Drake Fleet – We Shoot Our Own POS, Then Go Rat for a While

My continuing adventures with Drake Fleet.

Drake Fleet was part of a titanic operation.  The battle at 0P9Z-I was huge with about 2,000 ships destroyed.

There was enough going on that time dilation was cranked up to the maximum setting.

Time Dilation Factor: 10% means that the whole battle was running at 10% of normal speed so that the back end systems could keep up with all the activity.  A 10 second gun reload… 100 seconds at that setting.  Which is why the battle went on for a long, long time. (Somebody ~30 systems away who happened to be on the same set of servers was complaining on the forums about TiDi being a pain, as they were forced to 10% speed as well.)

At the battle climax

It was another battle in the economic war, with Raiden attempting to take out another CFC tech moon operation.  They succeeded in their goal, though losses were heavy all around.  Even the kill mail for the battle seems to be on time dilation, it takes so long to load.

Not only was the mining operation destroyed, but Raiden held the field at the end, dropping 30 titans into the battle to finish things off.

Titans mean the end of the battle

All of this happened while I was at work.  It was a big fight partially because it was in Euro prime time.  And I did not see a bit of it.  Images courtesy of Gaff who was there and IM’ing me about how slow things were moving.

No, when I got home everything was quiet.  I think EVE24 already had a post up about the great Raiden victory by that point. (And, oh noes, somebody leaked the Drake Fleet doctrine, but there is money to be made with Drake hulls now.)

But after rattling around a bit that evening, a call went out for a Drake Fleet, forming up at the usual location.  What could we be up to?

Syndic Thrass was the FC and he hurried us along, after getting a sizable logistics contingent into the fleet, first to a jump bridge, then to a titan, which then bridged us out to another system, from which we ended up in 0P9Z-I, the sight of the big battle earlier in the day.

There were still abandoned drones littering space when we got there, but Goonswarm sovereignty remained.

Look for the Goonswarm label...

And, as you can see in the background, there was also a tower setup and active.  According to the battle report I saw, Raiden tried to put up a tower, but there was a problem.  At some later point, the Goons got a blockade runner in there with a tower and put it up while nobody was looking, thus pretty much undoing the point of the giant battle in the first place.

Our unusually large logistics contingent was told to go to work repping the tower while another ship showed up to load it up with   strontium clathrates.  You can see the reppers on hitting the tower in that picture as well.  The Drakes flew cover, orbiting in the now usual “school of Drakes” formation.

Then, after the tower was in the desired state, Syndic Thrass told the reppers to stop, then had the Drakes open fire on the tower.

After a minute or so of, “Wait, you want us to do what?” the fire mission commenced.  Though, because he couldn’t resist jacking with us, Syndic Thrass told us to stop at one point and said that the reppers should start again, at which we all stopped doing anything until he told us he was kidding and the fire mission resumed.

Now for the obligatory Drake Fleet operation YouTube video.

I had guessed by this point what we were up to, but once the tower went into reinforced mode, making it invulnerable until its timer ran down, Syndic Thrass confirmed it.  The new tower would only be attackable again at a time convenient to the US but awkwardly late for Europeans.

Reinforce timer started...

After that Syndic Thrass jumped us around until we ended up in MA-VDX, where we killed a drone complex.

Blowing up a drone complex

And then we ratted for a bit.  And then we hung around the local station for a while.  After about an hour of this sort of thing, people were starting to aggressively ask, well, WTF?  This was not exactly the sort of thing that you put together a fleet operation for.

And then we jumped back to the POS...

Eventually we moved to one of the gates and Syndic Thrass explained that we were holding as a blocking force to trap some hostiles that another fleet had been chasing around.  Of course, you cannot just tell the fleet that until the time is right, because it is assumed that there is a spy in every fleet rebroadcasting your intel immediately.

So we all took up positions around the gate and waited for the bad guys to come through.

Smuggler gate

We did not have to wait long.  32 Black Legion ships jumped through.  Interdiction bubbles went up and there was a short, sharp fight where we took out 18 of them, plus 5 pods.  They returned fire quickly and picked off 6 of our ships before they warped away.  The tally board from the fight.

We chased them for a bit, warping around the system, but gave up eventually and headed back to the gate.  We waited there a bit, but were soon told that it was time to burn for home and stand down.

It was at this point that I almost got in trouble.  I was following Syndic Thrass at 500m as we cruised around the gate and stepped away for a minute for a bio.  When I got back, Syndic Thrass, who must have warped off and then back to the gate, was calling for the burn for home and I was just over 100km from the gate, MWD blazing away, too close to warp to it and too far to get there and keep up with the fleet.

Meanwhile, there were more than a dozen hostiles still in the system who could see the rest of the fleet disappearing from local.

I warped out to 100K off of one of the asteroid belts, then turned and did a lemming warp to the gate and was the last friendly out of the system.  I then burned for home myself, always just about a jump behind the rest of the fleet.  But I ended up home and safe with one more fleet op under my belt and a few more kills on my total for the month.