Every time I see a call go up for a Drake fleet, I try to join if I have the time. My hope is to winnow down the Drakes I have stashed around in null sec, as CCP’s nerfs to my longtime favorite ship have made it unlikely to remain useful in fleets.
Basically, nobody will want to buy them, so I might as well lose them and collect the insurance and reimbursement ISK.
So on Friday night when Fyzick called over Jabber for another Drake fleet in an attempt to lure The Retirement Club out to fight, I was online and in the fleet. After all, last time we tried that, I lost a Drake. And, since I did eventually get reimbursed for that loss, and didn’t get podded, it was at least an economic victory.
This time around though, we rang the doorbell, but nobody came out to play.
We formed up, traveled out to our titan and got bridged out to the target. It was yet another POS shoot. We knocked the modules offline and started in on the tower. There was a glimmer of hope that The Retirement Club might come out and play. A couple of their members were inside the shield and had manned the guns until they were all out of action.
(Complete aside: I have the Starbase Defense Management skill up to level IV. I could shoot POS guns. I trained it up for out aborted wormhole expedition a couple years back. I have never had the opportunity to use the skill. And that article I just linked has, at the bottom of the page, probably the best description of POS attack and defense issues that I have seen. Pity it is hidden in an article about a skill. Typical CCP.)
However, nothing happened.
Well, we flew in circles for a couple of hours, and launched missile after missile into the tower, slowly chipping away at it. But it was a tedious event. Nobody came out to bother us. There was no in-fight movie arranged to distract us. And Fyzick, our FC… a position that requires you to be more like a cruise director during these sorts of boring shoots… was distracted. He was likely off in one of the intel channels trying to figure out if anything was going to happen.
So I did what I often do in this sort of situation. I took a bunch of screen shots. I also opened up Fraps and took some video of Drakes shooting missiles to use as stock footage should I ever get around to making another Drake Fleet video.
And then a DBRB fleet was announced, its intent to roam out and find targets, something at which Dabigredboat excels. However we were all stuck flying in circles. Fyzick did talk DBRB into waiting for us to finish up so we could join in. However, by that point I had sort of had my fill of fleet ops for the night. Even the lure of endless DBRB trolling and stories couldn’t keep me going.
But I ended up with a few decent pictures.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Do you still play EVE on a daily basis or only where there is a fleet action? Seems like 0.0 space is a bit .. shall I say .. boring. ;)
As someone who is not part of the “big blue donut” our corp is having some fun times. We recently engaged in some wormhole exploration to ninja some gas and other junk.
I did lose a ship yesterday as a wormhole exit closed unexpectedly behind me and I had to scan through four 4 wormholes to find an entry back to normal space. Only downside was it spat me into the middle of Solar Fleet space so I had a bunch of angry Russians chasing me. They finally caught me at a gatecamp at the border of null/lowsec space.
Ironically wormhole space is far safer than null/lowsec.
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I am so glad I don’t have any Drakes and that my alliance has retired them (even though we never really flew them on an alliance basis anyway).
As for Mekhios’ comment.. I can’t speak for whichever alliance TAGN is in (TNT right?) but GENTS are having a *lot* of fun in 0.0. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in Eve right now.
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I know I wouldn’t trade null sec for anything, running with S2N and we have fleets/roams all the time – never a dull moment!
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I don’t sit in game much lately. All ISK earning activities have worn thin, specifically mining and ratting. So I depend on Goon Jabber to tell me about fleets, and of late Jabber has been pretty quite when I have been online and able to fly. Makes me think we need another war.
@Wartzilla – Didn’t GENTS deploy with Razor down to help Solar?
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Nope, that was Fatal Ascension. We are not deployed, it was intended that we eventually would solo deploy somewhere unknown (because that’s the norm for GENTS), but at this point we’ve got plenty enough to deal with at home. 401k and D’n’D are hitting our shit damn near daily, and we’ve actually gotten some fun fights out of that.
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