TEST & the HBC mark 2 have been ragepinging for this moon all day and, hilariously, they have like 50 ships sitting on a titan with a sickly trickle of tired pilots joining them. This is their rage-formup. Can we show them ours?
Original broadcast from blawrf_mctaggart at 2013-07-25 00:54
That was the opening for the call. Megathrons were needed. Baltec Fleet was in demand.
This popped up just as my wife was saying that it was time for dinner. So I launched Mumble, which takes forever to come up on my system, logged in to the EVE Online launcher, then wandered off to wash my hands and have dinner.
Once dinner was over, I walked back to my computer, finished logging into EVE, got on the right coms channel, and got into fleet, taking one of the two spots that were left by that point.
Fleet assembly can take some time, but we ended up with 256 pilots in under 40 minutes on a weekday night with dubious prospects for a fight.
I motored out to the titan to join the flock and await further developments. Those developments were slow in coming.
Vertically stacked Megathrons Waiting
Our capital ships were out and putting things into reinforce, and we were on hand to oppose any major TEST sub-capital response. But such a response was not evident. Gevlon’s post today stated that capital ships are equivalent to morale or some such, and that without the ISK to buy them, you lose. Though I thought that harnessing TEST carebears was going to solve the ISK problem, which would thus make TEST unbeatable, so obviously I missed something in there. But it is clear that the lack of Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition capital support is hurting TEST.
We sat for about an hour on the titan, during which I attempted to make some war propaganda.
Things just got real
It is an old joke, but I have a soft spot in my heart for abusing Clippy. And I even put it on Imgur so I can paste that URL into local just like the pros apparently do. Go me.
And, of course, I took pictures of things. I certainly have a lot of Megathron screen shots at this point.
Eventually we did get the call to bridge out to fly closer cover to the capital fleet.
Let The Megathrons Fly!
We ended up flying cover as all of the infrastructure hubs in the Kraken constellation were put into reinforce.
Welcome to Kraken
There was a TEST bomber fleet around when we were in Z30S-A, but they seemed to be mostly interested in spamming local. I linked my propaganda attempt in local, where it was derided. Go figure. We moved around the constellation, leaving TEST behind, though we did catch one bomber on a gate. It was dead long before I could lock on to it. As we finished up there, The Mittani, who was actually logged into the game and leading capital ships, came on to our coms to give us an update on had gone on.
Essentially, as I wrote above, we were the on-call fleet in case TEST rallied enough troops to challenge the capital ships. He thanks us for coming out to be a deterrent force, spending two hours either sitting on a titan or moving from system to system and shooting the occasional NPC. We took back an R64 moon and put a bunch of stuff into reinforce.
Our fleet was then bridged back to our staging point in 4-EP12 to let those who had to call it a night log off. Other fleets were formed up to continue the work in Fountain. And, of course, the alarm clock ops continued again last night. I woke to see TEST had lost sovereignty in another five systems. And even more are queued up for tonight, with the rumor going around that TEST hadn’t been bothering to fully rep structures even when they had saved them recently.
So, for the moment, things seem to be going very much our way in Fountain. But how long will this happy time last? We have taken a bunch of systems, about 30% of the total, but only 3 of the 36 stations in the region.
And what of TEST’s allies? Will Northern Coalition and Pandemic Legion return to stiffen TEST’s resolve and stifle the freely roaming CFC capitals? Are we heading towards a denouement in Fountain, or have we merely reached, to use Churchill’s words, “The end of the beginning?”
The Ancient Gaming Noob 