First Fleet Op with ANZAC Alliance

So as I mentioned previously I joined up with ANZAC Alliance corporation who are part of Executive Outcomes. We currently control Cloud Ring and are unfortunately allied with Goonswarm.

So I rounded up all my PVP gear and took it to the designated system where the corp jump freighter pilots move things back and forth between highsec and nullsec.

Occator Deep Space Transport

Then I moved my medical clone out to our home system and podded myself to get out there. The first thing that you should do when moving to any new space is make bookmarks 150+ away from the gates. This is so you can be assured you are clear of any bubbles that may be on the gates. So I bought the cheapest frigate I could find and a ridiculously overpriced mwd and spent an hour or so making bookmarks around the area.

cheap vigil frigate

It was about a week before my stuff arrived via jump freighter and since then I spent about another week waiting for a scheduled fleet op to happen during the time I usually play.

Turned out that Today was the day! A fleet operation notification was placed in our “Ship Violencing” forums, we were told to bring “battle cruisers T2 and 3, rapiers, coverts, tackle, and MOAR dps ships that go pew pew and logistics (scimi).” I didn’t have a drake ready so I jumped in my trusty Gothic Robochicken Onyx and headed out.

Onyx Heavy Interdictor dwarfed by an Avatar Titan

One thing I was blown away with was the new animations for jump bridges…. instead of the gate “bloop” there’s this massive space/time tearing sound that is absolutely epic! and animation that looks like this: I was having such a nerdgasm taking screenshots that I nearly missed the second bridge…

Turns out the fleet was a major logistics operation to transport the massive amounts of modules and minerals required to deploy our own station! Some of the modules were being built in Lowsec and some in high sec, so the support fleet’s job was to protect the freighters….. I have never seen so many freighters in one spot before.

Freighter Fleet

On the whole, it was a fairly dull evening, however sometimes these evenings are required. If we’re going to make our space better then sometimes the boring things need to be done. The FC and the other corp/alliance directors were busy the whole time though. We were occasionally told to shut up on Teamspeak just so they could think, although mostly it was friendly banter .

So for us, there wasn’t any pew pew. We did sit on a lowsec gate to highsec to ensure the freighters didn’t get bothered as they moved in and out. but as none of us thought we were going to be doing a lowsec op, we couldn’t hit anything….. The frigates we had couldn’t tank the gate guns and the cruisers/battlecruisers didn’t have the scan resolution to target fast enough. and when we did get something slow enough (a bestower hauler) those of us that could lock ended up being stopped by the “do you really want to do this” dialogue box….. So I will add to my list of “things to take in your HIC Cargohold” a sensor booster with a scan resolution script so you can swap it out with an active hardener if you get the chance to dock and you know you won’t be able to bubble.

Nevermind – objective achieved: Station Egg (see this guide on outposts: linky) will be placed tomorrow night just before downtime and it will grow into a station by tomorrow evening.

One thing I did discover, and I’m glad it was during a non-combat operation. Missile explosion effects in fleet for some reason cause a graphical glitch on my client and cause the client to pause for a good 10 seconds:

After turning off explosion effects it is fine.

Well, hopefully I’ll have some actual battle reports soon. Things seem to have died down in the north recently. I can only hope that someone tries to take it from us. My experience of Cloud Ring in the past has been quite violent (linky linky linky.)

On another note: to settle a dispute that some corp members were having my HIC guide got linked in corp chat and on jabber and it wasn’t by me. Turns out googling for “EVE online HIC guide” brings my blog up as the top result. Great success!

My HIC Guide being linked in corp chat

Roam through providence

And so as I mentioned I was going to do in my last post, I took my trusty Onyx and had a bit of a trip through Providence.

My Onyx Heavy Interdictor…. it doesn’t look good from any angle

This being the first time I have jumped into 0.0 space since I left the game two years ago, I was overly cautious. I had my alt scout and basically took my time to go through. My friend followed in his trusty rifter and we spent a bit of time going over the basics of nullsec survival. We made bookmarks near the gates, we had a bubble demonstration and eventually made our way to 9uy. Last time I was here I had the pleasure of bubbling the station for pew pew. This time I bubbled it for the lols

I was a bit disappointed however, there were only 5 in system, no hostiles. Still, it freaked me out a bit. In High sec you can be fairly safe assuming you’re not carrying anything of great value and there are no war decs against your corp. in nullsec with a proper alliance you can be certain of your safety if local contains only blues, but in Providence, despite the NRDS intention, you can’t tell who is going to kill you.

We met some nice proviholders from Sanctury Pact, and I remembered that seeing an onyx on screen is probably not the most peaceful ship you’d want to see. If it was me, I would assume that if I saw a lone HIC coming towards me, there would be a medium to large fleet of HAC’s or battle cruisers arriving shortly thereafter.

So I made my intentions clear in local (emiko is my alt):

[ 2012.05.16 12:08:13 ] EVE System > Channel changed to Local : XHQ-7V
[ 2012.05.16 12:08:37 ] Marites Camates > Konbanwa
[ 2012.05.16 12:08:56 ] Marites Camates > ogenki desu ka
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:10 ] Akura Kawanaka > nihongo o wakarimasen
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:23 ] Marites Camates > skosh
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:31 ] Akura Kawanaka > watashi mo
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:44 ] Marites Camates > Amirican living in Yokosuka
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:58 ] Akura Kawanaka > Australian pretending to be japanese living in australia
[ 2012.05.16 12:10:04 ] Marites Camates > haha
[ 2012.05.16 12:10:11 ] Marites Camates > Okage sama de
[ 2012.05.16 12:11:00 ] Emiko Kasono > we’re peaceful btw – just sight seeing, despit the fact Akura is in an onyx
[ 2012.05.16 12:11:26 ] Marites Camates > rgr, we are drinking, couldnt fight ..cant see
[ 2012.05.16 12:11:42 ] Significant other > dam coffee

These guys were sitting on one of the gates in a cane and a cruiser that I don’t remember. Unfortunately, when we were on the way out we noticed a 8-10 man gang from “Forceful Entry” alliance (never a good sign) and noticed a BC wreck on one of the gates – looks like our friend was smooshed.

On another note – on that killmail was a corporation called Centrelink Australia (this is sort of the Aussie equivalent of Social Security)
http://eve-kill.net/?a=corp_detail&crp_id=99309. I thought that was pretty funny.

So I also spoke to the recruiters at ANZAC Alliance. It turns out that my corporation name backfired and Rooman thought that I am an Alt. I’m certain I can convince them otherwise however.

I’m looking forward to a bit of alliance pew pew. According to The Ancient Gaming Noob I will be entering the north again (ANZAC is in Executive Outcomes alliance) just after a major conflict. which is probably good, it will give me a chance to settle in before the next round begins. I was never a fan of cloud ring though – as it connects with NPC held Syndicate, it was too easy to attack. the system is large and there are only a few bottleneck systems that we could defend easily. still, we had some of our

EVE Resume

In preparation for maybe joining up with a nullsec alliance, I was gathering together a bit of a history of what I’ve done in EVE. Generally in my experience there are varying requirements for joining a nullsec corporation. These vary on the maturity, size and attitude of the corporation. For example, a corporation that is new to nullsec may be happy to accept new members so long as those members are willing to contribute in some way.

on that note, I’d like to give a shout out to Jacabon Mere who commented on my last post – he’s a CEO of a smallish Aussie-timezone corporation that is now in the very northern reaches of nullsec as part of CONVICTED alliance. (useless fact of the day, I have a jump clone still in one of the stations up there). now his corporation are small and the requirements are low. This is necessary to build the corporation, and with proper leadership this corp may be well respected in the nullsec world.

Then the next level up are the established nullsec corporations, to whom an influx of inexperienced pilots would be detrimental. These corporations generally have a minimum skillpoint requirement and request an interview over voice chat prior to joining.

Further up the chain are the corporations which are super hard-core. I would place the Dark Knights of Daneb (my last nullsec corporation) in this boat. If I remember correctly we had to maintain 30 killmails per month to stay in the corporation (not really a hard thing to maintain due to the war we were having with the providence block at the time). These guys wanted to see references to previous killboards and evidence that I was serious about and experienced in PvP.

These corporation levels (for want of a better word) are not “better” than one-another, it is all dependant on the culture of the corp and the play style that you’re after. In any case, I was looking back at some of my old posts and I’ve found that quite a few of the links to corporation or alliance killboards have gone dead. I have a screenshot of my Mostly Harmless killboard summary from just prior to the Dominion patch here: pre-dominion-kill-summary. but other than that, all killboard websites seemed to have vanished.

And so, I must resort to using battleclinic or eve-kill.net. This is me here:
eve-kill pilot summary

Now, I’m certain that this is not all the kills/losses I’ve had. This is only the kills that other people have posted (via their api key) to the eve-kill.net website. What I would really love is for Eve to be able to show all the killmails that you have been on. That way I would be able to see every fight I have contributed to in some way. Unfortunately, the only thing that CCP allow us to have is mails when we land a final blow and when we die ourselves.

I have also been thinking. It is fairly important to keep your corporation history clean. This is one of the reasons I chose to name my corporation “0.0 veterans rest and relaxation corp”. If it was called something else or if I had joined a different corp it would have been one extra thing to explain to a recruiter next time I wanted in on nullsec.

On another note – My buddy and I took a bit of a roam through lowsec, just to get our feet wet. This was the result. I expected as much and we didn’t take anything I couldn’t afford to lose, but I was still annoyed I lost my pod as well, they had an onyx there that must have had a sensor booster or two. Still, I got a bit flustered in between telling my mate to warp out in fleet chat and trying to remember what things to click to get my pod out. It was a stupid mistake, no one should ever lose their pod in lowsec except to smartbombs. still, good learning experience once again.

The next thing to decide is: What ships should I prepare? Clearly my HIC, a covert ops or two, a stealth bomber or two, my deep space transport, my blockade runner and Tengu, but what are fleets made out of these days? pre-dominion in Mostly Harmless we flew heavily tanked armor battleships able to survive a doomsday device (Titan Doomsday’s were AOE back then). Post Dominion, both Mostly Harmless and Against All Authorities flew long range glass cannon battleships. But I’ve heard recently that battleship fleets aren’t so common now days? especially since the new Tier 3 Battlecruisers came out. Is this true? are all fleets now made up of spider tanking drakes and tier3 BC?

If so, this is even more incentive for me to go buy a Fleet Command ship.

I think, there is one thing I would like to do before joining a nullsec corp. I’d like to go see the station at 9UY4-H again. last time I was there we had just finished an epic system lockdown over the course of a week and had finally taken the system. I would like to see it under CVA control once again. To that end I’ll be flying a nostalgic tour in my Onyx HIC starting from the Dital gate probably tomorrow night. I promise I won’t try to kill anyone

HICS need redesigning

As I collect all my stuff, preparing to move back out into nullsec, I look at Gothic Robo-chicken, my trusty Onyx-class heavy interdictor. Sitting there, collecting dust ever since I could fit a t2 galente battleship and started flying them instead.

It occurs to me, that the Heavy interdictor is no longer fulfilling the role it is designed for. This, quite frankly, sucks.

Here’s why:

TL;DNR: Because of Titan

The long story: Cast your mind back to pre-dominion times

Titans had an area of effect weapon, that pretty much blasted any sub-capital that wasn’t a heavily tanked battleship. Your battleship fleet set up for gank and not tank? Boom, one doomsday and you’re sitting in a pod, Dual doomsdays and local drops by the exact amount of pilots that were in your fleet. Most alliances in the Northern Coalition therefore mandated that their battleship fleets should be able to survive at least one doomsday device.

a poor defenceless support fleet gets blasted into space dust, their battleship fleet barely hanging onto their ships by the skin of their structure while a Malicious titan laughs at the effects of his Doomsday Device

Both Titans and Motherships are immune to electronic warfare. This includes warp scramblers and so interceptors are useless against them. The potential for area of effect doomsdaying renders standard interdictors, destroyable, err, destroyer-class vessels less than survivable should a second titan come to assist the first supercapital.

Enter the Heavy Interdictor: A cruiser class vessel with the Effective Hit points of a heavily tanked battleship, able to project Warp bubbles if need, sacrificing manoeuvrability and speed, but also able to pin supercapitals with a focused warp disruption script, maintaining manoeuvrability and speed, making it hard to hit. Double doomsdays from titans of different races? Pah! A mere inconvenience. Doomsday destroy your fleet? Hold the supercapital in place, light a cyno when you’re fleet is ready to jump back in. Supercapital ships lived in fear of the cyno-HIC.

Small gang cruiser warfare? Oh, I’ll just take my cruiser class vessel with the hit points of a battleship and a bubble generator and infinite warp scrambling power along and see if we can’t trap a HAC or three at a gate.

They were Gods in nullsec.

Now: Post dominion:

So, what are Heavy interdictors good for now?

Tackling supercaps?
Titans now only hit one target at a time. Battleships no longer need to be tanked against Doomsday devices. You can tackle a titan and it can have ten doomsdays go off without reducing the effectiveness of your 100 man battleship fleet, despite the fact they are all glass cannons.

Sure, the supercapitals are still immune to ewarfare but I can buy and equip five standard interdictors for the price of one Heavy interdictor. And if a titan doomsdays, none of the interdictors die. And they have the manoeuvrability and speed almost equalling frigates.

Small gang warfare? Ok, they may be still good for gate camps, but if given a choice between a 30 million ship and a 160 million ship just to have a bubble up on a gate, heck – if you’re camping a gate why not deploy a large static bubble? That’s only 5-10 million.

Tackling tech III ships: ok – I admit, this is the one specialist role remaining. Only a focused warp disruption script can tackle a interdiction nullifier equipped strategic crulser. How the hell am I supposed to catch one though.

Tackling supercapitals in lowsec: ok, the HIC remains the only thing that can tackle super capitals in lowsec. I know I don’t fly in lowsec very much, but I’ve only had that happen once, and it was a fluke.

Wormholes? Please… you can’t fit a supercapital in a wormhole. Use an interdictor, although perhaps it would be nice to pin down a carrier… hmmm.

Gate camping in empire: Ok, a remote sensor boosted Onyx or Broadsword is still king of gate camps in lowsec, but why not have I don’t know… five interceptors for the same price.

My point remains: The Heavy Interdictor’s unique ability to pin down supercapitals while surviving multiple doomsday devices, is obsolete. And sitting on gates in lowsec is not what the ship was designed for.

What should happen:

In My Humble Opinion, the following changes should happen to HIC’s:

1) Hit points reduced
2) Warp disruption field generator range extended to at least give it a bit of advantage over a standard interdictor
3) The addition of scripts to change the properties of the bubble for example (and these are just ideas, some perhaps overpowered):

a) Make the bubble area of effect tracking disruption.
b) make the bubble area of effect webbing.
c) make the bubble area of effect sensor boosting (for friendly fleets)
d) make the bubble area of effect hit point boosting (portable shield for fleets)
) My personal favourite: Make the bubble Area of effect cloaking. Remember that protoss ship in starcraft that could conceal troops, revealing only itself..

Warp cloaked? Able to use black ops bridges? Perhaps too overpowered…

I’m not asking for a buff, I am just asking that it be looked at again in the light of the dominion changes.

Battle Report: Evoke Spanked Hard – Screenshot Extravaganza

Over the past weekend the Northern Coalition banded together to get rid of the evoke stain that had spread into lower Cloud Ring.

Evoke had taken sovereignty in a few systems while we were off dealing with Pandemic Legion

On Saturday night we didn’t have much luck, taking heavy losses in the initial few skirmishes with evoke fleets as Sons of Tangra and Pandemic Legion joined in for the pew also. I lost my brand new Megathron “Mr Pew” on the saturday night and was out of the fight for the rest of the day, however our luck didn’t improve. I’m told that later that night we Doomsday’d our own fleet – the hostile fleet warped out just as our fleet was bubbled and the DD went off.

Multi-alliance fleet burning to the gate (by starlight)

There was more fighting on sunday night and due to our absolutely awesome Alliance-level replacement program was in another fully fitted Megathron with zero out-lay on my part. This one still has the designation that it came with: “42.10″ I like it, it’s clinical. I have another three-and-a-bit days to go until I can use tech II large rail guns so I went and bought some tech I ones and joined the fighting.

This time we took out a few Pos’s in the station systems of G8AD and 9-4 and disabled the station fittings in G8AD. I was told that earlier in the day we had managed to successfully doomsday an evoke battleship fleet. most of the evoke pods went to the station in G8AD, which we then proceeded to siege.

By the time I joined we were shooting the station fitting and cloning services to prevent their use by the evoke pilots inside. The undock point was permanently bubbled by a Heavy Interdictor. over the next few hours we attacked POS’s in G8AD and 9-4 as they came out of reinforced mode. In addition to the 150+ battleship fleet we had what looked to be a fleet of about 30-40 dreadnoughts helping us so they went down very quickly. the couple of times that I was targeted by the POS I didn’t even get into armour because the tower was destroyed so quickly.

Northern Coalition Capital Fleet Pew (by starlight)

While waiting for another few POS’s to come out of reinforced we camped the station, killing anything that undocked. This of course got very dull and someone had the brilliant idea to start a conga-line. It took nearly 20 mins for it to get properly sorted but in the end, the results were worth it.

My megathron near the front of the battleship Conga-line

I also made a post that night with more pictures that I won’t repost here (Click here to see them)

Poor broadsword pilot doesn’t get to join the conga line (by starlight)

That night I logged out at a pos in 9-4 and on monday night it was on again, once again killing station services and three POS’s. By Tuesday the Northern Coalition had forced Evoke out of XZH and G8AD.

Success! (by starli…no wait!)

The massive effort by pilots in Mostly Harmless, Tau Ceti Federation, Morsus Mihi, Magesta Empire and Defi4nt (oh, and yes I think we saw one Razor ship…I think) over the weekend was truly amazing. We Northern Monkeys Still fight together as one!

Disclaimer: Not A Screenshot and/or does not contain starlight

As one of our alliance members said on our forums: “Never have I been more proud to be related to a group of people that eat bugs out of each others fur and fling poop for fun.”

pre-dominion kill summary

Just thought I’d post this pic of my kills over the past few months since joining Mostly Harmless. I was hoping to get to 250 real kills by dominion but it’s not looking good – got a friend staying in the same room as the computer so can’t go on many midnight roams this month.

Not e-peening, just demonstrating how much I love my HIC’s and Bombers

Near fatal mistake

Sunday night I made a mistake. A mistake that nearly cost me my beloved Gothic-Robochicken, the Onyx that has been with me for a good 2 months.

My first one at least died honourably in a swarm of 47 Sons of Tangra Heavy Assault Cruisers, but this time….. I was preparing to commit seppuku due to how fail I was to get into a situation like I did.

The lead up

It had been a long day. Once-again the northern coalition was fighting in the cloud-ring station system of 9-4 against Evoke. It was one of those fights where I would normally post awesome screenshots of massive fleets of battleships and carriers all pounding away at a hostile pos. I would normally tell tales of last minute covert-ops warp-ins and heroic sacrifices of interdictors. But this time, it was Evoke and friends that were doing all this and Mostly Harmless and allies were sitting in a friendly pos spinning our ships for four hours….

It was a little bit fun getting into the system, with Evoke camping the incoming jump bridge with cloaked interdictors. But we only lost 2 battleships in the process of getting 150+ ships into the system, which is not too shabby. Our FC got the testosterone flowing in us all when he rallied the troops in his Scottish accent: “make no mistake about it, We’re crossing the street with a sniper aiming out the window on the other side… we’re going to loose people. We will fight them in the trenches, we will fight them on the beaches…” well, perhaps he left out the Churchill part.

At one point I was sent out to a few hundred km off the friendly pos in the direction of the hostile pos. I assume since they had a habit of warping their battleship fleet in at about 175km I was to bubble if we ever saw them aligning and ensure they dropped out of warp outside their firing range. Nothing eventuated however and so I sat there, not even able to take good screenshots of the capital fleet jumping in…

my attempt at snapping a shot of the caps from a distance

Anyway – after a stupidly long amount of time, during which I got a good portion of my fan fiction short story for this month done I had to log off for dinner and a movie with my wife.

Complacency kills

Logging back on later that night, the hostilities had died down and I took the jump bridge network back to our home region. At one point however, I had to slow boat it through two star gates to get to the next jump bridge. I lacked patience due to the late night and unsatisfying day we had, so despite the fact there were two pandemic legion in local, I headed for the gate anyway. Hitting the directional scan button as an afterthought when in warp I saw a mass of mobile warp disruption bubbles. Having resigned myself to the fact I was going to die, I was quite relieved to find these bubbles were not on the gate (no idea where they were) and jumped through.

On the other side, however there was a recon, stealth bomber and an interdictor. I knew I was screwed. I had killed my poor ship by bad judgement and lack of use of the intel channels.

They only had three ships however, all of them fairly soft targets, so I locked up the manticore and started pounding away with my one missile launcher I had equipped. In hind sight I should have chosen the interdictor, but no matter. I mentioned in local that this fight would probably take a very long time, but got no reply.  In hind sight I should have offered to spare their ships for a ransom, or suggested a good book to read while they killed me, but wit in hindsight (hind-wit?) is 20:20.

Despite the fact I expected to die, I asked in our intel channel to see if anyone had any spare pew they could send my way. By this time, the hostile numbers had risen to about 6 and the dps was starting to make a dent in my shields they brought in an arazu and another ship which my combat log says was firing 250mm Railgun II’s. It turned out though, that there was a small bunch of friendlies in the next system over. I held out for what seemed like ages, I had moved to 40km away from the gate in the direction of where my buddies would be coming from and I didn’t use my mwd (to reduce my signature radius and therefore the damage that the stealth bomber was doing to me).

Saved!

Then local filled up with blues – I was saved. The best part is that the interdictor had a bubble on me so when my buddies warped to my gate, they were pulled into the bubble, directly on top of the hostiles, rather than continuing 40km away to the gate.

I was saved and my shield barely went below 50%. The combat log said the first hit on my shields was at 20:59:22 and the last at 21:05:05 so I think that’s pretty damn good. Apart from my ship not exploding, a couple of good things came out of this: I learned my lesson, the hostiles learned that you can’t take out a shield-tanking Heavy interdictor with a stealth bomber, 2 combat recon and light interdictor (and something else) in under 5 minutes. And my buddies got some pew and the satisfaction of saving an alliance mate.

Did some calculations on my onyx – I’d only really ever looked at the Effective Hit points because I’m buffer tanked (tanked for maximum hit points, with any passive regen being icing on the cake) and I never expected to be involved in a fight on a gate, solo against a small gang. Nevertheless with my maximum shield regen at 73hp/s and my shield resistances ranging from 78% to 91% my passive regen ranges from 347.6dps to 811dps! depending on the damage type being done of course – not bad for a buffer tanked ship in any case. With kinetic resistance being my second highest resistance at 87% and the manticore using kinetic torpedos (they get a bonus to kinetic damage), no wonder they were having a hard time taking me out.

I guess this post puts me officially in the shield-tanked Heavy interdictor fanboy club….

alright, fine – here’s some eye-candy before we finish up:

War

Prelude to Invasion

So it has become apparent over the last week or so that Sons of Tangra would like to have a go at taking some of the 0.0 space controlled by Mostly Harmless. There have been movements of Capital fleets arround areas close to MH space and some POS’s put up by SOT and their allies in what is considered a region controlled by MH.

An Influence map of the north-west portion of the Eve universe

As you can see from the map above, SOT are quite a distance away from Mostly Harmless, however they have recently moved a capital fleet into a low security space staging area in the Lonetrek region, just south of the Mostly Harmless/Council/Morsus Mihi borders. This movement, combined with the fact that SOT have acted hostile to MH over recent months, lead the MH leaders to strongly suspect an attack this weekend.

Politics

Now, dispite the fact that I live in 0.0 space, I have difficulty understanding the politics sometimes, but here’s a basic run-down of this area of Eve:

Tau Ceti Federation, Razor, Morsus Mihi, Wildly Inappropriate and Mostly Harmless form what is known as the Northern Coalition. The NC is friendly to Goonswarm who control the region just south of SOT. Pandemic legion works closely with the NC but is only officially “blue” to a couple of the alliances. PL are officially Neutral to MH but own some high-end moons within MH space. you could say that PL and MH are “it’s complicated” facebook buddies. SOT are seen as PL pets, and I believe are known to be a heavy industrial alliance, as are MH. So perhaps now you can grasp the delicate nature of SOT attacking MH.

POS Warfare 101

POS warfare is an interesting thing, I’ll write another post about it sometime, but for now it’s only important to know that you generally can’t kill a POS in one-go. Once a Pos’s shields get past a certain point, it enters “reinforced mode” during which it is invulnerable until the timer expires. The amount of time that this mode lasts is dependant on the size of the POS and how much Strontium has been loaded into it’s fuel reserves. For a large POS, the general timer is 1 day and 17 hours. during which time of course, the owners of the POS will rally their defence fleets. This is why they say in 0.0, you always know when there’s going to be a large fleet battle a day or so in advance. and why CCP ask directors of corporations to let them know  of potential >300 person fights.

Anyway… back to our previously scheduled program.

First Strike

Mostly Harmless scouts were sent out early this week with the task of finding the enemy’s staging area. on Thursday, word came in of a weekend of Call To Arms. A CTA basically requires all members of every corp online to be working towards the war effort. Those that can’t fly combat ships can scout or haul resources to staging areas. As a member of my corporation’s Pew Pew brigade I warmed up my HIC, moved arround a few battleships for the corporation and double-checked my ammo supplies.

The first fleet of the CTA was called on friday night. The word was that we were going to reinforce a SOT POS, but it we were not told which one just yet.

Now, the Mostly Harmless leadership had chosen this particular POS and this particular time in order that it would come out of reinforced mode on Sunday afternoon, where everyone in the alliance from both Euro and US timezones would be online to take it down and we’d have a numbers advantage over SOT.

So the call went out to form up. the FC said that he’d Idealy like 4-5 Heavy interdictors and that they must all bring Focus scripts. I knew then we’d be fighting in Lowsec.

Avatar Titan in our Staging area

So we all formed up and Titan-Bridged into the lowsec system of Saranen in the Lonetrek region. Just one jump outside Mostly Harmless-held Pure-blind. Due to the fact that bubbles can’t be used in lowsec, locking down a system is that much harder. the HIC’s were chosen over interceptors for their ability to Tank the gate guns.

After engaging a few SOT undocking from a station near the cyno beacon, the Heavy interdictors were spread out to lock down the system as best as they could. I was sent to the Tartoken gate and was immediately set apon by the gate guns due to my previous aggression.

It was at this point I realised a distinct advantage of an Onyx-class HIC over the other types. Shields have a natural passive regeneration to them, and so I was able to take all the damage the gate was giving me and still remain above 60% shield. if I had the foresight to fit some shield regeneration modules I would have easily been up arround 80% but I was fitted out for mobile gang warfare with a Buffer tank rather than a passive regen fit.

The other HIC’s however weren’t so happy. as they too were Buffer tanked (as most HIC’s should be) they were having difficulty remaining cap stable repairing their armor, which doesn’t naturally regenerate while being hit by the gate guns.

Anyway, once our scouts and HIC’s were deployed, our Dreadnought fleet jumped in and proceded to bash on the SOT capital staging Pos anchored in the system.

The systems surrounding Saranen

The dreadnoughts went into seige mode – where they cannot move, or be repaired by other ships, but do many times the normal amount of damage. And we settled in for the duration. It was mostly uneventfull, with the occasional force recon warping in and out and jumping through, neither SOT or their allies put up any fight and so the dreads went into a second seige cycle.

Oops!

It was towards the end of the second seige cycle that one of the dread pilots said on Team Speak: “Uh….I don’t think they put Strontium in this POS”. Sure enough, the Tower did not enter reinforced mode. Disbelieving, a third Dread seige cycle was ordered and the tower and all its modules melted. This is unheard of – No-one puts up a Tower and doesn’t put at least some strontium in it. Particularly not if the Tower is the capital ship staging area for an attack on another alliance……

The COAD post in the Eve forums said it all:

“SOT Cap Fleet Spotted Moving in near PB. Here it comes MH are you ready?????????”

and after a bit of banter, the result of the fight was posted:

“MH were indeed ready and attempted to use the default POS load of 1 day 17 hours to set up a fun Sunday evening. However as SoT had cunningly put zero stront in their low sec capital stagin tower, MH accidently the entire POS.

Oops. “

After the experience, we were all a bit numb… like I imagine you would be if you went to hunt a wolf but found it was just a little puppy…… but then you killed it anyway…

The FC appologised profusely for misleading us into thinking we were going to reinforce a POS. The others consoled themselves by toasting the FC, but since I had no whiskey on me at the time, I consoled myself with a cool screenshot of my HIC in Warp.

 
Ok, so it’s pretty much the ugliest ship in the game but it looks half decent with this background

We were all looking for a bit of fun and were dissapointed. We’ll see what the weekend brings in any case. SOT have assured us: “The Pew; it will be glorious” we certainly hope so. Nothing beats fleets of 200+ on each side beating the hell out of eachother. Bring it on brothers.