Fleet Fight!

We have activity in the static but it doesn't appear that the pilots live there. Kalseth and Wolwen have killed a Heron and there is a Enyo warping around the system. I jump in a Proteus and warp to our static connection.

The Enyo lands and Kalseth engages as Wolwen and I jump into the C2. Well Kalseth started to engage until the Enyo almost instant popped him and then managed to snag his pod as well. Boo!

By this time, Wolwen and I have the Enyo pilot locked and we proceed to destroy his ship and then get lucky and snag his pod as well. Not sure how you manage to catch a pod with cruisers and no bubble but we will take it. That was a fairly expensive pod.

A little scouting and we confirm that these pilots are coming from a connecting wormhole. I jump a scout into their system and see a Proteus and a Guardian on d-scan but there are two planets off d-scan and I find a second Guardian at the outer planet. By now, another pilot has shown up and shipped into a Kronos.

We decide to engage with a Prophecy, Oneiros, Proteus, Vexor Navy and a Falcon. We jump the Prophecy into their wormhole and they warp the Kronos and Proteus in to engage. The Prophecy burns away from the wormhole and once some distance is established, we jump the rest of the fleet into the wormhole.

The fight is on! They have a Kronos, Proteus and 2 Guardians against our fleet. The battle rages for several minutes with neither side gaining a clear advantage. We get one of them to below half armor and then the jams fail on the Guardians and they rep back up. They get one of us low before a jam hits on the Proteus or Kronos and we catch up.

Eventually, they break the tank on the Prophecy and we break off the engagement to reship hoping for another round. However, they warp back to their tower and log without even looting the field. We loot the field and head home when it is clear they are done for the evening.

Round 1:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=18686353
Kill: 550M
Lost: 182M

Round 2
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=18689769
Lost: 69M

This was an interesting fight and a lot of fun. The Guardians made the difference for them in the second engagement as we did not have enough DPS or enough jams to break them.

Solo Guardian (Really?)

I have been on holiday at the beach and out of game for over a week when I log in this evening. While I was gone, my corpmates managed to find all kinds of trouble which includes a wardec from a corp (Righteous Immortal Pew) that was upset about an encounter we had with them. /shrug

Since the static connection is crit, I grab an Oynx and pop the wormhole. Once the crit wormhole is dispatched, I scan out the new C2 and jump into the static. There is 1 medium and 2 small towers on d-scan with one force field. The unusual aspect of this is that there are 2 SMA's, 1 CHA and only 1 small autocannon between the three towers. Ok! After checking my overview settings, I decide to investigate. Sure enough, one of the small towers has a force field, 2 SMA's and 1 CHA with no protection. The gun must be at one of the offline towers.

There are still two planets out of d-scan range so I go to check them out and find another small tower with a SMA, CHA and Mobile Lab. This tower is also completely undefended. After deploying probes and locating all the wormholes, it is time to conduct a stront check.

A couple of corpmates and I jump into a variety of ships and start working on the tower with the mobile lab. We are at 50% on the shields when a covert ops ship jumps in from the C4. Let's hope he has friends. He is out of d-scan range of our tower bash fleet and he immediately drops probes.

Eventually, the covert ops pilot ends up finding the c2 static connection near our POS bash fleet and shortly thereafter the probes disappear. However, the covert ops ship doesn't appear to jump any of the connections. This makes us assume he has seen us on d-scan is trying to locate our position. The C4 activates again and a Tengu appears and cloaks. We are at 32% on the shields when another activation on the C4 occurs and I squad warp the group back to our home so that we can get proper PvP ships.

The second pilot from the C4 was in a Typhoon and he warped directly to the tower we were bashing. That confirms for us where the covert ops pilot was located. We reship and park a couple of cloaky T3s on our connection. In the meantime, I jump my scout into their C4 and find a lone Guardian sitting at zero on the wormhole. Huh? There has to be more to this fleet. No one flies a single Guardian, they are always in pairs. However, these pilots live in the C4 and I do not see any additional ships.

It takes a couple of minutes for the hostile scout to redeploy probes again in the static. Another couple of minutes and our static connection activates producing the hostile scout. He burns off and cloaks up able to see 1 Proteus on d-scan. The wormhole activates again and the Typhoon appears!

We decloak the T3s and engage the Typhoon. The Proteus pilot warps to zero and the Typhoon jumps back just before he lands. We follow through the wormhole and wait for the Typhoon to appear. While the Typhoon is holding cloak, the Guardian jumps into the C2 and warps.

The Typhoon appears and deploys Hornet ECM drones. The drones manage to jam me but we have multiple points on him so he is not going anywhere. The Guardian lands at zero. What? Get a point on him quick! Swap the neuts to the Guardian as well. Primary the Typhoon! Overheat all weapons!

The Typhoon explodes quickly and the pilot warps off and jumps into the C4 along with the cloaky Tengu. Obviously, the Tengu pilot did not want any part of this fight. The Guardian pilot jumps into our home system and I follow and tackle him on the opposite side.

After screwing up and warping to zero, jumping the wormhole in hopes everyone will follow and be on timer was a decent ploy. Unfortunately for him, it did not work. We left someone on the other side and his Guardian goes down. I guess he was flying a solo Guardian! Which worked as well as expected.

We managed to achieve the rare and elusive profitable and entertaining tower bash. The inhabitants of the C2 have no idea how close we were to reinforcing their tower. Since we had some fun, we decide to leave the small towers for someone else to stront check and go looking for more piloted targets.

Ambush

Based on the local chatter as we gank the Drake and Naga (see previous post), we know there is someone else around. We branch out and discover that their are 3 piloted ships in the adjoining wormhole. Two drakes and a legion. Wait, one of them just reshipped to a Drake. We now have 3 drakes. Wait! One of them just reshipped to a Talos. Wait! One of Drake pilots is now in a capsule. Back to a Drake. The second Drake pilot is now in a capsule. Back to a Drake! Ok! This is getting old.

In a little while, one of the pilots warps off, followed by a second pilot and disappears. Thanks to our scouting earlier in the day, we have both their static null sec and the incoming K162 from high sec. We put cloaky scouts on all three wormholes in the system and continue watching their activity. 

The high sec is only 4 from Amarr and we suspect that may be where they have gone. We put a scout in the null sec but they are not in there although there is a Cheetah visible in the system and +1 in local. Hmmm! Data or Relic site? I wonder if he is paying attention. We drop probes to find out and sure enough about 10 seconds after the probes go out, the Cheetah disappears. He was paying attention and it was a relic site. We bookmark it and recall our probes.

One of the pilots returns from high sec, warps straight to his tower and then 2 pilots go offline together. Crap! It looks like we caught them on the end of their playing time. In a bit, the second pilot returns from high sec and warps to his tower. Reships to a Drake and warps to the null sec.

We wait a minute and then jump a ship in behind him into null sec just in time to see him disappear from local. The chase pilot picks a random gate and warps to the next system. He enters the next system just in time to see the pilot disappear from local again.

We setup on the null sec wormhole to wait for his return. It takes a while but eventually he shows up in local again. The wormhole flares and he finds 3 Proteus' sitting there waiting on him. He waits out his timer and then jumps back to null sec. We follow and immediately burn back to the wormhole while activating our weapon systems. As soon as he decloaks we start burning his shields.

As he gets low on shields, I call a halt to the DPS while we wait for our flycatcher to arrive. He announces "Oh Crap, good trap!" in local as the flycatcher arrives and bubbles him. We finish killing the Drake and send Macgunner Trivanne back to the cloning vat.

Almost instantly, I get a private convo from him and he wants to know if we came from the C2 or from null sec. Evidently, he had been running a site escalation several jumps away in null sec. Knowing that he was the only one online and we weren't going to get any more action, I let him know that we had been watching him and his friends for some time.

Ratting Naga = Gank

I log in and almost immediately am told that we have a couple of targets ratting in the C2. Fantastic! I jump into a cloaky Proteus and warp to our static. Our fleet comp is 2 cloaky protues, a devoter, an astarte and an oneiros.

This is overkill for a couple of ratting battlecruisers but that is Ok. The wormhole is out of range of the site they are running so I jump into the wormhole. While I am in transit the scout reports a third party chatting in local. Crap!

Well, there is no reason to be stealthy, we need to see if we can get them before they escape. Our scout decloaks and surprisingly manages to point both ships. Our fleet lands on the scout and we make short work of the Naga and the Drake. Thanks to the bubble of the devoter, we send Zshootz Enaka and E Shootz back to the cloning vat.

We loot and shoot the wrecks and head back home. Now that we have ganked what appears to be a dual-boxing day tripper from k-space. We should see if we can find the third party who thought this was bait.

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.

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=18334008

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!

Engaging a fleet in wormhole space

I log in to find one of our scouts 20 jumps away down a chain. Not really, but there were quite a few wormholes mapped out and all of them had 3+ connecting wormholes. He was 5 jumps away down the chain reporting activity in what we were calling c2b.

(impressive paint skills below)

The corp living in c2b had 7-8 active pilots. Most of them were in drakes and the scout thought he may have interrupted their site running. We grabbed some armor ships and a couple of us moved up to c2a in preparation of trying to engage them. The rest of our fleet was still assembling when the hostile group warped from the tower with a Broadsword, Astarte and innumerable drakes.

We fell back to the c2a -> c3a wormhole to see what they were going to do and I had the second pilot fall back to the c3a > c2s wormhole when they jumped into the c2a. I stayed in the c2a and waited until they warped on grid with me before warping to a nearby planet and making a safe in route.

I landed at the planet and sure enough about the time I hit warp back to my safe, they landed several ships on me. This told me quickly that they were looking for a fight. In the meantime, the rest of our fleet had gotten organized.

Our fleet comp consisted of 1 Buzzard (go Kalseth!), 1 Armageddon, 2 Prophecies, 2 Oneiros and a Falcon. Since I was being actively chased, I passed fleet command off and the call was made to jump into c2a. The Broadsword and 2 drakes were sitting on the wormhole. With the Astarte and 2 Drakes chasing me. I'm not sure how innumerable drakes became 4 but it seems like a fuzzy math kinda day.

At this point, I was in warp to the outer planet (68 AU) away so I turned and headed back to the wormhole as soon as I landed. By the time I landed, their full fleet of 6 ships was on the wormhole.They killed our Falcon as soon as it decloaked. Jumping it into the middle of fleet engagement on a wormhole was a mistake on our part. That call should never have been made. 

One drake went down before I landed and I started locking up the Astarte. The secondary was called as another Drake and since I was slightly out of range on the Astarte, I put my point on the second Drake just in time to see the Broadsword and 1 Drake jump out. What? There is no longer a bubble on field.

They are bailing! Spread points! Ummm..... That call should probably have been made earlier since I now have to wait out the cycle for my jammer. Get the Astarte! Of course the rest of their fleet now warps off leaving the second Drake pilot to his fate. 

We had the Broadsword and Drake trapped for a while in the c2s, but ultimately got bored and headed home. This was a good fight! However, the enemy fleet bailed as soon as they saw the second Oneiros uncloak on the wormhole.

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=18209952

MOAR Lowsec

I login to discover that we have two outbound C140s to low-sec. It has been a couple of weeks since we roamed around (i.e. lost ships) in low sec and the sirens call cannot be ignored.

After some debate, we decide to go armor and field a rag tag fleet with a Brutix, Navy Omen, Arazu, Blackbird and an Exequror and a pilot who is AFK in system in an unknown cloaky ship. We jump into the low sec and I warp to the first gate where I land on top of a Typhoon who warps off before my warp engines disengage.

I track his direction and follow as quickly as I can to one of the other gates in system just in time to see him disappear through the gate. Odd! It is almost as if he wanted me to see him. BAIT! According to the map of the area I have sitting in front of me, the route he jumped only has 2 systems and then becomes a dead end.

Expecting him to come back that way in a few minutes and most likely with friends, we setup on the gate. Sure enough, in about 3-4 minutes, he jumps back in system. At the same time, our AFK pilot returns and we discover he is in a Tengu.  We engage the Typhoon and sure enough local spikes with 4-5 additional people. A quick check shows they are his friends. WooHoo! We are going to get a fight. Based on local, it will be a 5v5 on the gate. This should be fun!

We have the Typhoon heading into structure as his mates arrive on the field in a Raven, Tempest, Stabber Fleet Issue and a Cynabal. The Typhoon pilot jumps back to the other side of the gate as his friends pour the DPS on my Brutix. I call the Cynabal as the second target which was probably the third or fourth mistake I made in this engagement. :P

The Exequror is doing a fairly good job of keeping me alive, and the enemy fleet decides to go after the blackbird and the exequror. Both of these pilots are too close which was another of the mistakes I made as I called for them to warp in. In spite of overheating all reps on the Exequror, the Blackbird falls and of course the Exequror is next. 

In the meantime, my Brutix also goes down leaving our Navy Omen pilot on the field by himself. Three of the enemy pilots are approaching structure with the Typhoon back on the field as the Cynabal falls and shortly thereafter our Omen Navy pilot goes down as well.

The Tengu pilot wisely decided to stay out of the fight. In the end, they cleared us off the field and we were only able to take one of them down. The engagement results are linked here. According to the kill report, we lost 380M while destroying 275M. Even though we lost the engagement, it was fun and we learned a number of things.

Thanks for the great 5v5 from Wolfsbrigade!