Wednesday 10 September 2014

The Sum of All Fuck Ups

Even for me, it's more of an abstract title for a blog entry than usual, so I’ll start by saying that at first glance, it may be slightly misleading. So, a small explanation: It’s not referring to a monumental catastrophe that happened through a series of terrible mistakes, but rather a play on reddit’s TIFU (today I fucked up) threads, which a corpie introduced me to a while back, combined with Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, in which I suppose the protagonist, at least in some of guises can be called a spy.

Earlier in the week, I’d sold a toon that could fly everything sub-cap. Once again, I’d probably done this way too early as a while back I sold a perfect carrier toon months before any of my remaining toons were even thinking about sitting in carriers (and a week before I moved back into a C5). Then a couple of guys brought in some black ops battleships for the usual hotdropping fun. I thought this was great news until it dawned on me I’d just got rid of my blops pilot and the two characters I had left didn’t even have recon ships trained up to a respectable level. However, there was the option of bridging with a Crane incase someone needed jump fuel…

Now, in real life, one of my former colleagues introduced me to one of the new starters as a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’, which I took a slight offence to as it would imply the sentence should be affixed with: ‘master of none’. Sadly, in Eve, convoluted and ridiculously long training plans have meant that Jay is a Jack-of-all-trades toon and master only of the minmatar cruiser. As far as black ops goes, this isn’t terrible news since a Rapier is handy to have around on a hotdrop, if I would spend something like 4 days training it up to level 4 – except that would have interfered with other plans (like actually training some skills that would justify buying a Naglfar).

That was when I realised there was a more expensive alternative; yet another Loki! I hadn’t flown a covert ops fit loki for a while and was becoming bored of the Stratios and fit one up from a hull I had lying around. I’m actually a big fan of the Loki aesthetically, which is handy when you can’t fly any of the other T3’s and I’d taken to using my new toy as much as I could, instead of the scouting Legion on my other toon. Besides, what sounds cooler than a “Cloaky-Loki”? Not many other ships have the same assonant charm when describing their fit/function.

So it’s a quiet night in the chain. There’s a Euro football match on, so corp chat is quieter as a consequence but there is a couple of highsec connections which people exploit for a couple of trips to the market hubs. Galmas uses to opportunity to replace a Bhaalgorn he lost in a fight with Sleeper Social Club. O’nira is already in Jita and offers to haul in things for people, but has no room for the Bhaalgorn hull. This isn’t a worry, since there is one fairly cheap nearby one of the other highsec connections, so the mods get bought in Jita while the ship itself is flown in through a different route. While this is going on, I’m buzzing around the chain in my cloaky-loki (and not a legion), which conveniently puts me in the perfect place to scout the bhaalgorn home.

At this point, it is completely unfit – not even any rigs, but the chain was quiet and I’d not seen anything on my way through. Galmas jumps in from highsec and I throw him a web-warp just to get the vulnerable ship home quicker and warp after him towards the connection with the static. The cloaky-loki is about to land when I hear “Oh. Disavowed are here.” A cloaky-proteus (see, doesn’t have the same ring to it) had arrived on the WH at the same time as the Bhaalgorn and subsequently de-cloaked. There was about 10 seconds of all three pilots sitting there, each wondering quite how precarious the situation was. From Disavowed’s point of view, the Bhaalgorn could turn the Proteus into a floating spectator in a one-sided fight, at least until the inevitable back-up arrived. From our point of view, it looked quite different. We had no idea where they had connected to, so the safest option would have been to warp back to highsec and hope it wasn’t bubbled. The proteus obviously had faith in his reinforcements and put a point on the Bhaalgorn before we could take the safe option, forcing Galmas to jump.



Apparently, the cloaky-loki’s autocannons weren’t enough to grab the attention of the Proteus and it jumped after Galmas, which left me a second or so behind. This meant that Galmas was pointed jump before I was able to webwarp him. Discouraging the tackler with point/webs/dps probably wasn’t going to work at this point, since there was no response from the Bhaalgorn, but it was about the only option I had aside from wishing I was in the Legion instead of the Loki. Neuts would have all but guaranteed the escape from a single Proteus. Here’s where my multi-tasking prowess fell down a little. I was trying to log in said Legion while putting point/webs/dps on the tackler, but in my haste I hadn’t unlocked Galmas and the point went on him for a cycle (along with the webs from the failed web-warp). As I rectified the situation, a Negative Density Proteus jumped in (oh, apparently Negative Density have joined Disavowed). At this point, I started to wonder how much neuts might have been in the system where Galmas had bought the Bhaalgorn.

Prompted by the panicked screams being broadcast via teamspeak, O’nira had turned up with a Falcon and Sherpa also reinforced us with his own Proteus. Even with ECM, we weren’t able to save the beleaguered Bhaalgorn. O’nira only managed to jam both the DE-NY proteus’ after their target had popped. By now, I had put some distance between me and the hole, but Sherpa was at blaster range just as the rest of the Disavowed fleet jumped in, adding a Proteus loss to the night’s woes as I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and found my way back home.

“Ah, the Spy strikes again!” It had completely passed me by that my little miss-click would put me firmly on Galmas’ Bhaalgorn loss as an involved party. I’d already received plenty of ‘spy’ banter from the Marmite Collective connection just after I joined USYSC, but tonight’s derpage was about to trigger another round.
“Jay, isn’t that your old alliance?”
“er, yeah.”
“Is that why you tackled Galmas?”
“Wait, what? No, I can explain!”

Realistically, it made no difference. I’d have provided an ‘assist’ from the webs but as the point showed rather than the webs, the casual observer might think it suspicious. For us, it was a good way to make light of a good number of things that just plain should not have happened.

Ah, well. At least I christened the new cloaky-loki with a killmail. Even if it was my own CEO.

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