for bed. It had certainly been worth staying up.
o7
Friday, March 28, 2014
Officer Involved Shootings
"Alright, scouts are plus one. Free burn to the desto, best speed," the FC called.
I was one of the scouts, and I aligned for the next gate and entered warp. Another empty Null system... and another empty one... and an- wait! There is a pilot not in our fleet.
"POLICE RAID!" I blared over the local com channels, even as I aligned for the next gate. I giggled. "Bring your ship to the 3F gate with your weapons OFFLINED and prepare to be searched!!"
I was one of the scouts, and I aligned for the next gate and entered warp. Another empty Null system... and another empty one... and an- wait! There is a pilot not in our fleet.
"POLICE RAID!" I blared over the local com channels, even as I aligned for the next gate. I giggled. "Bring your ship to the 3F gate with your weapons OFFLINED and prepare to be searched!!"
It was Sunday, and I had poked one of the wormholer open fleet FC's into organizing a Police Pursuit Comet roam. We ended up setting out with almost fifty pilots from w-space in our fleet: a half dozen armor logi frigates, a few Kitsunes packing jams, and forty rail-fit Comets backed up by flashy lights and pilots ready to shout 'Pull over!' and 'Jettison the contraband!' in local.
We scared the crap out of the first couple of people we tried jumping in low sec - spiking the system by fifty pilots tends to do that, so Minus Dronus called for scouts/bait. I've never had problems with being shot at or taking one for the team, so I volunteered; we ended up with three comets going ahead of the fleet, finding Faction Warfare people in plexes or getting targets to aggress us on gates and stations.
The scouts took down a couple of T1 frigates in plexes, and a Noctis jumped through the gate the fleet was sitting on; he was quickly pointed and scrammed and ordered to surrender his contraband. When he didn't comply, of course the fleet blew him up for resisting arrest.
We had a few other criminals we snagged as we scouted through the warzone, and then finally caught something good: a fleet of a half-dozen yellow and red flashies camping a gate into high sec. One of the scouts landed on grid and was attacked by a tornado; I and the other scout quickly came to assist, spreading points and engaging the tornado, while the rest of the fleet quickly entered warp to join the fray. "OFFLINE YOUR HARDENERS, CRIMINALS!" we demanded, although we didn't seem to need to - the tornado went down /fast/, popping before the majority of the fleet had landed. The Hurricane had a heavier tank, but once it had forty Comets chewing on it it went down quickly, too. The third ship we had pointed had apparently not aggressed yet, though, and snuck out the gate; the rest of the gate camp scattered.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22579049
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22579430
We spent a few moments congratulating each other on putting an end to the criminal activities, and a Maller jumped through our gate; it cloaked up, though, and entered warp as it decloaked. "Your license plate has been noted!" I called after him in local. "We'll send you a citation in the mail!"
We took a detour through null sec, but as usual Null was pretty empty; when we got back into Low, though, the fleet jumped a gate and landed on a flashy yellow destroyer gang. There were easily a dozen to eighteen ships, mostly Algos' (Algosi?) and a few Navitases. They were already on the move as we entered system, warping off as we held cloak on the gate; the scouts gave chase!
The three of us followed them to a station in Vey, in the Placid region, and began ordering them to turn themselves in for questioning, to let us search their ships, and so on. They didn't respond, other than to acquire target locks; they held their fire, though, and the FC held the fleet out of the system as we waited for them to aggress. For whatever reason, they decided to start shooting me first; I informed the fleet, and the logi landed on grid as I was entering structure. They didn't save my comet in time (I exploded, to cries of 'Officer down!' echoed through coms), but because the destroyer gang was locked out of the station the rest of the fleet had a nice battle:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22579365
We took out half a dozen of them before they got away, and I headed back to Dodixie to grab one of the spare Comets I had in stock. The roam ended shortly afterwards, though, and we dispersed back to our uncharted systems... until next time.
Of special note was the following conversation I had with a Null Sec resident. :D
We scared the crap out of the first couple of people we tried jumping in low sec - spiking the system by fifty pilots tends to do that, so Minus Dronus called for scouts/bait. I've never had problems with being shot at or taking one for the team, so I volunteered; we ended up with three comets going ahead of the fleet, finding Faction Warfare people in plexes or getting targets to aggress us on gates and stations.
The scouts took down a couple of T1 frigates in plexes, and a Noctis jumped through the gate the fleet was sitting on; he was quickly pointed and scrammed and ordered to surrender his contraband. When he didn't comply, of course the fleet blew him up for resisting arrest.
We had a few other criminals we snagged as we scouted through the warzone, and then finally caught something good: a fleet of a half-dozen yellow and red flashies camping a gate into high sec. One of the scouts landed on grid and was attacked by a tornado; I and the other scout quickly came to assist, spreading points and engaging the tornado, while the rest of the fleet quickly entered warp to join the fray. "OFFLINE YOUR HARDENERS, CRIMINALS!" we demanded, although we didn't seem to need to - the tornado went down /fast/, popping before the majority of the fleet had landed. The Hurricane had a heavier tank, but once it had forty Comets chewing on it it went down quickly, too. The third ship we had pointed had apparently not aggressed yet, though, and snuck out the gate; the rest of the gate camp scattered.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22579049
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22579430
We spent a few moments congratulating each other on putting an end to the criminal activities, and a Maller jumped through our gate; it cloaked up, though, and entered warp as it decloaked. "Your license plate has been noted!" I called after him in local. "We'll send you a citation in the mail!"
We took a detour through null sec, but as usual Null was pretty empty; when we got back into Low, though, the fleet jumped a gate and landed on a flashy yellow destroyer gang. There were easily a dozen to eighteen ships, mostly Algos' (Algosi?) and a few Navitases. They were already on the move as we entered system, warping off as we held cloak on the gate; the scouts gave chase!
The three of us followed them to a station in Vey, in the Placid region, and began ordering them to turn themselves in for questioning, to let us search their ships, and so on. They didn't respond, other than to acquire target locks; they held their fire, though, and the FC held the fleet out of the system as we waited for them to aggress. For whatever reason, they decided to start shooting me first; I informed the fleet, and the logi landed on grid as I was entering structure. They didn't save my comet in time (I exploded, to cries of 'Officer down!' echoed through coms), but because the destroyer gang was locked out of the station the rest of the fleet had a nice battle:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22579365
We took out half a dozen of them before they got away, and I headed back to Dodixie to grab one of the spare Comets I had in stock. The roam ended shortly afterwards, though, and we dispersed back to our uncharted systems... until next time.
Of special note was the following conversation I had with a Null Sec resident. :D
[ 2014.03.23 19:29:56 ] Karen Galeo > o/
[ 2014.03.23 19:30:06 ] [redacted] > are you the police?
[ 2014.03.23 19:30:16 ] Karen Galeo > Yes.
[ 2014.03.23 19:30:24 ] [redacted] > omg
[ 2014.03.23 19:30:45 ] Karen Galeo > Are there any crimes you need to report, citizen?
[ 2014.03.23 19:30:45 ] [redacted] > so
[ 2014.03.23 19:30:54 ] [redacted] > yeah
[ 2014.03.23 19:31:09 ] [redacted] > i drink and i`m russian
[ 2014.03.23 19:31:18 ] [redacted] > it is crime?
[ 2014.03.23 19:31:32 ] Karen Galeo > No.
[ 2014.03.23 19:31:43 ] Karen Galeo > But you could go shoot someone.
[ 2014.03.23 19:33:01 ] [redacted] > nope
[ 2014.03.23 19:33:10 ] [redacted] > noobi-ship
[ 2014.03.23 19:33:21 ] Karen Galeo > o7
[ 2014.03.23 19:33:59 ] [redacted] > I just nearly killed
[ 2014.03.23 19:34:24 ] [redacted] > this wicked world
[ 2014.03.23 19:34:35 ] [redacted] > this wicked Galaxy
[ 2014.03.23 19:35:14 ] [redacted] > where were the police?
[ 2014.03.23 19:35:35 ] Karen Galeo > Probably confiscating valuable contraband.
[ 2014.03.23 19:35:55 ] [redacted] > no no
[ 2014.03.23 19:36:49 ] [redacted] > whiskey with cola is not contraband
[ 2014.03.23 19:37:24 ] Karen Galeo > >.>
[ 2014.03.23 19:37:26 ] Karen Galeo > :D
[ 2014.03.23 19:37:35 ] [redacted] > =)
[ 2014.03.23 19:43:12 ] [redacted] > how are you? how was your day?
[ 2014.03.23 19:43:35 ] Karen Galeo > It's going well. :D
[ 2014.03.23 19:43:54 ] Karen Galeo > Still roamng.
[ 2014.03.23 19:44:25 ] [redacted] > roaming?
[ 2014.03.23 19:44:34 ] [redacted] > sorry not understand
[ 2014.03.23 19:44:37 ] Karen Galeo > *patrolling*
[ 2014.03.23 19:44:39 ] Karen Galeo > ^^
[ 2014.03.23 19:44:42 ] [redacted] > ohh
[ 2014.03.23 19:45:57 ] [redacted] > probably hard to serve and protect Sunday
[ 2014.03.23 19:46:09 ] Karen Galeo > /emote snickers.
[ 2014.03.23 19:46:16 ] Karen Galeo > The criminals are keeping their heads down.
[ 2014.03.23 19:48:27 ] [redacted] > where are you from?
[ 2014.03.23 19:48:32 ] [redacted] > valiant police
[ 2014.03.23 19:49:09 ] Karen Galeo > Wormholes. :D
[ 2014.03.23 19:49:57 ] [redacted] > wh not have a police)
[ 2014.03.23 19:50:18 ] [redacted] > wh is anarhy
[ 2014.03.23 19:52:08 ] Karen Galeo > That's why we come out here to enforce the law. :D
[ 2014.03.23 20:10:22 ] [redacted] > are you usa-police?
[ 2014.03.23 20:10:31 ] [redacted] > or european
[ 2014.03.23 20:11:57 ] Karen Galeo > Nope. ^^
[ 2014.03.23 20:12:03 ] Karen Galeo > Just Wormhole police. :D
[ 2014.03.23 20:13:25 ] [redacted] > then you can not appear in zero systems
[ 2014.03.23 20:13:50 ] Karen Galeo > Yea, we just show up wherever. Wormholes are fun like that. :D
[ 2014.03.23 20:14:05 ] [redacted] > it is contrary to the statute
[ 2014.03.23 20:14:10 ] Karen Galeo > We're cruising Lowsec at the moment killing, erm, 'detaining' criminals.
[ 2014.03.23 20:14:24 ] Karen Galeo > And meh. We're wormholers. We go where we want. :D
[ 2014.03.23 20:14:57 ] [redacted] > anarchists!
[ 2014.03.23 20:14:59 ] [redacted] > !!!!
[ 2014.03.23 20:15:24 ] [redacted] > I would complain
[ 2014.03.23 20:15:30 ] [redacted] > :D
[ 2014.03.23 20:16:30 ] Karen Galeo > Heeee~
[ 2014.03.23 20:16:48 ] Karen Galeo > All complaints can be referred to Captain Minus Dronus in the 'bobisgreat' channel.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
A Day Full of Pews
I have no idea why I hadn't gotten into the Federation Navy Comet before. I like fast frigates, I like blasters... it is a great little ship for me to play around in, and much cheaper than that Daredevil I lost earlier this month (although, granted, the Comet doesn't have 90% webs). When the latest Rubicon patch landed and CCP re-introduced the Police Pursuit Comet, I thought the ship was so cute I had to have one - and, since I tend to make my ships blow up, I bought three.
Players who fly a Comet are encouraged to pull people over and make up reasons to fine them anything from 100 isk for 'Operating a Spacecraft With an Obscured Headlight' to several billion for excessive speeding in asthetically displeasing hulls. Of course, this being Eve, suspects are free to open fire.
I was undocking one of my Comets, 'Officer Friendly', to move it into our C5 on Friday when I received a challenge to a duel. I had a few other modules in my Comet for other ships still in w-space, buuuut... it had been a while since I had a good fight. I checked my erstwhile opponent - another Comet. I checked the local grid - nothing that looked suspicious, no logi floating nearby. I accepted the duel. Pews were to be had.
The fight went more or less perfectly for me, with Officer Friendly meeting all performance expectations. Right at the start I floundered for a moment, launching drones but forgetting to set them to attack, trying to orbit at 10k without webbing, that kind of thing. I regained my composure, though, and began operating how I was supposed to - I stuck my drones on the other Comet, changed my flight profile to 'keep at range', and began kiting the enemy Comet while my railguns and drones chewed through his armor. We ended up flying in a straight line, about 8km apart: right in my optimal range, but based on the number of glancing hits, I was at the extreme end of his range. I blew him up, and although I took damage I didn't have to kick on my armor repper.
Later that night, we began rolling our static for a high sec route - we had a pair of pilots that were moving into our C5, and we didn't want to escort them through low sec. We went through a few C4's, rolling our static until we got a C4-C4-C2 chain. C4a was an empty, unoccupied system, and C4b was inhabited but the pilots appeared to be AFK. There were a few pilots from Neko Neko Honpo, but when my co-scout accidentally warped to an ESS that had been planted at the sun (that then announced to the entire system that he was there) we didn't get a response. After stalking for a bit to make sure they weren't about to become active, we continued scouting - C4b turned out to have two C2's attached to it and we each took one.
My C2 was quiet, and had a high sec connection. Talene's C2, though, had an open connection to an active C4 - occupied by Pegasus Unity. The C2 also had a POS in it that looked like it had run out of fuel - anchored but offline, with a pair of SMA's and a corporate hangar array. I finished scanning my system down and went to the other system to keep an eye on things, while the rest of the corp slowly mobilized a PvP fleet - hopefully the SMA's would be full of loot, and hopefully Pegasus Unity would fight us for them.
With everyone shipped up, we began moving. A couple of us were coming down the chain, while another was bringing big guns in from high sec.
We got a fight - as the crew from Neko Neko Honpo jumped part of our fleet as it was exiting their system. We lost a Harbinger, the rest of us made it through and gathered up for a counter assault, and Neko Neko retreated back to their system. The dropped warp bubbles on the C4-C4 connection, retreated to their POS, and proceeded to not move for the rest of the night. We spent a few hours trying to bait a fight out of them (or Pegasus, since we knew Pegasus was watching: we had seen their covops ships), including things like running my Stratios around in both holes uncloaked, flying two Tengus (including mine) into Neko's system and blowing up their ESS and all of the warp bubbles, and sending an orca through to the high sec hole.
No takers.
So, with about twenty minutes left before down time, we popped the SMA's, scooped the loot, and started getting settled for the night. Pegasus Unity did show up at the end, popping the last of our Iteron's with a stealth bomber, but that night was a bit of a let down.
The next day, after my interview with Legacy of a Capsuleer, I saw the MOTD on the Bobisgreat channel flip. Open fleet roam, amarr-themed ships, in half an hour. Sold! We were joining up with RvB's Ganked, and we had about two hundred pilots in fleet when we moved out.
We were a blob. We had a big kitchen sink of a fleet, but it was effective and we scored a pile of kills. We ran into a gang from RAZOR in Doril and stomped them (http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22473255, their fleet looks smaller because we took no losses - some of their guys got caught in their own bubble and didn't get in to the fight in time) caught a few T3's from the locals as they bounced about, hopped back and forth through some lowsec and null sec systems. At one point the Goons mobilized a sniper tengu fleet, and we ran from that; they landed at extreme range and began volleying us one by one, so we fell back to a station to let people reship. While we were there Provibloc moved in with a fleet of Harbingers and Guardians, and began skirmishing with the Goons; when Provi pulled back, we undocked and followed them through the gate to engage. THAT turned into one heck of a giant brawl, and it was awesome. Goons, Black Legion, Provi, Brave, the RvB+Wormholers fleet... there were many pew pews, and much destruction. So many sides in the fight that the battlerep page is a mess, but it still shows the k-space pilots we sacrificed to Bob: http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22470369
I lost my Dragoon, went back to Sendaya and reshipped into an Atron, lost that, and began flying my cpasule back to Minmatar space to grab my nearest cruiser, a Caracal. We had heard reports of tackled capitals, and a guy the FC knew was bringing a Titan in to bridge our fleet to the fight. On my way back, though, one of our scouts in the C5 reported that he had been scanning down the new chain and had jumped into a C5/2 that looked like it was getting ready to fleet up for escalations, but that they had spotted him and he took off. He linked a few pilots, and I recognized the Wormbros.
I hopped into the Wormbro's public chat channel and said hi. We chatted a little, and they offered to fight a T1 cruiser brawl in the adjoining C2. In addition to myself, I had two other active pilots on; a bit of poking and scrounging got us up to a strength of five, and we met for honorable combat at the sun. We had four caracals and a shield thorax, up against a scythe, stabber, vexor, and two caracals.
Big shout out to Kast for agreeing to take over as FC; I kinda flubbed on the fleet comp for not insisting on getting us a pair of Osprey logis, but we had fun and the Wormbros were great. Their Vexor warped in ahead of the rest of them and we tore it up pretty quickly, then the rest of their gang landed; instead of moving straight for the scythe we tried to chew through its reps and take out a caracal, then switched DPS to the stabber when we couldn't break it. We were dropping steadily, and Kast made a dive for the Scythe (that had been sitting at 70k range). His thorax evaporated it and he followed up by finishing off another Caracal before going down. http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22472790
So, a great couple of days in Eve. o7
We got a fight - as the crew from Neko Neko Honpo jumped part of our fleet as it was exiting their system. We lost a Harbinger, the rest of us made it through and gathered up for a counter assault, and Neko Neko retreated back to their system. The dropped warp bubbles on the C4-C4 connection, retreated to their POS, and proceeded to not move for the rest of the night. We spent a few hours trying to bait a fight out of them (or Pegasus, since we knew Pegasus was watching: we had seen their covops ships), including things like running my Stratios around in both holes uncloaked, flying two Tengus (including mine) into Neko's system and blowing up their ESS and all of the warp bubbles, and sending an orca through to the high sec hole.
No takers.
So, with about twenty minutes left before down time, we popped the SMA's, scooped the loot, and started getting settled for the night. Pegasus Unity did show up at the end, popping the last of our Iteron's with a stealth bomber, but that night was a bit of a let down.
The next day, after my interview with Legacy of a Capsuleer, I saw the MOTD on the Bobisgreat channel flip. Open fleet roam, amarr-themed ships, in half an hour. Sold! We were joining up with RvB's Ganked, and we had about two hundred pilots in fleet when we moved out.
We were a blob. We had a big kitchen sink of a fleet, but it was effective and we scored a pile of kills. We ran into a gang from RAZOR in Doril and stomped them (http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22473255, their fleet looks smaller because we took no losses - some of their guys got caught in their own bubble and didn't get in to the fight in time) caught a few T3's from the locals as they bounced about, hopped back and forth through some lowsec and null sec systems. At one point the Goons mobilized a sniper tengu fleet, and we ran from that; they landed at extreme range and began volleying us one by one, so we fell back to a station to let people reship. While we were there Provibloc moved in with a fleet of Harbingers and Guardians, and began skirmishing with the Goons; when Provi pulled back, we undocked and followed them through the gate to engage. THAT turned into one heck of a giant brawl, and it was awesome. Goons, Black Legion, Provi, Brave, the RvB+Wormholers fleet... there were many pew pews, and much destruction. So many sides in the fight that the battlerep page is a mess, but it still shows the k-space pilots we sacrificed to Bob: http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22470369
I lost my Dragoon, went back to Sendaya and reshipped into an Atron, lost that, and began flying my cpasule back to Minmatar space to grab my nearest cruiser, a Caracal. We had heard reports of tackled capitals, and a guy the FC knew was bringing a Titan in to bridge our fleet to the fight. On my way back, though, one of our scouts in the C5 reported that he had been scanning down the new chain and had jumped into a C5/2 that looked like it was getting ready to fleet up for escalations, but that they had spotted him and he took off. He linked a few pilots, and I recognized the Wormbros.
I hopped into the Wormbro's public chat channel and said hi. We chatted a little, and they offered to fight a T1 cruiser brawl in the adjoining C2. In addition to myself, I had two other active pilots on; a bit of poking and scrounging got us up to a strength of five, and we met for honorable combat at the sun. We had four caracals and a shield thorax, up against a scythe, stabber, vexor, and two caracals.
Big shout out to Kast for agreeing to take over as FC; I kinda flubbed on the fleet comp for not insisting on getting us a pair of Osprey logis, but we had fun and the Wormbros were great. Their Vexor warped in ahead of the rest of them and we tore it up pretty quickly, then the rest of their gang landed; instead of moving straight for the scythe we tried to chew through its reps and take out a caracal, then switched DPS to the stabber when we couldn't break it. We were dropping steadily, and Kast made a dive for the Scythe (that had been sitting at 70k range). His thorax evaporated it and he followed up by finishing off another Caracal before going down. http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22472790
So, a great couple of days in Eve. o7
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
You are a pirate!
I trigger my voice coms, ready to report my find, when the CEO's voice cuts in. "Hey, Karen! Find anything out there?" I can't blame him; it's been a night of hunting, of scanning, of feinting and trying to draw out fights that, sadly, had not presented any actual fights yet.
"Yea. I have... hyperion, drake, drake, ishtar, drake, drake, basilisk basilisk."
It takes only a moment for Nate to ask if they are active and at a site - I was already narrowing down my scan range and seeing if I could find them. "Ehyea. Fleet is active, at combat site ITT. Warping in to get a look."
"Oooh shit," is the gleeful answer. "Come on, guys, fleet up."
I kick in my Stratios' thrusters and burn away from the wormhole in order to engage my cloaking device, hoping that luck is with me and nobody glances my way on their directional scanner during those precious few seconds where my ship is visible. I grin as I enter warp and listen to the fleet assembling, and then land on grid and begin providing further intel.
I had landed a little over eighty kilometers from the basilisks; I could see their cap chain running, and the blue glow of a shield transfer centered on one of the drakes. The other ships were down in the thick of things, swarmed by drones, both theirs and the Sleepers that reside in w-space. After a moment to make sure I am not about to drift too close to anything, I relay further intel: a few pilot names from ship IFF transponders, their corporations, and then I see it: these aren't the people that live in this system.
They're from nullsec space. All of the pilots are members of the Mordus Angels alliance.
Us wormholers are a destructive sort of people. I will gladly spend a few hours chatting with a fellow capsuleer, getting to know them, making friends, and then cheerfully try to turn their ships into joyous explosions for the sake of the Pews. It is, for me at least, a friendly competition and I would expect to be shot down and podded if any of my fellow wormholers caught me as well, unless we had made prior arrangements. Many wormholers are blue to nobody, and feel as though they must shoot anyone that isn't blue.
With nullsec, the rivalry is a little more... sour. To them, we are either the backwoods holebillies with suboptimal lolfits an unproven tactics, or the elitist rich kids with a dozen strategic cruisers each and so much money that we throw it away out of boredom. To many of us, nullsec pilots are too chicken to fight without a hundred fleet members backing them up, trained monkies and programmed drones that do exactly what they are told and are lost without a strict corporate structure. I realize that things are not so starkly divided, but that is the background I have picked up on.
And here I was, getting a better perch to watch a small gang of nullsec pilots operating in our turf. However, they were nearly done, and my backup was just now leaving our home system. It was a long chain - two C5 systems and a few C4's. The one I was in was designated 'C4d' on my map. I eyed the status lights of the pilots in our fleet, listened to the FC quickly going over tactics. We didn't have a blob; that wasn't how we rolled. We had one less pilot, their logi ships were stronger than ours, and that hyperion could put out a lot of damage. If we executed properly, though, we would win handily - the advantage I presented, giving the fleet the optimal place on the field to engage from.
"Alright, jump through the wormhole, warp to C4d, C4d." The fleet was only a few jumps away.
"Uh, guys? Shit. They killed the last sleeper, no more spawns. They've finished the site. It looks like... yea, they're warping out." I tracked the location they were leaving to, but it was a deadzone in space - nothing near by I could use to keep eyes on them.
"Well, where did they go? Find them." "I'm looking, I'm looking."
They dropped off of my scanner, and I had to widen angel to the fleet again; they had warped to a new location. I began zeroing in on it, when half of the fleet vanished, and then the other half. Crap. "They're gone, guys."
I was already in warp to the other side of the system before the FC's command came down; no luck. The fleet had exited the system, with one combat site still available. Speculation ran through the fleet - why retreat so quickly, with one more site left to check out? Had they caught wind of something? They hadn't collected their loot yet - a quick scan of the system sans filters revealed a staggering number of sleeper wrecks, including about twenty from the sleeper battleships. And the wrecks of a caldari battleship, and a caldari elite frigate. Maybe they had taken enough losses that they decided to call it, maybe a CTA came down. "Hey, guys! I have their noctis on scan." They still sent someone back for the wrecks, though, praise Bob. I had caught them at the last site, which meant a long wait, but we were patient. A plan was devised. When the noctis landed, I would pounce on it. Bump it. Jam its warp drive. Toy with it a little, see if the pilot would call for help, and hopefully we would get a fleet escalation out of it - it would be a sad night if we didn't get to cycle our guns.
It took the noctis what felt like hours to finally show up at the site I was prowling around. The encounter was over in seconds. I marked the spot of the first wreck the salvager tractored in next to himself, warped out, warped back in on top of the noctis, and rammed it with full power going to my microwarp drive. The collision sent the noctis spinning, although it kept trying to get back on approach to another wreck.
I resisted the urge to shout "STAND AND DELIVER!", and instead I quickly establish a target lock on the ship, pointed it, and kicked out my drones; a Mordus Angels falcon decloaked a short distance away from me and began locking my Stratios.
I got one salvo of fire off from my guns into the noctis' shield before the falcon's jam broke my lock; I tried to get my drones to attack the falcon, but I fumbled a little and didn't hit it fast enough. Trying to provoke a further escalation, two of our fleet members jumped into the system with me and warped onto grid; they locked up the falcon and began firing, but instead of hanging around or calling for help, the falcon warped off.
"Uh, why is there a capsule on... oh hell, he ejected?" one of my fleet buddies said.
I had automatically regained my target lock and point on the noctis when the jams dropped, and was still trying to assign my drones to assist the fleet guys in case of another jam and hadn't noticed the pod. Sure enough, the pilot of the noctis had ejected. And since I had his ship locked, he couldn't get back in. The pod warped off, and the three of us sat there surrounded by wrecks and an unpiloted salvager scratching our heads. One of our corp mates came in to grab the prize ship and fly it back to our station while I scanned down the hole the Angels had used to get into system - maybe if we chased after them, we could get them to fight. I mean, we couldn't be that scary, right?
Unfortunately, the pilot taking the noctis back reported that one of the holes enroute was in its death throes and would be collapsing soon; I began working faster, and had just pinpointed the only other hole in the system when another fleet member added that it looked like the noctis passing through had also put that hole on the verge of collapse. The FC didn't want to strand anyone in unknown space, so he ordered us all back home.
Next time, Angels... next time.
========================================================================
Although I am somewhat disappointed that the Angels didn't come back for the fight, I can't blame them; they had no idea if they were dealing with three pilots or thirty, while we knew how many of them there were and what ships they were in. I definitely want to give them props for having the balls to bring a fleet into w-space, and for being crafty with their loot - they anchored a cargo container at a safe spot, and the noctis was depositing loot at their safe spot between sites. That's what was taking it so long, and so when we caught it it barely had anything in it. Their falcon hung around on d-scan for a little after it left the field, probably grabbing the rest of the salvage.
I do feel like a pirate, having actually captured my first ship. :D Of course, without my corp mates to back me up things may have gone differently, so I can't just claim the ship as mine outright. I think I'll go ask Nate what he wants to do with it, though, just in case.
o7
"Yea. I have... hyperion, drake, drake, ishtar, drake, drake, basilisk basilisk."
It takes only a moment for Nate to ask if they are active and at a site - I was already narrowing down my scan range and seeing if I could find them. "Ehyea. Fleet is active, at combat site ITT. Warping in to get a look."
"Oooh shit," is the gleeful answer. "Come on, guys, fleet up."
I kick in my Stratios' thrusters and burn away from the wormhole in order to engage my cloaking device, hoping that luck is with me and nobody glances my way on their directional scanner during those precious few seconds where my ship is visible. I grin as I enter warp and listen to the fleet assembling, and then land on grid and begin providing further intel.
I had landed a little over eighty kilometers from the basilisks; I could see their cap chain running, and the blue glow of a shield transfer centered on one of the drakes. The other ships were down in the thick of things, swarmed by drones, both theirs and the Sleepers that reside in w-space. After a moment to make sure I am not about to drift too close to anything, I relay further intel: a few pilot names from ship IFF transponders, their corporations, and then I see it: these aren't the people that live in this system.
They're from nullsec space. All of the pilots are members of the Mordus Angels alliance.
Us wormholers are a destructive sort of people. I will gladly spend a few hours chatting with a fellow capsuleer, getting to know them, making friends, and then cheerfully try to turn their ships into joyous explosions for the sake of the Pews. It is, for me at least, a friendly competition and I would expect to be shot down and podded if any of my fellow wormholers caught me as well, unless we had made prior arrangements. Many wormholers are blue to nobody, and feel as though they must shoot anyone that isn't blue.
With nullsec, the rivalry is a little more... sour. To them, we are either the backwoods holebillies with suboptimal lolfits an unproven tactics, or the elitist rich kids with a dozen strategic cruisers each and so much money that we throw it away out of boredom. To many of us, nullsec pilots are too chicken to fight without a hundred fleet members backing them up, trained monkies and programmed drones that do exactly what they are told and are lost without a strict corporate structure. I realize that things are not so starkly divided, but that is the background I have picked up on.
And here I was, getting a better perch to watch a small gang of nullsec pilots operating in our turf. However, they were nearly done, and my backup was just now leaving our home system. It was a long chain - two C5 systems and a few C4's. The one I was in was designated 'C4d' on my map. I eyed the status lights of the pilots in our fleet, listened to the FC quickly going over tactics. We didn't have a blob; that wasn't how we rolled. We had one less pilot, their logi ships were stronger than ours, and that hyperion could put out a lot of damage. If we executed properly, though, we would win handily - the advantage I presented, giving the fleet the optimal place on the field to engage from.
"Alright, jump through the wormhole, warp to C4d, C4d." The fleet was only a few jumps away.
"Uh, guys? Shit. They killed the last sleeper, no more spawns. They've finished the site. It looks like... yea, they're warping out." I tracked the location they were leaving to, but it was a deadzone in space - nothing near by I could use to keep eyes on them.
"Well, where did they go? Find them." "I'm looking, I'm looking."
They dropped off of my scanner, and I had to widen angel to the fleet again; they had warped to a new location. I began zeroing in on it, when half of the fleet vanished, and then the other half. Crap. "They're gone, guys."
I was already in warp to the other side of the system before the FC's command came down; no luck. The fleet had exited the system, with one combat site still available. Speculation ran through the fleet - why retreat so quickly, with one more site left to check out? Had they caught wind of something? They hadn't collected their loot yet - a quick scan of the system sans filters revealed a staggering number of sleeper wrecks, including about twenty from the sleeper battleships. And the wrecks of a caldari battleship, and a caldari elite frigate. Maybe they had taken enough losses that they decided to call it, maybe a CTA came down. "Hey, guys! I have their noctis on scan." They still sent someone back for the wrecks, though, praise Bob. I had caught them at the last site, which meant a long wait, but we were patient. A plan was devised. When the noctis landed, I would pounce on it. Bump it. Jam its warp drive. Toy with it a little, see if the pilot would call for help, and hopefully we would get a fleet escalation out of it - it would be a sad night if we didn't get to cycle our guns.
It took the noctis what felt like hours to finally show up at the site I was prowling around. The encounter was over in seconds. I marked the spot of the first wreck the salvager tractored in next to himself, warped out, warped back in on top of the noctis, and rammed it with full power going to my microwarp drive. The collision sent the noctis spinning, although it kept trying to get back on approach to another wreck.
I resisted the urge to shout "STAND AND DELIVER!", and instead I quickly establish a target lock on the ship, pointed it, and kicked out my drones; a Mordus Angels falcon decloaked a short distance away from me and began locking my Stratios.
I got one salvo of fire off from my guns into the noctis' shield before the falcon's jam broke my lock; I tried to get my drones to attack the falcon, but I fumbled a little and didn't hit it fast enough. Trying to provoke a further escalation, two of our fleet members jumped into the system with me and warped onto grid; they locked up the falcon and began firing, but instead of hanging around or calling for help, the falcon warped off.
"Uh, why is there a capsule on... oh hell, he ejected?" one of my fleet buddies said.
I had automatically regained my target lock and point on the noctis when the jams dropped, and was still trying to assign my drones to assist the fleet guys in case of another jam and hadn't noticed the pod. Sure enough, the pilot of the noctis had ejected. And since I had his ship locked, he couldn't get back in. The pod warped off, and the three of us sat there surrounded by wrecks and an unpiloted salvager scratching our heads. One of our corp mates came in to grab the prize ship and fly it back to our station while I scanned down the hole the Angels had used to get into system - maybe if we chased after them, we could get them to fight. I mean, we couldn't be that scary, right?
Unfortunately, the pilot taking the noctis back reported that one of the holes enroute was in its death throes and would be collapsing soon; I began working faster, and had just pinpointed the only other hole in the system when another fleet member added that it looked like the noctis passing through had also put that hole on the verge of collapse. The FC didn't want to strand anyone in unknown space, so he ordered us all back home.
Next time, Angels... next time.
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Although I am somewhat disappointed that the Angels didn't come back for the fight, I can't blame them; they had no idea if they were dealing with three pilots or thirty, while we knew how many of them there were and what ships they were in. I definitely want to give them props for having the balls to bring a fleet into w-space, and for being crafty with their loot - they anchored a cargo container at a safe spot, and the noctis was depositing loot at their safe spot between sites. That's what was taking it so long, and so when we caught it it barely had anything in it. Their falcon hung around on d-scan for a little after it left the field, probably grabbing the rest of the salvage.
I do feel like a pirate, having actually captured my first ship. :D Of course, without my corp mates to back me up things may have gone differently, so I can't just claim the ship as mine outright. I think I'll go ask Nate what he wants to do with it, though, just in case.
Yar, har, fiddle de dee,
Being a pirate is alright with me,
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate!
Yo ho, ahoy and avast!
Hang the black flag at the end of the mast!!
o7
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