Saturday, July 20, 2013

The maths of wormholes

I log in to discover that we have active pilots in our static. My corpmates are watching at least 8 pilots and they are fairly active, moving around but not doing anything of consequence. Their wormhole is fairly clean of signatures and anomalies so we can assume they stay busy and keep it clean.

The reports from the scouts indicate that they are aware of our wormhole although they haven't sent anyone through it yet. There are 4 of us and we can count at least 8 piloted ships. However, most of them are in T1 cruisers so we put together a fleet which is designed to fight outnumbered.

Now that we are ready we need them to engage us. To that end, we put a battleship through the wormhole and leave it sitting on the other side for a minute before jumping it back. The brings no response so we have our scout in the wormhole put out probes. This takes a minute but we do get a response this time.

A Manticore shows up at our wormhole and jumps into our home system. The battleship is sitting at zero and an Oneiros is orbiting the wormhole at 60km. Nothing else is visible in system. A second Manticore jumps into the system and immediately jumps back out. During all of this, our battleship pilot has made no move to engage.

We give it a minute and then jump the battleship into the static. This brings an immediate response with several ships warping immediately to the wormhole to engage the hole rolling Armageddon. The battleship jumps back and their small fleet follows with a Caracal Navy Issue, a Caracal or two, an Arbitrator and both stealth bombers. 

As soon as the wormhole flares, we decloak with a Legion and a Proteus and the fight is on. My alt is in a Falcon which I decloak and start applying jams. The Geddon is nuet fit and the enemy realizes quickly that the battleship was bait and that they are outmatched. They jump back through the wormhole and we follow with our T3's but we are only able to lock one of them in the scramble on the opposite side. Boo!

Jeromis' Arbitrator goes down quickly with the assistance of a bomb from one of his corpmates. He instantly warps his pod out and we loot the wreck before jumping back into our home system. In a couple of minutes I start talking to one of the members. Since most of them are flying T1 ships, I ask if they would be interested in a fleet engagement limited to T1 cruisers. They say sure so we start preparing.

A couple more members have shown up at this point bringing our total number of online pilots to 5 leaving us outnumbered. The wormhole is crit and we are taking bets on whether they will jump it or not. With almost everyone believing they will not jump the wormhole.

Using alts we are able to field 3 Moa's, a Vexor, and a Blackbird with our mains. In addition, we have a Scythe, a second Blackbird and a remote sensor boosting Blackbird with alts. The enemy has a Caracal Navy Issue, 2 Bellicose, 2 Caracal, 1 Blackbird, 2 Scythes and a Talwar. 

I notify them that we are at the wormhole and ready for them to jump when ready. They say Ok and jump their fleet into our system. Remember that crit wormhole? We live in a C5 static C2 which is a small hole with only 1B in total allowed mass. They knew it was crit, but they also knew there had only been 3 cruisers and a couple of bombers through it from the point it went crit. Thinking there was plenty of mass left for their cruiser fleet, they jumped in and got everything but the second Scythe in before it collapsed. 

The fight is on!!!

I call primary on their Blackbird who manages to jam one of our Blackbirds but gets jammed in return by the other Blackbird we have. The enemy Blackbird goes down fairly quickly and I call primary on the Scythe. The Scythe doesn't last long which leaves them without support. At this point, we lose our remote sensor boosting Blackbird since the pilot was dual boxing and forgot to warp the ship out once the fight was engaged. We also lose our first Moa as we are killing the first Bellicose.

At this point, they are putting a lot of DPS on my Moa and I am deep into shields. I call for primary on the Caracal Navy. With 15% left on my shields, I overheat my guns and my shields. I am still going down so I ask for overheated reps from the Scythe and all DPS ships to overheat their weapons. The Caracal Navy goes down and the overheated reps begin bringing my shields back up. The rest is mop up until only the Talwar is left. He is kiting all over the place and we can't get in range of him so I ask for a sniping ship to take him out leaving their entire fleet sitting on the field in pods.


These guys jumped in and gave us a good fight, even though it was a crit wormhole, so we agree to scan them back to k-space instead of podding them and send a scout looking for a route. Our new static has a low sec static which ends up being 2 jumps from high sec near Hek. We escort the fleet of pods to the low sec system and they head home.


This has been one of the most entertaining fights I have had in a long time. Many of them appear to be fairly new players but they were willing to fight. They made no effort to run and chose to fight to the last man. Hats off to a great group of players. Have fun and fly dangerous!

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