Insidious Designs

Patience! Some claim it is a virtue. Many admit to not having it. However, it is a key ingredient to a succesful ambush.

It has been a few days since we carebeared and some of us are feeling the need to make some ISK. The current static is a dead and empty swiss cheese wormhole so we roll for a new static. The new static only has 8 sigs but 4 of them resolve to wormholes. Another swiss cheese. But wait! The C2 appears to connect to the new home system of Insidious Design.

There is a bit of a history with Insidious Design. I will not go into it here, but suffice it to say that there is little love lost between the groups. Back in early December, Talocan United and Transmission Lost burned their home C5 to the ground and watched them SD 30B+ in ships.

We watch them run back and forth to high sec for a while and finally a couple of them jump to the C4. One is in a Loki and the other in an Abaddon. We spring the ambush (rather clumsily) and manage to spook the Loki pilot, who abandons the Abaddon pilot to his fate. We kill both the ship and the pilot.

We hang around for a while and offer a 6v6. However, our offer is met with silence. Nothing! We pull back since we now have activity in the C4a which also connects to our static. The C4a corp has sent a scout into the static and he has now made his way into our home system.

Now the patience part of the evening really kicks in and it is starting to get late. The pilots in Insidious Design are still moving around and running back and forth to high sec. The scout from C4a is poking around as well. After 45 minutes, SojournerRover, the CEO of Insidious Design jumps into the static in a Cheetah. He cloaks up and hangs out for about 5 minutes then returns home. A couple of minutes later, he jumps an Orca through the wormhole trying to collapse it.

I send a couple of pilots to attack and they jump with the Orca which is not polarized. However, the Insidious Design group has a Rapier sitting on the other side of the wormhole and the Orca is instant webbed off the wormhole by Fazor Whitesnow in a Rapier . The Orca manages to get out, but Fazor is not so lucky. We tackle him and start slowing burning him down.

I have the rest of the fleet move up to the other side of the wormhole in preparation. The wormhole is now crit, but you can put a lot of cruisers through a crit wormhole. Rover reships to a Proteus and joins the fight. The rest of the fleet is now sitting on the other side of the wormhole at this point and I have then jump into the C2 hoping it will collapse the wormhole. It didn't and Rover jumps thru to the C4 once his timer wears off. I instruct 1/2 the fleet to follow and make sure he does not escape.

The blood lust of battle has kicked in and the wormhole flares with most of the fleet and the wormhole disappearing. The main body of the fleet reports that they have Rover and his Proteus is destroyed shortly. I am not sure what Rover is going to do about getting his pod out, but I now have more pressing issues to deal with.

I have 1 Loki, 1 Devoter and 2 Guardians trapped in what is now a very hostile environment. The first ship to land on us is a Harbinger. I tackle and start killing him and it doesn't take very long for additional pilots to start landing on us. There are 2 drakes, 1 harbinger, 1 proteus, 1 loki, 1 phobos, 1 oynx and an armageddon. We got the 6 vs 6, well kinda. We have 12 pilots on field but 8 of them are hostile and our group only has 1 DPS.

We decide to make sure we stay together. I am thinking to myself that this is probably a lost cause but there is going to be no running. We will stand together in victory or death! What goes next is an epic fight.

We take the Harbinger down first simply becuase he was there first. I quickly decide to kill all pods to keep them from reshipping and coming back. For the second time in the evening, Pederass Tocles is sent to the medical bay. The Proteus of Night Beagle is next on my list. It seems to take forever to kill him, but he finally goes down and I shift focus to the Loki.

Meanwhile, the rest of the fleet has went to high sec and are burning 31 jumps toward the high sec where this fight is occuring. Up until this point, the Insidious group has been trying to use the Armeggedon to nuet out our guardians with no success. The Armegeddon pilot burns off and swaps to a Scorpion. This works in their favor as the Scorpion is just successful enough to keep us from killing anyone else but not enough to allow them to kill anyone.

We are slowly burning down the Loki but eventually, we realize that we are one unlucky jam cycle from losing a Guardian. At this point, I decide to attempt to get everyone off the field. With some creative positioning we manage to get everyone aligned at a point no one is scrambled.

We clear the field and start the process of jumping between safes. Hoping to keep them interested until help can arrive. The fleet never visits the same safe twice but a wrinkle develops in our plan. They decide to collapse the wormhole and put 2 Orca's on the HS and collapse it with our fleet still 3 jumps away.

One of our scouts in system beats them to the new HS but decloaks and gets caught on the wormhole. In the end, he has to jump to high sec to save his Tengu leaving us with a single scout in system. With no backup scout and the time getting late, we log everyone off and make plans to get people out tomorrow.

Update: Everyone got out alive: 9 kills, 0 losses for the total engagement
http://www.tl-eve.com/kb/?a=kill_related&kll_id=27776 - outnumbered fight in their system
http://www.tl-eve.com/kb/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=27770 - kill of SojournerRover by main fleet
http://www.tl-eve.com/kb/?a=kill_related&kll_id=27767 - earlier kill of Abaddon on the wormhole