“A Game of Stronts” Does Not Run in My Time Zone

There is a war going on somewhere.

I know this because it has been broadcast via corporation mail.

We have been told to knock off all that carebear crap, get out there and stick it to the enemy.

So don’t rat, don’t mine, and stay the hell out of empire space because some other alliance declared war on us… which is in addition to the war I am actually writing about… so two wars… and if you get killed in empire space due to that other war it is a clear sign that you are screwing around and not taking the real war seriously.

Alrighty then!

So I put the dust cover on the Tengu, drained the oil out of the Hulk and put it up on blocks, stationed my Maelstrom and Hurricane in Mittaningrad, and even fitted out a few war Drakes since Drakes are making a comeback in fleet doctrine.

Me, in a Drake, at Mittaningrad

I am sitting in the system where we form up with my fleet ops ship ready and loaded for bear.  I am logged into the ops announcement channel on Jabber.  I have the Mumble loaded.

And I am sitting with my feet up on my desk blowing spit bubbles and playing Ticket to Ride on my iPad.

From Winnipeg to Houston

Eventually I get tired of sitting around and log off to do something else.  Life in space.

After the cut, I try to summarize (badly) what I have read about the war and what other people are up to while I am at work.

The problem is that the war apparently gets tired and goes to bed about the time I get home from work in California.  Once in a while it gets insomnia, or at least sleeps restlessly.  I hopped into one fleet the other night that assembled on the rumor that something was going to happen.  But we stood down when the enemy failed to show.

And so to find out about the war I wander over to the Kugutsuman to see if I can pick up anything about what is going on.  Granted, at times that is like picking up the National Enquirer for election coverage, only with a lot more trolling and arguments about which key you should use for “push to talk.” (The main factions seem to be keyboard button versus mouse button.)

Still, there is information to be gleaned, like the fact that the war is being fought pretty much on European time, with the occasional reports, like this one about an op that Raiden ran, which was summed up as:

• 4 hostile tech reffed
• 1 Const neutralized
• 4 blue techs repped
• 2 failed Kites
• 1 dead welp fleet (again)

I had to go to Gaff to get this translated, and came back with this (your corrections are welcome):

• 4 hostile tech reffed

4 CFC (us) towers being used to mine moons were attacked and put into reinforced mode.  This means that a timer kicks off, during which the tower is invulnerable.  When the timer expires, the tower and related facilities can be destroyed.  Remember that station busting fleet I was in… you do that when the timer runs down.  The tower can be repaired/refueled before the timer runs down, at which point you have to beat it down again and wait on the reinforce timer again.  The refueling requires  strontium clathrates, which is what lead to the reference in the title of this post, which I totally stole from the Kugu thread, so score on more use for it.

• 1 Const neutralized

1 constellation neutralized.  A constellation is a sub-unit of a region in EVE and is about as well thought out as your local school and water district borders.  By neutralized I think they mean they chased all the other kids out of the neighborhood.  This does not given them sovereignty or anything, but it was probably fun.

• 4 blue techs repped

4 of their own towers at tech moons were repaired/refueled, thus thwarting the CFC plans to destroy them.

• 2 failed Kites

Kiting, in this context, is apparently an attempt to get the reinforce timers on the towers of the opposition to sync up with your own optimum attack time.  Again, back in that December run, we blew away White Noise towers while they were mostly asleep.  Not sure how you accomplish this, but it sounds like a good idea.  And they failed at it, so good for the CFC.

• 1 dead welp fleet (again)

A welp fleet is a collection of high damage, low cost ships sent out on what is expected to be a one-way mission in order to take down an opposing capital ship.  I skilled up to fit and fly a Hurricane so I could come along on such ops. (Pic of my Hurricane here.)

This was summed up in the thread as “nothing really happened.”

And that has been the story for a lot of the war so far.  We go put a couple of their moon mining operations into reinforce mode, they do that to a couple of ours.  This doesn’t change the sovereignty or anything.  The map has been static for weeks. (Below from usual source, and frankly not much different from last week.)

Pretty much the same in the north...

But this does hit at the economic base of each side.  Tech moon mining is one of the reasons you go into null sec and try to hold sovereignty.  They provide a very substantial cash flow to those who exploit them.

But every so often operation activity of Raiden and their allies overlaps with the CFC in Deklein and Branch and some actual fighting takes place.

In what multiple people have been calling one of the best fleet fights in a while happened yesterday afternoon my time.  In a clash of Tengus and Drakes, Rokhs and Scimitars, two fleets numbering over 1,000 players fought it out over a CFC tech moon operation at MQFX-Q, planet VI,  Moon 19.  Over 600 ships and capsules were destroyed.

I was getting IM’s from Gaff throughout the fight.

And, as usual, by the time I got off work, got home, had dinner, and was ready to play, the battle was over.  We lost the tower and, more importantly to me, I missed yet another battle.

Ah well, they cannot avoid me forever.  At some point I will be on at the right time for a fight.