Back to the POS Shoot Game in N5Y-4N

Last night was one of those nights of running around just waiting for a target.

I got an alert on Jabber that a quick op was forming up to go after some intruders into our section of space.  This was a Drake fleet lead by Ninetales, the CFC’s own Khazak Fleet Commander.  Unfortunately, this operation got held up by a need for logistic ship support.

Jump Bridge is Red while we wait for Scimitars

And once we got it and got out to where the reds were running around, there was a recall out for another op that had been planned for the evening, so nothing really happened on that first op.

The planned op got superseded for a short bit when word came in that somebody 40+ jumps away had a few super capitals tackled and we were all going to run out and help with that.  That actually got Dabigredboat’s fleet, the one initially scheduled for the planned op, filled up pretty quickly.  Welp fleet Hurricanes and such were the order at that moment.

And then word came down that the supers had broken tackle and got away.  Doctrine changed to Drake fleet for the original op (and the fleet name changed… again) with the promise of maybe shooting a station and about half the fleet melted away.

Boat expressed annoyance about people running away, but eventually rounded up the 100 or so people left in the fleet and got us pointed in the right direction.  That involved getting us out to a titan that was in place to bridge us out to our main objective.

Waiting for Bridge

Part of waiting for a bridge is keeping your ship at a range of 2000 meters from the titan so you can use the bridge when it becomes available, but not bumping the titan, which annoys the driver of the giant and slow turning ship no end.  Our pilot for the evening had named his ship appropriately.

It was at that point, when we had collected everybody and had them at the titan when every single Comcast ISP user logged into EVE Online apparently got dropped.  Certainly every Comcast user in our fleet did.  This did not affect communications through Mumble or any other of their internet services.  It was just EVE.

And so we waited around for that issue to get resolved.  During that time, Boat told a seemingly endless series of awful and pointless stories.  During one he gave a reference point to his age, which would put him in diapers still when I was legally able to buy alcohol in all 50 states, and which no doubt explains the nature of his tales.  I remember being young and thinking stupid crap was universally funny as well.

After about 40 minutes of Boat’s open mic night, when he had gotten around to trolling Canadians, I think he sensed that we had the hit the point that we would all rather just get blown up than hear another pointless anecdote and decided we were going in with or without the Comcast portion of our fleet.

Our target was a tower in N5Y-4N.

It belonged to… well, somebody we didn’t like I guess… I had never heard of the alliance Cartel.  And it had been put into reinforce and was coming out and fit to be destroyed.  We arrived and started shooting.

Opening up on the tower

While this was in Venal, which is 0.0 space owned by NPCs (the Guristas) there were some reds in the system who were clearly hoping we would come and play.  Boat seemed interesting in seeing if we could make the evening more fun, so we went off to see what was what.

There were some bubbles up and a few ships around.  We managed to catch one out, but the rest were inside another POS bubble where they were manning the gun arrays to try and knock us down.

Bubbles, always bubbles

There really wasn’t much point in our hanging around for that.  Boat seemed determined to take a couple of their guns offline once all the bubbles were down.  And then he got annoyed when somebody got killed by the guns when we had plenty of logistics and were all aligned and told to warp off if we started taking too much shield damage.  So it became an idiot test, and he held us in range of the guns to see who would fail.

Firing at guns

A couple more Drakes did before we decided to pack up and head back to the original POS shoot.

It was during this stage that Riverini of EVE News 24, who was part of the defending force, plied us with his new CSM7 campaign slogan.

I expect we will see that on a campaign poster soon.

In the mean time we headed back to the original POS shoot to finish that off, putting me on the kill board for March.

POS Down

At about that time the Comcast people started logging back in, the blocking them from EVE Online issue having been resolved, though it seemed like a bit too late for that.  Some headed our direction, while we headed back.

On the way back we ran into a serious gate camp.

The only picture I got during the confusion

This developed into a running battle between systems for a bit, but the campers clearly did not want a stand up fight… which was clearly not to their advantage, so who can blame them… while we did not have the means or the patience to track them down, being a Drake fleet with really only Scimitar support.  There were a few losses on both sides before we decided to continue to burn for home.

On the way, Boat told us that the op we were on had initially be setup as a screening operation, a distraction while our own super capitals went off and took care of some other business.  But since the timer on that particular station was in the window, it was felt that we all might be happier if we at least got to blow something up.  And so the POS war in the north carries on.