The “Good Fites” war in Delve continues on, giving us something to do during our summer vacations, such that they are. As usual, I tend to just sit and do other things until Jabber pops up and tells me it is time for a space fight.
Saturday morning seemed to be a rich time for ops. I missed an earlier tower defense, but happened to just sit down at my computer when a call went out for Harpy fleet. They had suffered some losses during a fight and were re-shipping in F2OY-X, so there was an opportunity to jump in. I quickly got online and on coms and was off with the fleet to NOL-M9 where a Northern Coalition Tengu fleet was in the process of being pinned down. NOL is about at the edge of what is the current radius of action around the NPC null sec stations in Delve.
The hot corner of Delve
We arrived just in time to find the NC Tengu fleet bubbled up and heavily committed. We were able to warp to the fight and join in at extreme range for Harpies, using Spike ammo and range scripts.
Rolling in on the bubbled Tengus
Time dilation was running close to 10% at times with a lot of ships on grid, but we were able to close and get in on our share of kills before the remaining hostiles slipped the trap. We then bounced around quite a bit trying to catch them on their way home, but there was no further action for the Harpies and we eventually headed home ourselves.
That fleet slaked my need for a fight, but when a call came up two hours later for a Baltec fleet to go and kill some super capitals, I was in as quick as I could be.
On coms the word was that there were supers tackled and so it was time to go go go! Reagalan was FC and, as proof that we were in a hurry, he had us warp to zero when traveling to the titan waiting to bridge us, causing it to get a severe bumping. (Don’t bump the titan is the mantra of almost every bridging operation.) We bridged immediately to another POS where another titan was waiting to bridge us soonest out to Rilera, where the supers were said to be waiting.
However, once we got there, the supers had slipped away. We were left with a Black Legion carrier on the field though, which we proceeded to blow up as quickly as we could, and then we cleared out all the drones that the supers left behind. Super pilots leave so much litter behind I swear I saw a crying space Indian… or native American… or whatever.
No splitting fire with just one target
We then managed to corner a Black Legion Ishtar fleet and took a bite out of them before they got away. There were a lot of people hanging around the system for a while, and then people faded and Reagalan had to figure out what to do with us. We were in a low sec system, which was fine, but to get back to Querious and F2OY-X, we needed to travel through high sec. Rilera is a pocket of low sec surrounded by high.
The route to low sec
For me this was no big deal. My security status is 4.98. But there were a lot of people in fleet with negative security status, all the way down to -10 if coms are to be believed. And I have yet to be in a CFC fleet that has to pass through high sec where anybody seemed to know definitively what will happen if low security status pilots go into high sec. Will CONCORD shoot them, will faction police shoot them, will they get pointed or just webbed before being blown up, will they be able to get through in a battleship… always questions with half a dozen conflicting answers on coms.
Reagalan eventually just got us lined up on the jump gate to Col, gave everybody the destination, and told us to just fly as fast as possible through high sec. There was nothing else for it, nobody was going to risk jumping a titan out to low sec just to rescue a few relatively cheap battleships. So we went.
And, as far as I could tell, nobody got blown up.
From there it was just a matter of getting to null and the jump bridge network for The Initiative, which we can use, and hey presto we were home. A lot of anxiety for naught.
That was it for me on Saturday, but Sunday held the promise of more fights. One of our towers was reinforced in 1-SMEB and the timer was set to come out at around 19:00 EVE time. Skymarshal Blawrf McTaggart was putting up pings on Jabber about this operation, counting down to the undock time and practically promising a fight.
STRATOP FORMING IN 30 MINS. We’ll be forming large – tengufleet as first fleet, baltec as second, fyf & harpies as third. BE IN F2O FOR A SUNDAY BRAWL
Since 1-SMEB is in the Delve hot pocket, I figured this would be a short commute for a fight, so got into the Tengu fleet. I am starting to acquire a ship for every occasion in F2OY-X.
We formed up, caused a lot of TiDi undocking, bridged to 1-SMEB, got to the POS and watched the tower count down the minutes.
And nobody showed up. Well, we showed up, but the other side did not. We ran off to a blocking position in another system, lest this be some trickery of some sort. But the hostiles were not going to fight us. Eventually Blawrf was back on Jabber telling us the fight wasn’t going to happen.
After broadcasting for guarenteed fight all day, the lowsec pirates sit on a titan and ref a moon before docking again. Sorry that we didn’t get a fight.
We wandered back home and stood down. Unfortunately, that was about all I had time for on Sunday. I left Jabber up and it looked like there were fleets of opportunity throughout the day, but I was done. Still, two fights out of three tries isn’t a bad record for null sec.
Some screen shots of the various ops after the cut.
Weekend ops.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I keep getting tempted to resub to this game reading your posts and TMC ((say what you will about The Mittani the man is good at generating talk), but seeing as the last thing I was able to get in before quitting was a Raven AND the couple friends I had who played also quit. Just left with nothing to do other than Mission or mine, and just, no lol
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@Random Poster – I get that. If I wasn’t getting fleet ops now and again, I would probably be about done. I am almost literally doing nothing else in the game aside from responding to fleet opportunities that come up in Jabber. I still find that entertaining enough and there is a certain amount of “will this be the next big event?” when any fleet op goes up.
Fortunately reporting in for fleets is viewed as a very positive thing in our corp/alliance, so I can get away with doing nothing else.
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It’s a shame that every op seems to require TiDi. When will CCP finally get their act together and develop server technology that does away with this.
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@zaphod6502 – It is kind of funny to see what really impacts TiDi as it is happening. People loading into grid has a big impact. All of use bridging in or undocking into space can drive TiDi up. I understand this comes from having to load up everything the game knows about you into the current server partition. This was particularly apparent when we were moving through high sec and lagging out whole sections of a region as we jumped from system to system. (That was pretty empty space we went through too. I have to wonder what the one guy hanging out in one of those systems thought when a couple hundred of us just passed through.
And then there is the whole weapons thing. Shooting takes up a lot of processing. In a huge engagement with 1,500 people in the system driving TiDi down to 10% and causing lag on the system, the moment people stop shooting, TiDi suddenly goes away.
So there are clearly a couple of obvious bottlenecks to work on. Of course, once you fix those, there will be others, and allowing more people to be in a fight encourages more people to be in a fight and we’ll find the upper limit again at some point.
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