#xenuria

How do I explain Xenuria?  There is a lot there to unpack.  Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up. Let’s say Xenuria is space famous in EVE Online for being himself, or some version of himself, rather than for a specific action or event or for leading a famous (or infamous) group.  If you use the search box at the top of the blog and search on his name, you will find that I have…

FC: Asher Elias || Fleet name: Ferox Flun Feet || Op 8 || Peacetime Ships: Feroxs + Ravens + support

FLeet departs in 20 minutes

~~~ This was a broadcast from asher_elias

When this ping popped up I hadn’t undocked for a fleet op so far this month.  Granted, a week in Hawaii took me out of the running for most of that, so it wasn’t like I was missing it much.

Being away also meant that I missed the six hour Entosis tug-of-war op versus Northern Army, where two small fleets could basically make no headway against one another until one side just gave up in exhaustion.  Fozzie Sov fun FTW!  Asher goes over some of that in his podcast this week where he covers our deployment down south.

Anyway, a relaxing fun fleet seemed a fine way to get back into fleet ops after a break, and all the more so since I could bring my Raven.

The Raven was left over from a doctrine we tried out last summer in Querious.  My own Raven had been saved after the fall of ED-L9T and stowed away safely in Khanid to await another deployment.

So I logged right in… waited for the launcher to verify and update yet again… is this any better with the new launcher… cloned jumped down to our staging station, got in my Raven and joined the fleet.

I also insured the Raven, since “fun fleet” often means we’re going to die.  But what better ship to sacrifice than this one, which had been gathering dust in a hangar for the last six months.  Sure, it had some history.  It was my ratting Raven as far back as 2007 and had, among other things, made the run up to Deklein and back for the Revenant kill.  But a ship is a ship, and in the zen of EVE Online, you must be prepared to let go of any possession which you undock.  Plus, you know, fun.

There was a minor fitting change; I had to remove the MJD and fit a MWD, but otherwise when I undocked it was pretty much the same ship I left in the station last summer… the same to the point that I should have looked in the cargo hold as I had clearly used it to haul some extra modules and a spare mobile depot back down from Deklein.  I might have cleared some of that out had I noticed.  Ah well.  And so it was we did undock.

Undocking in Khanid

Asher steered us towards Querious.  We also had Lazarus Telraven along for the op and he was streaming the whole thing on his Twitch channel, including our voice coms, so any hostile in the area would have all the intel they could want with just a 15 second delay.

https://twitter.com/wilhelm2451/status/697962253522317312

As it happened, we were headed towards Pandemic Horde’s home at A2-V27, where we warped to the station and hung around on their stoop hoping that they might come out and play.  Eventually they obliged, undocking a sizable fleet relative to our own, including a triage carrier in support.

After a some initial losses we began to chip away at them, warping off and back as Asher tried to position us to play to our strengths versus their numbers.  Then again, Asher also warped us into an asteroid belt at one point, something he specifically mentioned had been an issue in past fights as big ships got caught and bounced off rocks, delaying align times and warps.

Ravens aligning out of an asteroid belt

We shook off drones by activating the smart bombs that most of us had fit, which had the side benefit of getting us on some blue kill mails for fun, but at the final point of the fight it was clear that we were rapidly losing our ability to put enough damage on our foes to get kills.

The last point of the fight

My own Raven went down on that last grid as our logi gamely tried to save me.

I’m sure that tracking disruptor was really hurting me…

As my ship exploded I warped off grid and then back at 100km to watch the remains of the fight.  We lost a few more ships, including Xenuria (See, he undocks! Xenuria for CSM 11!), as Asher got the remainder of the fleet headed outbound.  My staying alive a bit longer meant that my pod got on six kill mails, five of which were fleet members, due to damage I did before my Raven went down.  My pod is currently listed as the fourth most deadly ship for our corp this month… mostly because we kind of suck at PvP.  If I am the top killer for the month (I’m on 19 kill mails, seven of them blue, six of them in a pod) something is hilariously wrong.

Then somebody spotted my pod and I got popped and sent back to our staging station the quick way.  I listened on coms as the remains of the fleet extracted.  Pandemic Horde used a jump bridge to cut off the fleet’s escape, so Asher just had everybody safe up and log off when they could.  Not sitting still and dying made a few of our foes angry, and they went to Reddit to complain in the usual way.  The battle report shows we lost the ISK war, yet somehow we appear to have won on the rage front.  You would think people would be happy about us delivering some easy content to their doorstep.  Did we forget to say “gf” in local?

After a short time Asher had everybody log back in and brought people home.  We shall see if I can get on for the fight tonight to defend our station in 60M-TG.  Another Entosis struggle looms.

Below are the screen shots I took along the way in gallery form.  I also left the new camera on for the duration of the op to try it out. (You can see the new controls in that HUD screen shot.)  Once I changed the movement slider all the way to the fastest motion, it seemed to be okay.  And then, during the fight, I had the camera on a hostile as we warped off and it pretty much went crazy and wouldn’t stay pointed at anything, so I had to go turn it off to be able to keep space from flicking around me so fast it threatened to induce motion sickness.  Not quite ready for prime time.

Undocking in Khanid

Ravens in warp

Ravens hanging in space

Landing at a planet

Ravens aligning out of an asteroid belt

The last point of the fight