49-U6U – Another Night, Another Boat Fleet

My people, we are facing heavy resistance tonight in 49-, the most key system in the Southeast. Our TCU has not onlined and the foe are trying to launch towers there; I need everyone to wake up and be prepared for a late US TZ slugfest. We need to win 49- and claim sov tonight, or else this system will go into Dominion Limbo.

The original goon broadcast was by the_mittani to all-all

After the long fleet operations of the weekend, I was going to skip that sort of things for a few days.

Gaff, who had also recently been away on vacation, made it down to Delve and was IM’ing me about cheap Rifters up on contract.  I logged on and grabbed one… because I really need another ship to leave behind after the deployment wraps up… I still have a couple of ships up in Tenal left over from the conquest there… and joined him on the semi-premenant camp of the PR-8CA gate in 1DH-SX.

That gate is sort of the front line for the moment.  The SoCo camps one side pretty much non-stop and we camp the other, each hoping to snag a straggler or infiltrator.  It is the reason that you wait for a titan to bridge you into the on and off camp of 319-3D, as you are likely to get picked off if you try to run the few systems there by yourself.

So I joined the fleet, logged into voice coms, and formed up on Gaff on the gate and zoomed around in a MWD Rifter for a while.

In the progression of things early on in my EVE career, I went almost straight to battlecruisers, spending as little time in frigates as you possibly managed.  This “go big” attitude was formed because the very first post-tutorial mission I picked up in game was Worlds Collide.  So I pretty much went to destroyers as soon as I could, then battlecruisers, and then battleships.

In the drag bubbles at

So, for me, there is still a sense of freshness, or newness in flying a frigate.  I was quite enjoying zooming around in excess of 3km a second around the gate, guns loaded and wondering if I might actually get to shoot something.

And then the word came down for an emergency fleet form up.

It wasn’t the message quoted at the top of this post from The Mittani.  That came later.

No, this was from Dabigredboat and was of the “Get in fleet! Get in a Drake! Get on the titan in F2OY-X! Hurry! Hurry! Fight going on NOW!”

And somehow, I always fall for the promise of a “fight now.”

So I left the camp in 1DH, took the gate to F2O, and mulled over just staying in my Rifter… might I actually get to web/tackle?

I decided to go with the old standard, swapped to a Drake, and got to the POS just as the titan bridge went up.  I had to turn on the MWD to get to it in time to catch the bridge, giving it a bump for good measure.  Hey, it was DBRB’s titan, he can take it.

We bridged into the region, moved a couple of systems, and then set up a camp on the gate at 8QT-H4.  It was then, when we were finally at rest for a bit, that DBRB took some time to explain what was up.

Men who stare at gates

We had a Territorial Claim Unit going online in 49-U6U, an important system in the Querious region as it has an outpost and is on the border with the Catch region, which starts to get into Against All Authorities home turf.  Once the unit finished and went online, sovereignty would change from Cascade Imminent to Goonswarm and we would have a new outpost to work with in a position where it could easily become the staging ground for operations in Catch.

During the period when the TCU is going online, which takes 8 hours, it is vulnerable to attack.  And SoCo decided to try and take it out in hopes of poking the CFC blob in the eye. (Their own attempt to plant one in the system got shot down earlier.)

There was actually another fleet in 49-U set to defend the system and chase off the SoCo fleet.  We were to be the blocking force, to camp a gate on the route through which the SoCo fleet would withdraw, assuming that they would head back to 319-3D where they had been staging so far.

The plan worked, to a limited extent.  The SoCo fleet did not come through en masse, but we were able to pop a few ships trying to head back to 319.  We then pulled back a system, to SVM-3K to give the illusion that the door was now open.  This brought a few more targets into our grasp, though much to the annoyance of the Drake pilots, there were several “Insta-Canes” in the fleet (Hurricane battlecruisers configured to lock and shoot targets very quickly) who managed to pick off almost all the enemy ships before the rest of us could lock them up.  I personally got on exactly one kill report there in a half a dozen tries.  I am going to have to look into that Hurricane fit if I want to kill whore with the pros I guess.

When that dried up, we moved off to try and track down the SoCo fleet.  It looked like a pile of them hit the station 5V-BJI, was in reinforce and which seemed to be having some graphics issues on my system.

Shouldn’t that shield graphic overlay the station graphic?

The SoCo fleet appeared to be leaving or logging off at that point, so we returned to 49-U6U, where they had planted a tower in order to keep a foothold in the system.  It had not gone online and so we warped to it in order to shoot it up.

Chipping away at the tower

This was a large tower and our fleet shooting at it was not doing huge amounts of damage.  Fortunately for us, by this time The Mittani’s call had gone out and had been responded to and further reinforcements were sent our way, including some capital ships.

Dreadnoughts join the shoot

The tower went down, so now I have a structure on this month’s kill board.  Go me, I suppose.

And then we began what is often, subjectively speaking, the longest stage of any DBRB fleet; the gap between when Boat says we are going home and when we actually do go home.  I realize that once he has a weapon in his hands along with access to alliance intel, the desire to smite just one more thing must be pretty big.

So it was the usual routine.  Set destination, all gates green.  No, stop on gate X, gate X is red.  All gates green until gate Y, hold on gate Y.  We need to hold here for a few minutes.  And so on and so forth.

Intellectually, I know he does it for good reason.  However, the fleet in general does not have access to the same intel, so we just get surly and impatient.  We fidget in our seats, punch our siblings, and keep asking, “Are we there yet?”  Minutes start to seem like hours and we’re all thinking, “Just say ‘go!’ already!”

Eventually we got to 319-3D, where we were going to stop… or camp the station… or sit in the safe POS… when DBRB announced that all gates were green back to F2OY-X and we were free to go.  And off we went, a blob of Drakes rushing along, bursting through the eternal gate camp where I started off and back to the station.

This morning I checked as saw that sovereignty had changed hands and that Goonswarm now had a station on the border of Catch.

And as we are getting there, The Mittani seems unsure about continuing on into Catch.

I'm coming to realize that taking Catch would be beneath us. Even IRC would be a more challenging conquest. #tweetfleet #eveonline

— ~Abolish the Police~🌹 (@TheMittani) July 9, 2012

Meanwhile, there is a diplomatic call out to flee the sinking ship that is the unhappy SoCo. (You have to log into the EVE forums to use that link I am afraid. Otherwise you get a 404 error, which seems like the completely wrong way to handle things, but that might just be me.)

So while there is a pretty well written summary of how we all got here in Delve, where it goes from here seems to be, as yet, unwritten, whether it be a great war or not.