#saranen

It has been a while since I’ve been through Saranen, once our staging before the retreat to Delve after the Casino War. The Quafe Company Warehouse that was our home in Saranen The low sec system remains, however, a fine place to drop citadels in order to annoy those who live in our old space.  So there were a couple in there, placed as part of our “plant a citadel and watch fights grow!”…

Last Ship out of Saranen

Getting subcaps out of Saranen has proven to be considerably easier than getting my carrier down to Delve.  That week long adventure represents most of my effort when it comes to the move down to Delve. (The five days of jump fatigue I accrued faded away and was never an issue, so I won on that front I guess.) On the plus side, I was able to stuff quite a few ships in the carrier, so when it…

A POS Shoot in Saranen

Going to do hurricanes if I can get better numbers, our enemies are coming to fight us so get in fleet, I want to volley some nerds. Op 1 ~~~ This was a broadcast from asher_elias to all at 2016-06-29 01:57:39.912887 EVE ~~~ Though the station camp itself… never really a “hellcamp,” no matter how often EN24 chose to use the term, but still active and heavy at times… had largely subsided by late…

There was the possibility of a Naga fleet last night. Asher’s pre-op ping said that Nagas or Hurricanes would be the likely ships for the 02:00 fleet.  Having secured a few Nagas, I was up for that.  Also, Asher had actually stopped by and left a comment on the blog, which I figured was a sign that I ought to log in. (Maybe FC ships will be a topic on his next podcast.) I was on early, in my…

One of the recent changes in The Imperium, announced publicly on the Meta Show this past weekend, is a plan to run a number of fleet ops at standard times every night, each one having a regular doctrine and mission.  I strongly suspect that this is to boost participation in fleets by allowing people to plan their time in advance, as opposed to waiting for a Jabber ping to show up (or not show up)…

So the Moneybadger Coalition has come to Saranen to try to make us say, “uncle.”.

First it was just Pandemic Legion and NCDot.  They moved from 93PI-4 in Pure Blind to come and camp us.  They hung that Fortizar citadel on the same grid as our undock.

The Fortizar looms

Then the rest of the MBC started showing up.  More citadels were hung in space around our home station, the Quafe Company Warehouse at Saranen V, moon 9, with Darkness and Mercenary Coalition adding their own to the scene.

You can see three Fortizars on grid now

Even TEST hung one up, though they didn’t join the club fully, opting for an Astrahus directly above the station.

Key players declared war on us, so as to take station guns… which will shoot aggressors on the undock… out of the equation.

Not pictured: TEST, which was late on the scene

The MBC settled in to camp us into our station in Saranen.

Singing songs around the campfire

(image from this thread)

In their effort to defeat us, our enemy has had to become us.  As the CFC/Imperium had often been called Band of Brothers 2.0, the Moneybadgers have begun to look a bit like the CFC 2.0.  We have a coalition with overwhelming force made up of mutually blued alliances which hold the north… you have to be in denial not to see some parallel there.

Meanwhile, our groan worthy name for the conflict, the War of Sovless Aggression, had flipped meaning as well, since we are now without sovereignty and attacking those who hold it.  I didn’t like that name before, and it hasn’t aged well for me since.  I’ll stick with the Casino War, which goes back to the flash point that started the whole conflict back in January.

Over at EN24, it was announced that we were being “Hellcamped” nearly a week ago.  And then a few days later it was announced at EN24 that the siege had begun.  The MBC was going to sit on the undock in Saranen and… something.  Kill us I guess.  Make us give up, maybe?

On our side of the divide the loss of all our sovereignty has had an upside.  We have become something else as well.  As Asher Elias noted in his latest podcast, we are free to choose our fights now as opposed to being objective driven all the time.  If the enemy is out in force, we don’t give them a fight.  If they get bored and their camp of the undock dwindles… and this is why they are not the CFC 2.0, because the CFC of old didn’t get bored so easily… we undock and chase them off.

If the enemy puts an expensive bait ship on the undock, we can flash form and kill it before they can bring in their response fleet to reply.  With no objectives to defend, we get to measure our success in ISK efficiency, in causing more damage to our enemies than they do to us.  And when the enemy forms up their might to overwhelm us, we dock up again and the fight is over.

This hasn’t been ideal for everybody.  People who joined up to do null sec PvE are justifiably dissatisfied with the situation and have been leaving for greener pastures.  And I cannot imagine that the capital ship pilots are happy.  But for layabout subcap line members like myself, who barely lived in their own space when we had it and just want to fleet up and shoot things while suckling on the SRP teat, the situation has been almost ideal.  We could easily echo some of TEST’s post 6VDT-H sentiments.

Which isn’t to say that the MBC doesn’t get kills as well.  The fights are often bloody for both sides, and we generally win on ISK efficiency alone, having exchanged a pile of cheap ships for a few expensive ones.  And they own the undock when they want to and are able to pick off even those with insta-undock bookmarks with fighters now and again.

The question now seems to be who can outlast whom in this situation?

For the moment I lean towards us.  We are able to undock when we can win and get the sort of morale boosting fights that can sustain us while also keeping the supply train flowing into the station to make good our losses.  Even if we lose our citadel and the convenience that goes with it… a scenario which seems likely… we can still pick and choose our fights.

Our foes seem to have three courses going forward.

They can give up, which clearly isn’t a winning strategy.  I doubt that will seem viable to anybody in the short term, though there could be a long game possibility in it I suppose.

They can carry on as they are now and see who gets tired of this first.  That hasn’t been a winning strategy so far in Saranen, but tactics could change.  They might find their angle with the current level of effort.

Or they can try harder.

One way would be to sit on the undock with more forces more often.  Or, alternatively, they can use their economic muscle to buy up our doctrine contracts to keep us from re-shipping, denude the market in Jita of Harpies, Hurricanes, and the fittings that sustain us.  With all that IWantISK money behind them, they could starve us out by simply making everything too expensive for us.  I do not think we can out spend them head-on on that front.  The problems there are the Jita market and how much ISK it might take to conquer us via that route, especially when we can trade out doctrines.

Anyway, as I keep saying, the war goes on.  Saranen remains a busy place judging from the kill boards.  And, to go with the title, some screen shots from around the Saranen undock, including that bling fit Phoenix we got last night.

Apostle sitting on the undock

Cormorants tethered on our citadel

Harpies on the undock

Harpies hanging on their tethers

Hostile Vultures out of range of our citadel

Bling fit bait Phoenix under fire

Bait Phoenix fight

Bait Phoenix fight

Bait Phoenix fight

Wreck of the bait Phoenix

~~~ This was a broadcast from asher_elias to opt-all at 2016-05-25 04:22:07.447156 EVE ~~~

I was having one of those weeks where, on Sunday night, I wondered what I would write about.  I had finished the post for Monday, knew Overwatch would cover me for Tuesday, and and item from Tuesday’s EVE Online patch for Wednesday, if I could make something out of it.  But after that, it seemed to be a quiet week.  We’d lost all our sovereignty and were sitting in our soda warehouse in Saranen fiddling with citadels and towers.

But war will bring opportunity.  We took back a bit of sovereignty last night.  And then, just as I posted that tidbit and was finishing up a post about recurring opportunities, a Jabber ping showed up saying that there were hostiles in system and we needed more Hurricane’s on Thomas Lear.

I almost didn’t go, but the standing defense fleet tends to be easy come, easy go, so I figured I could run off soon enough if nothing was going on.

And it didn’t seem like things were going to go on.  I joined the fleet in my Hurricane, undocked, and anchored up, because the fleet was hanging about the station.  On our overviews we could see the enemy forming up around Pandemic Legion’s Fozitar citadel on grid with the station.

The Fortizar looms still

They were bringing Abaddons, the Amarr battleship which is supposed to be the cure for the artillery fit Hurricane menace that The Imperium has been bringing to bear over the last week.  Meanwhile, we were still stumbling around, trying to get people in fleet, trying to get some boosters, and warping around to find an angle on our foes.

The enemy got off the citadel and we tried to close, got chewed up a bit, looked at the numbers, and warped back to the station where we docked up even as more hostiles were being cyno’d into system.  We were not going to take the fight.

But people were still showing up in fleet and clearly something was going on in the intel channel, as we did not stand down, but undocked and sat on the station for a bit as the fleet filled in more.  Other forces were around to work with us.  White Legion was about, I even saw Talvorian Dex, who still hates us but joined WL to get in on the kills, in local.  Asher had a fleet of his own spun up and was supposed to be off doing something else, but the opportunity was right there in Saranen.

We started trying to take the enemy at the end of our range, warping in at about 70km and aligning out and trying to pick off what we could.  It was a narrow envelope of engagement as we were still lacking boosts so our lock range was less than the falloff of our guns and we kept moving beyond that limit.  We were able to volley off a couple of Abaddons, but we were losing Hurricanes pretty quickly as well.  An Abaddon is worth a little more than two Hurricanes, so we couldn’t exchange too many of ours for theirs and come out ahead.

Meanwhile there were also some Hurricane Fleet Issues on the field and some Machariels being cyno’d in to the fight.  We took a couple more runs and had some success.  The arty-caine’s strength is in its high single shot damage.  A sufficiently large fleet of them, all firing at once, can volley a ship off the field even if it is getting repair reps from its logi.  After several miserable attempts to do this, we actually started almost firing as one, letting off ragged volleys into the hostiles that would often destroy a ship in one go, or at least leave them so deep in structure that the next volley would take care of them.

We were still trying to operate at range, warping in, aligning out, picking a few targets while losing some Hurricanes.  We finally got our boosts setup and running after a while, and the fleet kept growing in size as people logged in, while those who lost ships were just warping back to the station to grab another Hurricane and rejoin the fight.

By that point the fight had moved to the tower we had on the station grid.  The enemy was arrayed about it and had six force auxiliaries, fax machines, in support.   By then though we had a full fleet of Hurricanes, other fleets in support, and things rapidly swung in our favor.

Thomas Lear had us load medium range ammunition at that point and we warped in much closer to the enemy and stood toe-to-toe and hit them with everything we had.  Time dilation kicked in, and for a while it was a slow motion fight.  A target would be called, locked up, volley’d off the field, and then the next one would be called.  Abaddon, Machariels, Bhaalgorns were all popped in succession.  We managed to knock off one of the fax machines, then continued killing off battleships.

I ended up on a lot of kill mails… looks like about 60 now that the kill board appears to have caught up… and I could barely keep up with the cycle of lock and shoot.  I did get one final blow, which means that my Hurricane has a kill mark on it… somewhere… I forgot to look after the fight.

At that point the enemy started to bug out and it was a scramble to lock some of them down and hold them on the field to be destroyed.  Most of their sub cap logi got away, but the five remaining fax machines were priority targets and were destroyed in turn.

And then it was over.  Tidi had lifted towards the end as we raced to slaughter the remains.  The tower had been saved and the enemy driven off.

We lost a lot of ships, 40 more than the enemy.  But as noted, Hurricanes are cheaper than Abaddons, much cheaper than Machariels, and you can expend a lot of Hurricanes for each fax machine kill and still come out ahead on the ISK war, which we clearly did according to the battle report.

Battle Report Summary

Curiously missing from the match was Pandemic Horde, which usually provides some bulk in Feroxes to help out.  Of course, there is some speculation on Reddit as to what may have happened there.

As we lolled about on grid looting and laughing, Mittens showed up on coms wondering what was going on.  He had missed the whole show.  A bit of command chat was rebroadcast over Jabber for us, which included this:

(11:25:13 PM) the_mittani: i asked you to kill a tower asher_elias did you kill pl instead (11:25:25 PM) asher_elias: sorry :(

Apparently Asher was neglecting his duties in order to destroy hostile capital ships.

I did not know it at the time, but this was the second batch of fax machines to go down in Saranen, as PL had lost five earlier in the day in exchange for a few Hurricanes.  We do like bashing fax machines.  At least somebody at TMC actually woke up and posted something about the war, though still no post about us losing all our sov.

On top of that, some intrepid spirits managed to take back another system in Pure Blind, doubling our holdings since my last post, with EWOK-K falling to us.

Asher pinged for his tower busting op, and I was tempted to go along, but it was getting late for me so I passed, logged off, and headed to bed… though not before a flurry of writing.  Asher got his tower kill without my help in any case.  Another op success.

All in all, a pretty good day for The Imperium.  The sort of day that keeps us logging in and joining fleets.  And just before all this kicked off a B-24 from the Collings Foundation (this one), which is out at Moffett Field with a B-17, a B-25, and a P-51 for the week, flew low over our house as I stood on the front lawn.  That certainly put me in the mood for a fight.  A good day indeed.

And, as I noted previously, our prodigious appetite for Hurricanes is probably stimulating the market in Jita.  I haven’t checked, but I wonder if prices are climbing or if production is ramping up, but it seems like an opportunity for a producer out there somewhere.  If you look at some of our Hurricane kill mails (like this one), they will show you the modules we are using, which are also be in demand.

The Hurricane op was pretty busy, but I did managed to get a few screen shots along the way.  I guess I can save that recurring opportunities post until tomorrow.  The week seems to be filling up on its own.

Fight at a distance

Hurricanes aligning in for the fight

Fax machines in the fight

Fax machines and our POS

Fax machine wrecks

Passing close to one of the wrecks

Dread Goonristas Hiding Point

More than a thousand hostiles in Saranen with us… local was up to 2,600… and somehow the citadel survived and went online.  No capital ships in the fight though. Now available in Saranen Yes, we lost the ISK war, including some other citadels set to go, but we got our new toy online.  Among the benefits is the ability to swap jump clones… if you want to move between implants… without a timer. I…