Interrupting a tower bash

Hey guys, let's get rid of this dead stick in our new wormhole system! Ok. Should we put some scouts on the wormholes. Nah! We need all the DPS we can get on this tower. No one is awake in wormholes at this time of night. Ok! Heading to the dead stick with my shiny new Stratios! I want to see how it performs. Does this line of logic strike you as dumb? It should!

One of our scouts is down chain scouting and reports back that he was 2 Talos, 2 Naga, a Myrmidon and an Oracle. He gets little reaction since we often find ships floating. However, his next comment makes me sit up. These ships are a a planet with a tower but there is no force field. Scout, please confirm ship list and no force field. Confirmed, no force field. I have 2 Talos, 2 Naga, a Myrmidon and an Oracle plus a new Helios who is in a different location.

The rest of the group reships while he locates the tower and reports back that several of the ships are sitting in a group shooting a dead stick. I instruct him to move within 5 km of the group and we head down chain with a Devoter, 2 Proteus and an Oneiros. We move quickly to the entrance of the target system and figure out how to spread points as we are in route.

We land on the wormhole and since the ships were warped independently we wait the few seconds for everyone to arrive. As soon as we are all on grid, we jump the wormhole and initiate warp to our scout. The warp is 39.6 AU so they are not going to have much notice if they didn't have eyes on this incoming wormhole.

We land on grid with them and it is readily apparent that they did not have eyes on the incoming wormhole. They have not moved and as we land, a new pilot arrives in a Stratios. I quickly change my point from one of the Talos to the new Stratios. The first Talos and a Naga are dead before they even react to our presence. The Stratios is trying to burn away but I am faster and he cannot escape my 36 km point. I chase him down while the other Proteus is taking care of the pilots caught by the bubble.

The scout who found the tower bash in progress decloaks and tags the Stratios in his Buzzard before I kill it and then manages to catch the pod before it can warp off. Great job!

In total, we destroy 5 ships and 4 pods shown in the battle report. I thank the remaining members for contributing to my corpse collection since good fight does not make any sense. Poor security, poor reactions, poor target calling and poor DPS leads to a 1.1B loss. Of the seven ships on field, only 2 escaped. One was the Oracle who was sitting 40km from the rest of the group and the other was the Talos that I dropped point from in order to get the Stratios.