Renovating Providence

I was able to participate in my first CTA for about one and a half weeks today – a lot has happened since my last decent battle report.

The long story short is that Providence region is being divided up into small little pieces by Atlas, Against All Authorities, Systematic Chaos and Ushra’Khan. Sylph alliance has completely gone from the influence map and it won’t be long before CVA disappears entirely also.

Sir Pewalot on an Erebus, waiting for a jump bridge

Today’s CTA was called in order to complete the take over of R3-K7K just before downtime. It was planned that Systematic Chaos were going to have this system, but -A- and U’K had brought a fleet to assist.

I had the pleasure of flying with my corp mate and long-time blogger Wensley of Rifter Drifter in the tempest here

The first part of the operation went smoothly – we had to take two titan bridges to get from our home system of GE- into the target system of R3-K7K. The middle system was 9UY – the Ushra’Khan-owned station system that fell a couple of weeks back.

Using only carriers/supercarriers and sub-capitals, we jumped into the target system on top of a small battlecruiser-heavy gate-camp which sensibly bugged out as fast as they could. We then warped to a POS and jumped our small dread fleet in.

carrier fleet aligning to POS

Next it was the station – We warped everyone to the station and started pew pewing it. I knew that we would likely be doing this so beforehand I contacted my mate at CCP and got them to refit my Megathron with Special GM lasers as you can see in the shot below. This meant the station dropped far more quickly than it would have otherwise.

Super-mega-ultra-pew-pew railguns

As you can see here: Wensley was a bit slack and didn’t call in any CCP favours and his weapons are somewhat lacking

Note the station name: “Science and Slave Augmentation Facility”. This is honourable work we are doing here, removing the slaver blight once and for all.

Nevertheless – there cannot be a battle in providence without some kind of drama. In all this time, despite the fact that Systematic Chaos were going to be given the system, there were no Sys-K pilots in our fleet, nor in local until just before the station was about to die (about half structure). Then a couple popped in and unanchored their Sovereignty Blockade Units, rendering the station invulnerable and preventing the system take-over just before down time.

I don’t yet know the fallout from this, hopefully it is not a prelude to war between -A- and Sys-K. I don’t think so because they’re involved in their own war at the moment apparently and they probably just didn’t want the system to be theirs anyway, but they went about it the entirely wrong way.

Now, after downtime, we’ll have to anchor our own SBU’s and wait for three hours while they anchor and online, then siege the station again – another five days of sieging……. bah. such is life in 0.0.

Also: Hi everyone reading this via Capsuleer! *waves* It feels good to be part of the blog pack! I’d appreciate some feedback: I base my blog very heavily on screenshots. is it easier to read the blog with full shots like above, or with clickable thumbnails like this:

Updated Impressions of the South

Having written a blog post when I first was accepted into Against All Authorities (here) I thought I should update my impressions based on having actually had some combat time with my new alliance as I’ve found it is very different, and yet the still the same in certain aspects.

Supercapitals
The main difference that I’m noticing is the number of supercaps fielded. I’m certain that this is mostly due to the dominion and subsequent motherSuper Carrier changes, but it certainly makes a difference. Mosupercariers are fielded almost as commonly as normal carriers. Prior to the recent few weeks I had never seen a mothership in actual combat, now they seem quite common.

Mothership deployed at the hostile station in 3D-CQU

The Number of titans is also huge compared to what I am used to from the Northern Coalition. In the North, we were lucky if we had two titans online at a time and often there wouldn’t be any titan pilot logged in at all. The corporation I was in had a special corp event to launch our first titan with all the associated pomp and ceremony, but then we never heard from the titan pilot again. I believe that this had a lot to do with the type of war that was being fought in the north, which I will discuss later, and also the pre-dominion titan functionality causing them to be only used when there was no danger of a hostile capital fleet. Now, of course, there is safety in numbers and the titan pilots from -A- are very active.

edit: I have recently found this blog: Jump On Contact and it looks like the NC is also fielding supercapitals in a similar way as we are down south

Capital Fleet at the 9UY4-H siege

Station and I-hub timers
This is new as part of dominion and it has completely changed sov warfare. Having taken sov in D-G and 9UY recently, my impression is that since the sov changed is guaranteed if you can hold the system for 5 days or so, there is more morale, more motivation to fight when there is a definite end in sight. It depends on the system of course. The defensive fight for P-2 that I participated in while I was in Mostly Harmless was quite a different story as there was only 5 moons in the entire system the enemy could effectively remove our ability to fight by destroying our towers and so the normal Dominion sov mechanics did not really apply.

Sub-capital -A- and U’K fleet about to jump through and engage a CVA battleship fleet

The recent fighting in Z-REF3 and 3D-CQU (mentioned in Ga’len’s blog here) has been another story, but one thing for sure, the new mechanics seem to make for more good fights so long as there isn’t a massive fire-power disparity like we saw in 9UY. Reports are coming in from both sides of the fighting in the providence/catch area that the fighting has been good in recent times.

Offensive War
The biggest change for me is going from a defensive grind to an offensive mindset. No longer can I go home from CTA’s via jump bridge network, I have to rely on titan bridge, which is actually working out very well. – so far in all major engagements there have been regular (30mins or so apart) titan bridges to and from the battle. I can’t imagine how much isotopes/ozone is burned through every operation, but I guess we do hold a fair amount of space and therefore wealth.

Also, I’ve noticed the larger number of haulers required – moving things like blockade units and Territorial Control Units. The battlefield seems much more dynamic now. But these are just impressions, others may have an entirely different opinion of course.

Crane at a gate

So far I’ve achieved 87 kills, 72 not including pods and I have lost a HAC and a pod with +4 implants. Not bad – I hope to keep this ratio going long into the future.

In other news – I’m away next week so I’ve prepared two screenshot posts to appear during the week to keep you interested

The fighting spirit

This (trying very hard not to be ranting) post was mainly inspired by a comment on my (mostly ranting) post here.

Here is the comment in question but feel free to read the entire discussion on the original post:

First of, the proviblock only lost d-g because of grid lag, -A- took the field first, and due to the unfortunate issues introduced in dominion, it appears that whoever takes the grid first wins.
Your corp then proceded to rub it in by bumping out pilots out of a POS bubbles using passwords they got their hands on by placing spies within CVA, underhand tactic that the Provibloc would never use.
The people of Providence have a loyalty that -A- players don’t have. You sound like a glory supporter, jumping to whichever corp you feel you will win with, maybe you should think about trying to stick it out with an underdog alliance and try and put up the best fight you can facing overwhelming odds.
What I understand the least about -A- is that they completely missed the oppertunity to take advantage of the fall of goonswarm. Delve region is worth so much more than Providence, yet you decide to fight for pointless little systems and make life difficult for an easier opponant when you could have push full force into delve and taken over that region. Instead you let it fall to IT Alliance, who I believe will want to come for your blood in the not-too-distant future.
Yeah you can bully the proviblock, but think about it in the long term, its going to be much better to clear out, leave them too it, and concentrate on bigger enemies. Even if you push them out, -A- will fall eventually, and you wont stick with them, you’ll jump into the next strongest corp that will let you in… Loyalty is more important than brute strength.

Yes, I admit that I am an alliance grunt, I have no knowledge of what either CVA or -A-/U’K have in store for the future, so perhaps I’m missing quite a lot somewhere. Perhaps providence has some epic smackdown planned. I’d also like to admit that I feel no ill will whatsoever, I am not bitterly ranting like Helicity Bson did in the epic post about carebears far from it.

I’d just like to address a couple of issues, the first of which is that I have switched alliances to be part of the winning team. In doing so I also hope to demonstrate that despite being an alliance grunt, I know something about defence in both pre and post dominion.

First of all: I did not leave Mostly Harmless (part of the Northern coalition) solely due to the fact that they were on the back foot. In fact, from the moment I entered nullsec until when I left in early January I have only been fighting defensive wars.

We fought against Tri, although that was before I started this blog

We fought against Evoke continuously, holding on, sometimes with the rest of the Northern Coalition, often by ourselves to the critical stations in Cloud ring. When they got the advantage and held our station systems, we fought back.

We fought against Sons of Tangra by ourselves, as they struck into our critical high-end moon systems and staged their entire capital fleet just outside our home region. We won because we counter attacked and they made mistakes. We did not stop harassing them on their home turf. Heck – we reinforced their R64 moons by deep incursions in frikking stealth bombers. We camped their jump bridges, we brought as many people we could to the fight.

We fought against Pandemic Legion who were hell bent on reclaiming all our R64′s just before dominion hit. They presented so much of a threat that we ended up losing the entire region of cloud ring to Evoke while we were defending our home systems. But still we made an effort to harass Evoke and yes, we got wiped out often also but we gave as much as we got. yes, ok, sometimes the northern coalition managed capital blobs. but when the NC weren’t backing us and we faced superior forces in a cyno jammed system we got into stealth bombers and executed coordinated attacks on their RR battleship fleet and made sure that we at least had sub capital fights rather than loosing a system without a fight at all.

Again, we tried to fight off evoke. Here we were fighting a war on both fronts. Pandemic Legion in the heart of our systems in Pure Blind and Evoke making a very good effort to take over cloud ring. We made some very bad mistakes and lost a lot of ships, but immediately afterwards got back into stealth bombers and executed coordinated attacks on PL’s battleship fleets. (the more perceptive here may note the recurring “get in frikking stealth bombers” theme here). Even after the entire Northern coalition tried to force Evoke out, but after some initial success we had to pull back, leaving Cloud Ring to the hostiles.

And again Triumverate came, and we fought against them but also didn’t let evoke take cloud ring without a fight. I didn’t write about the battles where evoke came and destroyed our r64′s in cloud ring because they had more in fleet. I didn’t write about the hours spent sitting staring at a system being totally ripped apart by hostiles because screenshot opportunities were hard to come by. Nor do I write blog posts about the hours spent sitting in a covert ops ship trying to find out where the hostile jump bridges are or which pos’s have Capital ship construction facilities, or where the enemy stages from because that is seriously boring stuff. I write about epic battles, whether we win or loose or even when the battles don’t happen but we made an effort. At one point it was so bad that we were told to move to an NPC station because we didn’t think we could hold Pure Blind. We also had our main staging system attacked, and destroyed prior to which I spent hours ferrying alliance assets out to a rear staging point. And a week of logging off in the ever decreasing number of pos’s in system.

As for the few fights I have had in providence. I have to say, I’ve only been here 2 weeks, I don’t know the history behind -A- and Proviblock, so I have no grudge or any emotion about this. The fight in D-G was great – and I don’t mean great in the fact that we won completely and utterly, I mean great in the fact that Providence actually tried to win. In fact, if I would say that the fight wasn’t satisfying at all. Read this post: Turkey Shoot and you’ll see my views on one fleet wholesale slaughtering another fleet. You’ll see that it is not enjoyable, I would much rather have my ship destroyed and me be podded ten times over if it meant we could have a good bit of a fight.

The reason why I am disappointed with CVA is that there is no resistance, there is no counter attack, you’re not deploying SBU’s in GE-, you’re not harassing our jump bridge network. Did you know that if you incapacitate a jump bridge or pos-based cyno generator, we have to rep it up or kill it entirely before we can online another one? Do you know how freaking long that takes? You can do that with a smallish battleship fleet and therefore prevent reinforcements coming to the front lines and/or divert valuable assets away in order to fix the logistics network. Put together a fleet of 40 or so stealth bombers, find a valuable POS of ours that has only large guns on it and reinforce it or kill cyno generators! If the tower starts to target you, cloak up! make it a war of attrition, leave alts cloaked up in our carebear systems and our staging station systems. harrass our undock points, camp our jump bridges! Don’t just sit there whining about grid lag on a battle that happened half a month ago. Do something!

As for the station loss itself: With the new Sov mechanics, you have 5 days or so, and two major battles with which to reset the attack. Control the system yourselves and the enemies won’t be able to gain it back without a lot of effort. That goes for both sides, attacking or defending In case you didn’t notice, a combined force of -A- and IT alliance was pushed back by goonswarm when we (I wasn’t here at the time) tried to take 49U from them. You’ll notice that goonswarm, despite being at a timezone disadvantage managed to prevail against a superior force. Don’t tell me it’s impossible for CVA to at least try the same, yet over those 5 days sieging 9UY there was no concerted effort to take back the system. there was the occasional freighter breakout fleets and the occasional solo stealth bomber (solo stealth bombers won’t do much at all, get in a group and coordinate your targets and warpings) but that was it. As I have said, I don’t know the reasons high up in CVA for this, but I’m under the impression that it was a major psychological blow to all providence holders, and indeed it was intended to be. -A- doesn’t want that system! we just wanted the psychological blow that it would deliver and we succeeded in that.

Finally, I’d like to state the obvious: holding nullsec requires fighting. If you’re not capable of fighting, then you need to be good friends with an alliance who is. That is the way of it. it’s not “unfair” it’s not “bullying” I don’t even understand what you mean by that…. it’s just the game mechanics. you’re in 0.0 you are not going to get a free ride. I do understand that there are a lot of people in providence itching for a fight. It remains a leadership problem then if you don’t get what you want.

Perhaps it’s not relevant now, U’K have 9UY and are NRDS therefore with the exception of D-G, the holders of Providence region are still NRDS. -A- is withdrawing from the offensive for the short term. perhaps this is the politics that I’ve been missing, perhaps this was intended by CVA.

Still, CVA would do well to heed what confucius said. A quote that I have in my Bio:

The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved. – Confucius (circa 551-479 BC)

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to twist the knife, I’m trying to exhort you to take control yourselves!

oooh, and again finally: I’d like to sincerely thank the CVA and proviholder members who have posted on this blog – I appreciate being corrected on things like the relationship with goons and the fact that I’m missing political goings on that are over my grunt-like position in the alliance. I never got that honest feedback when I was in the NC. Being able to have an open dialogue with your enemies is certainly refreshing. I will approve any comments posted on this blog usually within 12 hrs at the latest (I usually post at night and I need my sleepy time) so please be patient if it doesn’t appear immediatly.

Unity Station 9UY4-H

I can almost hear the tears of joy in the voices of the Ushra’Khan members on voice coms. After many years of struggle against the Amarr, they have finally reclaimed the station that they created and was taken from them so long ago.

Unity station
Haven for the Ushra’Khan
Freedom for the Slaves

A glorious moment even if the station was relinquished without a fight.

May the Ushra’Khan use it wisely. -A- are going back to catch and I’ll be able to dock for the first time in a week.

In other news, Razor and Morsus Mihi alliances both declared war against -A- the very moment the station fell, and then Wildly inappropriate shortly after. We’ll see if anything becomes of this, I expect Mostly Harmless and Tau Ceti Federation will follow suit.

Going for the heart of providence

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that title was some sort of romance novel. In fact this story is one of a love/hate relationship, which I am unfortunately not qualified to tell from the beginning, being in the North when it started. I only joined the fighting on the night that Against All Authorities took D-GTMI from Paxton federation, one of the Providence region holders.

Apparently the providence holders were offered a truce. Being the grunt I am, I was not party to the discussions, but from what I heard here are the events that brought us to the current situation:

Providence holders (CVA + pets) and Against all authorities (-A-) have had a Non Aggression Pact in terms of sovereignty changes but were enemies in terms of roaming fleets.

CVA got disbanded by a hacker and -A- marshalled to help protect their space from would-be invaders until they were reinstated by CCP

-A- Started a war with Goonswarm in 49-U.

CVA took the opportunity to launch an attack into -A- space, cutting us off from empire space.

-A- didn’t take this very well, especially after the recent show of solidarity and came back hard, taking an important station in providence (D-GTMI).

-A- after claiming the system in what is possibly the the largest fleet fight ever combined with possibly the largest single loss of capital ships ever with the greatest disparity between those on the winning side vs those on the loosing side ever proceeded to offer CVA a truce.

For reasons only their roleplaying god knows, CVA abandon common sense and reject said truce outright.

—-

This brings us to the subject of today’s blog:

-A- begin an offensive into the heart of Providence, their trade hub of 9uy, a system that has not been contested for three years.

—-
A vengeful battleship fleet prepares to jump into 9UY

I was at work, following twitter, when I read a post from my corp mate Wensley saying that the providence holders just got a nice surprise. I hastily tweeted back “What? What happened?!?!” knowing that the conflict had likely escalated. This was met with a “log on, get in fleet” and then a private “We’re taking 9UY”.

By this time it was 6:30pm anyway and after mouthing a big “O…..M…….G……” I decided I didn’t have to work late anyway and literally ran to get the next tube home.

9UY is a fair way from our home staging system, and so I was hoping that I hadn’t missed the titan bridge. it turned out that they had already started sieging the system, but CVA had counter attacked by dropping Sovereignty Blockade Units in our empire access system of HED and in the newly taken D-GTMI. Our fleet had returned to kill the attacking fleet and the SBU’s and I managed to catch the bridge back into 9UY in my Megathron.

Fleet jumping into 9UY

On a side note: the -A- fleet megathrons are a very tight fit. I have Advanced Weapons Upgrades to lvl 5 but I still needed to replace my 3% capacitor recharge hard-wiring implant with a 1% CPU implant in order to fit everything. Same goes for the recommended Eagle fit, I need a t2 power grid module, a power grid rig and energy grid upgrades to lvl 5 to even fit the damn thing…(yes, I have a new shiny… I can finally fly HAC’s after putting it off for so long. but that’s another blog post).

Unfortunately the battleship fleet at this stage didn’t see much action as the providence holders had exausted their resistance. Their jump bridge network was incapacitated and they didn’t seem to have any titans with which to bridge around from. whereas we were able go from HED, to D-G to 9UY at will with our titan pilots seemingly everywhere at once.

Shortly thereafter both the station and the infrastructure hub were reinforced and the timer was is a very favorable saturday night.

The order was given to return back to the home station and come back in roaming gang ships to lock down the system. I had my client set to have all the visual effects on for once and managed to get a shot of an open titan bridge:

Titan Bridge open. ooooh, shiny

I thought about taking my eagle out. This baby can hit at 165km, which for a cruiser is pretty damn good. my other option was a falcon which I haven’t flown for ages or my trusty onyx. after actually undocking and jumping into the system where the next titan bridge was going to be, I changed my mind and went back for what I know. My faithful Gothic Robo-Chicken has been through multiple wars in the north and has yet to let me down.

We bridged into 9UY again and proceeded to lock every gate down. At this point the FC explained why he chose this system to attack, fairly simple really: Rather than grind through all the station systems one-by-one, we’re going straight for the heart

9UY is a trade hub, and a number of CVA freighters were seen dropping off stuff at the station in recent days.
9UY is a crossroads. if you look at a map of Providence region you will see that it is a vital system, tying together the alliances CVA, -7-, STEEL and SLYPH who control a small portion of neighboring catch. in order to marshal their forces, the providence holders would need to pass through this system. Also, if, perhaps one were to look at their jump bridge map, not that I approve of metagaming, but perhaps I have been privy to information that suggests it is a fairly central point for the providence holder jump bridge network.

These two things have been the case for years and so this was a very obvious target for anyone wishing to shut down CVA and pets as fast as possible.

Onyx Heavy Interdictor on a gate

It was quite fun actually there wasn’t any more than about 150 in the system at any one time, but we had almost complete control over all the gates. Large mobile warp disruptors were anchored on most of the gates so I parked myself at one that didn’t and threw my bubble up. A friendly MomSupercarrier pilot sent me some fighters and although I managed to get two hostile battleships into armour, I didn’t get any kills before they burned to the gate as there were only 3-4 of us on that gate at that time. I mentioned on TS that they may want to come help kill the 15 man battleship gang that was attacking my poor little (albeit very heavily tanked with 115,000 hp) cruiser but for some reason the battleships decided to burn to the gate rather than face the might of the one heavy assault missile on my ship and they got away. good times

For some reason, throughout the night, there was a gang of about 50 hostiles that appeared in 9-F, two systems away and went back and forth, playing chicken with our support ships. as soon as we jumped in, they’d safe or dock up. this happened about 5 times.

Bubbling their station out of frustration. Wait…. that’s a minmatar station!

Eventually we left a cloaked interdictor there and Soundly Spanked them it looks like they were not all that prepared or just threw their fleet together at the last minute.. it looks like its trying to be a battlecruiser gang I guess. In any case, as you can see from that killboard link, the fight was reminiscent of the fight for D-G. we killed 34 ships and 11 pods for a loss of 5 frigates and two pods. lots of “gf”‘s in local afterwards, and at the time I thought we were fairly equal, but it seems not.

I think I need a good beating from a providence fleet to give me a reality check, because I’m starting to think they’re generally incompetent.

Another bit of fun we had that evening was when we killed a HAC gang that warped to the gate that I was at. The FC called primaries and we dutifully killed them one by one. Then at the last one, a guardian logistics ship, the FC told everyone to stop and get rid of their drones from him. Then he said to rep him up, “he’s our pet now” he said.

and so we did:

Bubbled and Scrambled and Neuted and Jammed and Target Disrupted

It’s those little moments in eve that make it such an enjoyable game to play. Even the guardian pilot seemed to appreciate the joke, saying “awww, AAA loves me” in local.

We thought it was only propper that we send him home the express rout and eventually killed him and his pod.

The -A- killboards for the operation in 9UY (not including our kills in 9-F) show the VERY favourable result of 222 ships killed for 16 ships lost. This was becoming a recurring theme in our engagements with providence:

To finish off. I was very nearly able to reproduce the screenshot that I showed on my fourth blog post ever. The angle of the Nyx wasn’t quite right to get the sun glinting off the top, but it was damn close. I still haven’t managed to get a clear view of a Hel. I got one the other day, but it had about three titans in the background, ruining the shot (I never thought I’d say that).

Nyx MotherSupercarrier by Starlight

Currently I’m logging in and out at a POS in 9UY, helping with the 23/7 lockdown of the system which will continue until it is in -A-’s hands in about 5 days or so.
The station comes out of its first reinforced cycle on saturday, I hope I can be there for that battle also.

First impressions of the South

So I have recently joined Against All Authorities. I originally applied to Ushra’Khan, but weighing up the options and pros and cons of each option, -A- suited me better. I’m used to being in a large space holding alliance while Ushra’Khan is more of a roaming-bases alliance. Every corporation generally has requirements to remain part of it and the Ushra’Khan corporation that I applied to required a payment of anywhere between 2 and 10 million per month per member to support the role-playing wardec against the providence members. The corporation that I have joined as part of -A- requires that every member get 20 killmails per month to remain in the corporation. This was more to my liking, and so I chose to join them. There were some other smaller reasons that also contributed. The 20 kills haven’t been hard to accomplish, having been on 26 ship kills in 4 days. some of those were of course as part of the large battle for D-G, but nevertheless I think it won’t be hard to maintain a good rate.

Before I go any further, I’d like to set the record straight about Goons and the Providence holders. I blame Podded Podcast for the source of this misinformation but I have since seen many people on both sides of the battle lines deny that the goons and providence holders are in any sort of non-hostile agreement, including seeing declarations to that end in Ushra’Khan pilots bio. I’d like to apologise for perpetuating this myth.

Against All Authorities Market system of G-E

First Impressions of the south:

Against All Authorities
This alliance seems extremely well organised. It seems like there is almost 50% russian pilots and so every fleet that I have been on except the small roaming gangs have had the fleet commands translated from english into russian either by the FC himself or a translator. Most of the important fleet commands are also transliterated into fleet chat in english, which most of the russians can apparently read better than they can understand spoken english. This is quite cool. I think though I will make an effort to at least learn how to count in russian so I can get an idea which gate they’re talking about before the translation comes along.

It is hard to compare it to my previous alliance Mostly Harmless because there has also been some changes in the sovereignty mechanics since I last participated in large fleet fights. It seems that Capital ships are deployed with an almost reckless abandon compared to what I’m used to and Battleships are relegated to an almost support role. This is good in a way as it increases the incentive for pilots to train for capital ships. I’m certainly inspired in any case. on Saturday night we had a CTA to go and destroy some goon POS’s in Querious and the battleship fleet wasn’t used for anything except destroying cyno jammers so that the capital fleet could warp in and do its thing.

General fighting
The highlight of the evening was coming back from querious to Catch via empire, where the fleet of 50+ battleships stumbled upon a 5 man war target camp in a 0.9 security system. our scout mentioned they were there and one of the alliance undocked a freighter at the station and warped it to the gate. The wartargets must have been so busy wetting themselves that a freighter had been stupid enough to warp to the middle of their little camp that they didn’t notice the battleship fleet jump in. We killed Two Loki’s. Very cool.

Also of course, we had the huge fight in D-G the other night, the same day I joined.

Fleet Salvation Initiative
My first thoughts when joining the alliance and reading alliance mails about CTA’s was that everything was fairly similar to what I’ve been used to for so long. Get the Teamspeak details, get the jump bridge map, bookmark all gates along the main routes etc. but then they kept on referencing “FSI” as in: “CTA 18:00 Dreads > Carriers > BS > FSI > support” which usually tells you what to bring in order of priority. After asking around I found that FSI stood for “Fleet Salvation Initiative”. this is simply the most organised bunch of logistics ships that I’ve heard of in a nullsec alliance. if you can fly a logistics ship but can’t afford, or don’t want to afford one. just grab an alliance logi ship before the op and hand it back afterwards. Pilots are encouraged to rotate out from damage dealing ships into the FSI every now and then.

Casual Roaming
My prior experience to frigate/cruiser roams have been mixed. In the north, unless we stumbled on a gang of empire guys wanting a bit of pew, or some pirates that ventured into nullsec for a change, most of the fights were close things. We would go roaming down through cloud ring and syndicate where Evoke was at the time and during these roams we all knew it was only a matter of time before an equal or more powerful fleet of evoke or Sons of Tangra was formed to take us down and it would be an intense fight on a gate somewhere, after which only one side would emerge victorious.

My first roam through providence however was completely different.

I dusted off my Onyx, which hasn’t seen action for a couple of months and joined up with a mixed cruiser/frigate gang that was going for a little roam through southern Providence. Ga’len a fellow blogger from Ushra’Khan joined up in his vagabond and about 20 of us roamed free, back and forth through a few dozen systems owned by CVA and Paxton Federation. No one stopped us, no one seemed to care. We hit a little bit of a gate camp at one point but they were quickly dispatched. We went to one station system and bubbled the station, staying there for a few minutes while unsuspecting proviholder members undocked and died. Now, when I first joined eve, I spent a little bit of time down in severence’s space and I had access to their intel channels. When a red was reported nearby you safe’d up and waited until they went away or got destroyed. I find it hard to believe that providence’s intel channels have degenerated so far that people were so willing to die to our fleet.

Bubbling a station

Perhaps it is just a lack of morale after losing D-G to -A- or perhaps it’s just a general incompetance. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but my initial impressions are not good.

What was good however, was getting back into my Hictor. they seem to be appreciated a little bit more in this alliance. I did stuff up at one stage – that station in the screenshot above is an amarr refinery. I’d never seen one of these before and moved to the other end and bubbled, not realising that the undock point is the flat end, not the pointy one. “Fail bubble” on teamspeak and a sorry from me in fleet chat and I changed to the position you see above. I won’t make that mistake again.

Other thoughts
I am in the same corporation as Wensley of rifter drifter fame. he is also a new recruit. it will be interesting comparing our blogs. I think we have different blogging styles and we come from different backgrounds in the game so there shouldn’t be too much overlap. hopefully he’ll pick me up when I exaggerate too much about -A- victories

Station Killing D-GTMI

once more we find ourselves in D-GTMI.

The destruction of the i-hub went swimmingly, you could say it was almost overkill:

Then Thursday night the station came out of reinforced. This time, as before I slipped into the system in my tengu.
shortly after, however I was accepted into -A-.

I don’t have much story to tell here, so I’ll let the screenshots do the talking.

Capitals at a pos ready to go

the cap ship battle commences and we warp in our big guns:

sixteen titans!

I managed to get on a kill with my token multi-spec ECM (I couldn’t find heavy missiles on the markets in the vicinity)

As the station came out of reinforced, our cap fleet warped to the station, blotting out the sun.

CCP atlas turned up in a Polaris frigate and for some reason seemed to pop our large T2 bubble that was on the station:

Towards the end, there was almost 1600 in system, with everyone weighing in, including Atlas.

one of my corpmates flying a titan posted this in corp:
23:34:32 Combat Your Judgement hits rhialto [GSY](Revelation), doing 679547.9 damage.

Here is the final -A- killboard – as you can see it was quite a slaughter:

http://www.a-kills.com/?a=kill_related&kll_id=353578

last I checked it was 232 kills for 11 losses. and of course, we took the station.

it was certainly a good first day in my new corp

The battle for D-GTMI

This has been reported elsewhere and is perhaps overshadowed by the news that NOL has been taken from the goons in the heart of Delve but here is the story of last night.

I had finished hauling a large amount of my ships down to the high-security systems just outside providence/catch last night when I decided that a whiskey-fuelled roam through nullsec would be just the ticket to celebrate. I knew in the back of my mind that I’d likely lose the ship but I didn’t care.

Turns out I didn’t though. Initially I thought I’d have one more roam through providence while I’m still not red to the residents there, but I got sidetracked.

I fitted out my tengu with an interdiction nullifier, covert configuration, warp core stabilizers and nanofiber internal structures. this is as hard to catch as any ship you’re going to get and it paid off. There was a heavily populated gate-camp by Against All Authorities (-A-) on the gate from empire but I blew past them. A few systems in and I went through another large camp with permanent bubbles anchored. it took me a while to realise that I had stumbled on a major battle between -A- and allies vs the providence holders.

I thought I’d hang around to see the show despite being neutral to both parties. I had my graphics turned right down due to the nearly 900 people in system so sorry for the quality of the shots.

Current location: D-GTMI
Sovereignty > Paxton Federation (Vulnerable)
Constellation > 4BZ-R3
Region > Providence
Security Level > 0.0


Immediately after entering the system, an old corp mate of mine from a year ago convoed me. Turns out he had been in Systematic Chaos for 6 months or so and was fighting on the side of -A-. It was good hearing his side as it went along.

First of all, it was my duty to take a screenshot of a Sovereignty Blockade Unit which I had never actually seen up close before, having always had something more important to be doing, like shooting the bad guys. Now I wasn’t allied to anyone and had warp disruption bubble immunity so I had the freedom to move around the battlefield:

Sovereignty Blockade unit and two anchored bubbles at a gate

Next stop was my very first deep safe. Both sides jumped in capitals at a deep safespot, which, although I’ve not used these much, give time for whoever is jumping in to get their ships out before anyone can possibly warp to the cyno beacon.

Deep safespots 253au away from the station. the safespot bookmarks you see there are 14 AU apart.

It was actually quite funny at one stage. The first cyno I warped to was lit by an -A- blackbird. after hanging around for a while about 10 or so severence stealth bombers turned up. I thought they’d target paint the blackbird and shoot it with torpedos or something. but no… they launched bombs…. I counted 9 bombs (at 1mil or soeach) before the blackbird died. talk about cost efficiency…….*rolls eyes*. They left and the cyno pilot was dead so I scooped the loot: some t2 ecm modules, t2 10mn mwd etc. not bad for all the not fighting I did to get it.

At this point I was told by my mate that they were “titan bowling” where they warp titans into a hostile pos, hoping to knock out any ships inside….. then they blew up the pos as you’ll see in a screenshot at the end of this post.

Next was a trip to see the aggressor’s capital staging POS. Here was a fairly largeish fleet of both -A- and UNITY (Ushra’Khan) capital ships that seemed to be slightly smaller than the Northern Coalition brought a while back vs PL but not less impressive by any means:

Capital ships in a POS.

Shortly, their non-capital fleet warped to the station. I thought I’d be smart and warp to the station from the opposite direction of the POS, but it turned out to be a bad Idea. I warped to an asteroid belt first, then back to the station at 100, only to land about 10km from the bulk of their fleet. luckily I didn’t become decloaked, but it was hairy there for a few minutes.

-A- and UNITY sieging the station

Then they warped in the big guns….

capital ships land at the station

In case you missed it, that’s eleven (11) titans on the field according to my directional scanner, five avatars and two each of the other titans.

This image: pretty much sums up the fight