It's always fun logging onto TS to:
Jay> ‘ello
Fiestyone> Grab an armour assault frigate, if you’ve got one. Got some guys down the chain. Name linked in corp.
[user joined your channel]
Jay> Oh, it’s W.H.O.R.E.
Utari Onzo> Charming!
Jay> er, sorry mate. That was quite unfortunately timed.
Of course, what I meant was WormHole Occupation and Resource Exploitation by way of their charming acronym. It wasn’t actually a Fozzie-hole (frigate WH), but owing to their small numbers online, they were in the process of arranging a frigate fight and had asked for no podding. Great. RvB in WH space. Oh, well - a fight is a fight.
Unfortunately, I was a little short on armour assault frigates. The only armour frigate I had available was an Astero, but figured I’d send an alt down another branch of the chain to bring in a Vengeance from K-Space. Even if it didn’t make it back for the fight, it might be handy if we find more Fozzie-holes. The RvB style arranged fight (with no podding) was taking so long to sort out, that I had to not only get to Dodixie but also to finish fitting the Vengeance. That was when we were informed that due to numbers they now had, they could upgrade to T1 cruisers.
Wonderful… Although we did have some T1 cruisers in the main POS. A while back, someone had the idea to put together a T1 doctrine with free ships and fittings that had never been used. There were indeed a bunch of Thorax’s, Augorors and Mallers – none of which were fitted and the module stockpile was missing a few vital items. We could put together some logi, but otherwise, things were very kitchen sink. Armour-Jaguar, Ishkur, 2 Augorors, Thorax along with my Stratios and the Vengeance that had made it back from Dodixie. The Stratios was about all I had available and the WH0RE guys didn’t seem to have a problem with faction as they were shipping into Navy Augorors themselves but had strangely requested no Ashimmu’s(but of course!). At which point I asked our scout/diplo if we couldn’t just have a good old fashioned T3 brawl and we’ll pay for their losses. I don’t think the suggestion was forwarded to them.
Round 1: We knew the Navy Augorors would be tough cookies but the key to the fight would be breaking their logi. Focusing on one of their Augorors, I set my dishonour drones on the other one. Very slowly, it started to break, but the second Augoror re-established a lock before his partner hit structure. By now, our own logi was under pressure from neuts. Mid-fight, I spotted a Merlin warp in. I suggested we could deal with it quickly and with our FC’s agreement, we made short work of it before one of our Augorors went down. After the other was forced to jump out and we lost the Ishkur, I found my Stratios being primaried. I wasn’t too keen on leaving 60m ISK’s worth of Geckos behind, but things were looking about as hairy as they get. I abandoned the Geckos and escaped with 19% hull. The Vengeance was still engaged and was able to scoop my drones back up before being forced off the field.
Round 1 to WormHole Occupation and Resource Exploitation.
It’s easy to say how rubbish arranged fights are after losing out like that, but the subsequent spontaneous skirmish was even worse. Scouts reported that WH0RE ships were jumping out of a direct null – Sacrilege, Myrmidon, Sleipnir. Those of us who were still around reshipped to shield-nano to try and catch something so we’d feel better about the bloody nose we’d gotten earlier. Athanor was ahead of me and had engaged the Sleipnir on a gate. At the other end of the system, I’d spotted the Myrm and another Sacrilege. Guys who were passing through their home system spotted a Harbinger, Hawk and a Zealot moving out to the null. The numbers weren't looking great but what was worse was how spread out and disorganised our fleet was. Athanor got caught out on the gate with the weapons timer and suddenly things looked like a really bad idea. Back on the WH to null, Oddic had engaged the Harbinger and got it into mid armour before having to disengage as the rest of their fleet turned up to assist.
Meanwhile, my Orthrus was moving slightly behind Feisty’s Gila to try to at least finish off the Harbinger. We landed 50km from the null WH in their home system, which happened to be right on top of their fleet. Keeping one eye on the range to each ship, I lit the micro-warpdrive and pulled range. Tackle landed on the Gila before it could move off and it went down as I lit up the Harbinger. The intention behind the shield ships was to kite the slower fleet and harry them down, but this is not an easy thing to try solo. The Harbinger hit structure as their Hawk burned out to tackle. My attention was more on the distance between him and me than anything else. I hit the micro-warpdrive and aligned away with the heavy missiles still heading for the stricken Harbinger. I was aware that if the Hawk got a scram on me, it’d be all over and Sacrilege’s could catch up. As it got close, a burst of neut and a flight of warrior drones dissuaded him to continue his pursuit. Crucially, he’d done enough to put me out of range of the Harbinger, which escaped in very low hull and I decided that was a good time to make my own exit.
Round 2 to WormHole Occupation and Resource Exploitation.
With tails firmly between our legs and running low on ships, it seemed like a good time for a break. By now, a couple more of our guys had logged in and we were explaining the whole embarrassing state of affairs to them over comms. That was when they got in contact again.
Feistyone> Sounds like they want a proper fight now.
Jay> Tell them it’s their turn to come to us. We’re not fucking around with these guys anymore. Tool up into armour T3’s.
It might have been fair to say that we might have lulled them into a false sense of security with our previous successive derps. Our scout reported 2 full neut legions, 3 guardians, Hurricane, 2 Proteus’, Sacrilege, Armageddon and an Absolution, which was more or less equivalent to our numbers with a couple of guys dual-boxing. I was keen to bring a HAM Legion to exploit the Black hole that was our static, but the Absolution was likely to be on-grid boosts. I decided to fight fire with fire and switched into the Eos along with a Loki.
From the off, we were looking light on dps, but with a HAM/Neut legion, 2 Tengu’s, plus Oddic’s Armageddon in reserve, I was pretty confident we could break their logi and we assembled the fleet (except the geddon) on our static. We knew they had eyes on us, and our scout followed them. They assembled on the other side at zero and I started to hatch a plan. The static had dropped to half mass after round 2 and I knew from earlier that they weren’t keen to fight in the black hole, so I ordered the fleet to jump. As we started to engage, I ordered the geddon to warp to the hole but the WH0RE fleet jumped earlier than I expected. The only thing this changed was that we had shown our hand. I didn’t mind this in the position we were now in, but we now needed a HIC to pull off what I was planning. Oknos was having trouble re-shipping into his, but this was fine. For this to work, we’d need to wait for our polarisation timers. Given how tentative the other fleet was, I didn’t rate them going for a prolonged brawl but I intended to force the issue. 5 minutes later, Oknos was warping a Phobos over to the static and I ordered the fleet to jump back.
My first concern was the Armageddon. Along with the 2 Legions WH0RE had, they had the neuting potential to wreck our fleet. Their Guardians burned out to range as we engaged the geddon, but one of the three was caught close and webbed down. It was obvious from early on that our dps wouldn’t be able to burn down even a T1 hull while their guardians were still in play, especially with links active. We couldn’t even scratch it. I dropped the neuts from the Eos onto the stranded Guardian and damps on one of the orbiting pair while calling for the fleet to switch dps to the close guardian. As it hit low armour, the reps landed and seemed to cancel out our dps. We needed this to work to tip the balance in our favour and I called for the fleet to overheat on it. It was agonisingly slow, with their reps heroically dragging the guardian back into mid armour after the damage started to bleed into hull, but it couldn’t hold. We’d done enough and as the guardian popped, the WH0RE fleet manoeuvred back to jump range – just as I had anticipated.
Jay> That’s it, they’re jumping out.
Fiestyone> You sure?
Jay> Yep, fleet jump-jump-jump.
I’d been watching and listening out for that moment and our fleet managed to get ahead of some of their ships on the jump. As we decloaked to spread points, the wormhole collapsed. I love it when a plan comes together. I really love it when a plan comes together. I’d like to say that it was the WH0RE geddon burning back to the hole and jumping heavy that made it collapse as it jumped behind our fleet, but the truth is I’m not sure what collapsed it. Either way, all of my fleet had made it to the other side, and the WH0RE fleet guardians were now trapped in our home system, cut-off from the rest of their fleet. Only one thing was missing to make the execution of said plan flawless…
Jay> Where’s that bubble?
Oknos> No cap
Fair play to WH0RE. It didn’t save them totally, but they’d seen the danger in the Phobos and had managed to get a few ships away while it was regaining cap. Here is where it really showed to me where USYSC had really improved as a group and the new and old pilots had got used to flying with each other. In this situation in so many previous engagements, we were lucky to catch one or two fleeing ships, but now points were being called loud and clear and therefore, spread efficiently. We quickly burned down the geddon, the hurricane and the Absolution as the last two WH0RE ships on grid burned in opposite directions out of the bubble Oknos finally managed to deploy. Feisty called that he was losing point on the Proteus and I moved the Loki to assist, the webs thwarting the Proteus’ escape. The Legion that had burned the other direction was about 70km off but the fleet had split up to keep each one tackled and to make sure there was no escape for either the Legion or the Proteus.
As we looted the field, Chesterfield Fancypantz convo’d me. We exchanged “gf’s” (I did make sure they were thanked for content in local) and he asked if there was a way out for his guardians. I told him we’d scan the new static for them. Since one of the guardian pilots was an ex-Blackstar member in Sool Nera, it was the least I could do. Our fleet managed to make its way back to K-space via a deep lowsec connection, but WH0RE’s stranded guardians had a more convoluted route to safety. Our new static happened to be Blue-Fire’s home system, and with their usual subtlety, they started shooting at our customs offices in between attempting to catch our scanners. I had to let them know that the fleet went balls deep, so no fight would be forthcoming until we fixed that. They let me know they only had 4 EOL nulls in the chain, which was kinda the end of that. The only other possibility seemed to the direct null into our home. Sure enough, the guardians were escorted 1 jump through null, through another C5 and into a direct lowsec 1 jump from highsec.
Thanks for the fun, WormHole Occupation and Resource Exploitation. Can’t wait for round 4.
P.S. Once again, no fraps. Apparently, my last efforts weren't HD enough, so apologies but this is all the fault of Alzuule and O'nira.
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