#null sec

The highlight of weekend fleet ops up until Saturday evening had been flying around Black Rise to pop a couple of Black Legion faction battleships with DBRB.  I hadn’t been in one of his fleets in ages, and it was good to see that he hasn’t calmed down at all.  The best moment during that op was when he had us on a gate, yelling into coms that the hostiles were on the other side and jumping through, only to discover we were on the wrong gate.  All those low sec names look alike.

Things were quiet on Saturday afternoon until the call went out to form up to take on some hostiles out in Cloud Ring who were hitting one of our towers.  We were going to head out in Tengu fleet, though we had to go through the usual round of trying to get enough Scimitars and boosters before we could get on our way.  Having gotten on my share of kill mails for the month, I joined up in a Scimitar to help keep the fleet alive.

I figured something interesting must be going on as when I undocked to join the fleet at the staging POS, there was a huge lump of capital ships undocking as well.

Heavy iron undocking

We had to sit in the POS and be cajoled for a while until the fleet composition settled down into something useful before we headed out and down the “so familiar I could fly it in my sleep” pipe from Deklein to Cloud Ring.  After nearly three years in null, I think I have finally flipped over and systems with seemingly random letters and numbers as designators seem normal while systems with actual names seem odd.

We got into the region and held a couple of gates out.  I gather we were waiting for our own caps to get into the system.  Eventually we moved into F7C-H0 as well though, and dropped into the fight under heavy TiDi.  The main fight seemed to be a slugging match between capital ships, but there were plenty of sub caps running around as well.  Our personal nemesis seemed to be a fleet of rapid light missile launcher fit Cerberuses. (fit)  Those seem to be the counter to our Harpy fleet doctrine, but they seemed to do equally well in a mass against our Tengu fleet Scimitars and Scythes.  They were able to lock up and alpha Scimis off the field before we could get reps on them.  And so when my name came up as a target, I could see that mass of ships yellow boxing me, meaning that they were locking me up as a target, at which point I called for shield reps.  But before help for me could arrive, the boxes went red and the missiles began to hit.

And soon I was in a pod in the middle of the battle, my Scimitar having exploded.

I had about a minute of peace as I tried to move towards the edge of the bubbles with an eye to warping off when I got caught and was sent quickly home to our staging system at YAO.

The battle was still in full swing, and my first reaction was to just jump into another Scimitar and head back towards the fight.  I knew the route after all, and a Scimi can be swift.  But that way lies madness and gate camps, so I reigned in my enthusiasm and took stock of the situation.  A Harpy fleet had just gone out (soon to pay the price in facing those Cerebruses), and was far enough away that I wasn’t going to catch them.

However, a Baltec fleet was forming up.  That meant swapping to an armor doctrine ship.  As usual, logistics was in demand so I went with an Oneiros.  I wasn’t in the right clone to fly the Apocalypse battleship, the mainstay of the fleet, in any case.  It needs an implant.  The joys of clone juggling.  Anyway, we got out there on the titan, as fleet boosters were obtained and logistics pilots were recruited (including any number of dead Tengu fleet logi pilots), and sat.

We ended up just sitting for about an hour before we got our participation link and were stood down.  We were, it seems, just a fleet in being, there to show the hostiles that we had more forces to drop on them should they pursue our withdrawal from the battle.

The whole thing was apparently a trap to lure out some CFC capital ships to kill.  While much of the CFC leadership was hanging out at EVE Vegas (here are Elo Knight and The Mittani, something I linked in fleet during the op) Black Legion and N3 set their plans in motion, and we stepped right into it.  (Rumor has it that the leadership in Vegas were all hovering over Skymarshal Blawrf and his laptop at one point to find out what was going on while they were away.)  The ISK war was tilted heavily in their favor, though they did not leave unscathed, losing some caps of their own.  The battle report sums it up as such:

Red: BL & N3 – Blue: CFC

Long time gaming pal Gaff, who just returned to EVE Online last week, managed to get on kill mails for ten hostile dreadnoughts before losing his Archon in the fight.  He was almost all the way into the POS shields as the capital fleet pulled back when he went into structure and exploded.

And so it goes.  Another big fight in before the November 4 Phoebe expansion turns operations like that from a two jump flit for capitals (16 ly covered from YA0 to F7C according to DOTLAN) to a 20 gate slow march through TiDi.

The two competing EVE Online news sites both have battle reports up.

EN24

TMC

Meanwhile I have, as usual, a few screen shots from my own short time on grid.  You can just see the ball of Cerberuses that killed me in that last picture.

The battle in progress

Scimitar, alive for the moment

Caps up close

Dreads wrecks in the mix

The Birth of a Pipe Bombing Campaign

When it comes to watching gaming related videos on YouTube, I must admit that I do not have much patience.  Small screen video, bad audio commentary, and a general inability to keep hold the interest of any viewer not captivated by shiny colors and an overbearing sound track pushes me to reject just about anything that demands more than 5 minutes of my time in the medium.

Some of that is my MTV…

We Pay Black Legion a Visit

We are suddenly living in interesting times in New Eden.  Change is coming.  A lot of people think they know how things will play out, but when CCP is telling people that they cannot predict the results, it can be hard to tell which pundit has some deep insight versus just some wishful thinking.

In addition to my own minor predictions, I am going to guess that, over the next few weeks, we will be…

Carrier fleet drops in

And then the titans appear

Titans visible through the fight

The titans dwarf the other ships

The situation around the gate

Doomsday on an interdictor

Titans on grid did not bring out PL, so there was no B-R or Asakai style escalation.  Not ready to have a supercap pyre just yet I guess.

Meanwhile, DBRB and his bombers were taking care of a hostile Abaddon fleet in one pass.

The alert said that more than 100 ships were in YA0 looking for a fight, so I logged right in.  I was in my high sec training clone, so I jumped back to my clone in YA0,  got into my Baltec Apocalypse, and got onto voice coms to listen to the usual operetta of a fleet form up.  The fleet commander, the tenor, must sing his sad tale of not having enough logistics (and too many interceptors) and how we won’t even undock if we do not get enough.  I sit in my Apoc and rationalize by saying to myself that it is a new month so I need a couple of kill mails, and in any case I am in my Apoc clone, the one with the EG-603 implant, which is required to fly our fit, so if I am going to get podded and lose it I am damn well going to do it in the ship that requires it.  I’ll fly logistics next time, I swear.

Eventually Red Crown cajoles enough people to swap that we meet the minimum doctrine requirements.  The logistics theme is not done yet though.  That motif will continue through the fight.  But we are able to start undocking, which turns on the time dilation.

Undocking in YA0

Red Crown had us align to the 2R-CRW gate in YA0, where Black Legion was reported to be lingering.  That is when we started to prove again that we can be very bad at EVE Online.  On of the squad commanders warped his squad to the gate rather than aligning, sending most of his squad to a quick and early death.  On person was able to cancel warp, the rest were blown up on landing, being served up for Black Legion like hors d’oeuvres.  The rest of us managed to align without warping to a fiery death.

Once we had a safe warp in, Red Crown warped the fleet and we landed on grid with Black Legion and the shooting could begin.  Black Legion was out in Tengus with a fleet of over 120 ships, a quarter of which were logistics.  As has been discussed elsewhere, logistics is a very powerful aspect of fleet composition.  This is why the FC is always shouting for more logi.  Black Legion was going to be a tough nut to crack with all that support.

The first thing on the agenda was to clear off a Mobile Cynosural Inhibitor that was on grid, so that we could bring in some more firepower in the form of some carriers and their sentry drones.  This led to a moment of comedy where everybody locked up the inhibitor, shot it into structure, then moved on to the next target.  When you are shooting ships, and you see one out of shields, out of armor, and taking damage to its hull, it is time to think about moving onto the next target.  But with structures, the hull actually makes up the bulk of the hit points.  The inhibitor only has 20K hit points armor and shields combined, but 150K in the hull.

So everybody shot it into hull and moved on, leaving it still alive.  So the FC had to get us all to go back and finish it off so some carriers could land on grid with us and add their fire to the mix.

With that finally accomplished, we started trying to whittle down the enemy logistics, which were on the far side of the battle from us.  Baltec fleet in general, and Apocs in particular, are good and picking off ships at range. With the right crystals loaded, I can engage targets out past 150km.  So the FC began calling Scimitars as targets.  We even managed to pop the first one, but then the hostiles were alerted and each subsequent target got reps before we could get it into armor.

BL Scimitar taking heat

On our side though, casualties began to mount.  We had half as much in the way of logistics, and a third of it was being flown my one guy who was multi-boxing.  Add in the fact that armor reps apply at the end of the module cycle, as opposed to the beginning of the cycle with shield reps, and there was a lot less margin for error on our side.  Even TiDi, which usually makes logistics easier, as your reaction time remains the same while the world around you slows down, wasn’t enough to help us out.

We swapped to other target types, and managed to knock down a couple, but once the hostile logi was wise to our plan, reps thwarted further kills.

At some point Red Crown went down and Reagalan took over the FC slot.  He aligned us away from the hostiles so we could engage at range and then tried a few tricks to see if we could alpha ships before reps kicked in.  He would have us all hold fire until we were ready to go, then give us a target to lock up and shoot.  When this worked, it worked quickly, but for the most part Black Legion seemed to be on the ball and calling for reps as soon as we started locking somebody up.  Anybody who was slow died, the rest got reps in time to thwart our damage.

There were a couple calls to get more logistics in our fleet and a small Celestis fleet went up to try and damp the hostile logistics, though they were targeted and destroyed in pretty short order.  After a while of mounting losses for little gain, we left the field and headed back to the station.  Black Legion won the day, with more kills and more ISK destroyed.

Team 1: CFC, Team 2: BL

The battle report from which that graph was drawn is available here.

Some screen shots from the fight.  There are a couple of shots where you can, thanks to colors, spot people using the wrong crystals for their lasers.

Aligning before the fight

Focus fire early in the fight

Reps and beams

Hostile Broadsword

Sentry drone fire on a Huginn

Apoc taking fire and reps

Apoc and sentry drone beams

Apoc fire

Long range beams

Reps going out

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Super Caps…

We expect the impact of these changes to be emergent, and as a consequence are unpredictable and will take a while to develop on TQ [Tranquility, the EVE Online live server]. This plays into our longer-term plans…

CCP Greyscale, Long-Distance Travel Changes Inbound

Oh, we’ve spent a lazy summer, with no major sovereignty war to occupy us, going on and on about how null sec is broken and how it…

I tend to leave Jabber up most evenings, and not a lot of op announcements have been showing up.  And those that did pop often came at awkward times.  I have to be at my computer and ready to go and have the free time available when things get rolling.  A non-strategic fleet op tends to get moving somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes after it has been announced, and once an op is undocked and on its way somewhere, catching up can be a dubious proposition.  Travel in EVE Online is not trivial.  Catching up to a fleet op solo in anything other than an interceptor can be a dubious proposition.  Gate camps that will hide from the main body of the fleet tend to close in to try and grab stragglers and you have to cover every inch of space that the fleet has covered.  Nobody can summon you to the raid, you have to fly there on your own.

Flying Alone…

Still, sometimes it works.  I did managed to get into a fleet already 30 minutes live, fly out, and get on a kill mail before getting blown up myself.  I managed to warp into spot that made me the closest target and that was that.

Saturday night I gave it another shot.  There was a call for a Harpy fleet already 15 minutes old when I sat down at my desk.  As my wife was going to be away for a couple of hours, I figured I had time enough to give it a shot.  I logged in and got in my Harpy and then couldn’t get in the fleet.  I commented on the CFC general channel that the fleet was full and the FC, Alphastarpilot, got back to me in less than a minute with a “try now.”  And, hey presto, I was in.

And I was behind.

They were already 8 jumps down the pipe towards their destination and the FC was calling for people to catch up.  I undocked and immediately started down the route posted in the MOTD in fleet chat.  Three jumps in and then the FC began calling for people to reship to Bursts, as we were short on logistics.  I had to stop and ask myself if, already running behind, I should further compound that by turning around and reshipping or if I should just press on to catch up.  I decided to press on rather than miss out.  And it started to sound like the J4LP guys coming from another direction might have us covered on the logistics front.

I got to within a couple of jumps of the fleet before it started moving again, so it was just warp and jump and warp again trying to catch up.  Eventually the fleet stopped.  Part of the plan was to pass through a wormhole that the Circle of Two team had found that would get us a big leap towards our destination.  But he wanted everybody to go through together so nobody ended up lost in W-space where you actually have to know how scan and such to get out.  I managed to join the fleet on the wormhole.

Landing on the wormhole

Once we were assembled, we passed into W-space, flew to the exit wormhole, and ended up in Black Rise, Caldari low sec space.  From there Alphastarpilot had a plan.

Based on intel he had, we were going to drop on a group attacking a POCO in Pavanakka.  Our Harpy fleet, with about 70 people present, would land on them and attack in hopes that the would call in reinforcements in the form of a carrier.  So the FC got us into position and we landed on them and starting shooting up their logistics support.  Some of them were spooked, but the rest held on, a cyno was lit (which we were told not to shoot) and an Archon landed in our midst.

The big target arrives

At this point Alphastarpilot calls in a Razor fleet that has been hanging around the area and we all drop on the Archon for the big kill.  Op success.

At that point the whole thing was probably the best fleet op I had been in all month.  A capital ship kill is always worth the effort, and another 16 kill mails was nice.  We could have gone home happy at that point.

But, according to intel, the people we dropped on were pissed and looking for a rematch.  Razor went on their merry way, happy to have helped, but we were still hanging around many jumps from home with nothing else to do, so we decided to stick around.

The one thing we had lost was logistics, so while our foes got themselves sorted out, we docked up in a station and started scrounging for replacements for our lost Bursts.  The J4LP guys managed to come up with a couple of Bursts and a few logistic fit Bantams for us, which gave us just enough coverage to go back for a second run.

Again, intel managed to put us in the right place at the right time and alerted us to the fact that our foes had phoned in for some help in the form of some ECM Blackbird support, no doubt in hopes of locking us down to be easy meat.

However, that did not end up working out for them.  When we clashed again, this time in Akidagi, Alphastarpilot called the targets, we shot them with a minimal amount of target splitting (when you get a secondary in the midst of a reload cycle, it is easy to think you should just move on to the secondary target if the primary looks like it is going down), and managed to get on top of things, again taking few losses and tearing a strip off of our foes.  I was on kill mails for 9 of the Blackbirds that came out in support.

They broke off and we chased around trying to find them again, catching one big fat target on the gate in Hikkoken.

Where we fought in Black Rise

From there we headed to the station when they seemed to be hold up and hung around the undock in hopes that they might come out for another round, but it did not look promising.  After a while playing undock games, Alphastarpilot pointed us back towards our wormhole and brought us home.

All in all, it was the best op of the month for me and ended a slow September on a high point.  I tried to assemble a battle summary to sum up who was there.  Alphastarpilot and his team did a great job.  I also have to commend Alphastarpilot for just being a great FC, calling all the right targets, and being able to pronounce, seemingly off the cuff, every low sec system we passed through.  I know a couple of time I thought to myself, “Ah, so that is how you say that name.”

And I also had a new ship spotting.  I saw my first Mordu’s Legion ship, as we had an Orthrus cruiser along for the ride.  It takes a while for new ships to filter into fleets.

As is the norm, I have some screen shots from the op, including a couple of the Orthrus, after the cut.

Our visit to low sec.

I landed a little far from the wormhold

Burned into range

Harpies in W-Space

Harpies on the move

An Oracle in the fight

The big target arrives

Shooting the Archon

After our station break

Orthrus cruising

Keres orbiting

Orthrus with the Harpies

Hostile Ashimmu

Blackbird taking heat

Playing station games

Orthrus with us in warp

Taking the wormhole back home