Delve on a Saturday Night

There is the plan, and then there is what actually happens.

-As true in EVE Online as anywhere.

It was, as the title no doubt gives away, Saturday night.  The regular group was opting out, one by one, until it was just Potshot and I wondering what to do.

His latest passion is War Thunder, which I have totally told myself I need to download and try.  But I haven’t  gotten around to it and, with my internet connection, it wasn’t going to happen on short notice.  Meanwhile I have been off in Middle-earth on yet-another-server.  So the points of overlap (and current interest) for the moment were Neverwinter and EVE Online.

We chose space.

We had things to do in EVE.  There are always things to be done in EVE.

For us, there was a need to move more stuff down to the staging station in Delve.  While it was still fat city up in 4-EP station up in Fountain, the logistical tail of war had not caught up to the new deployment.  It seems to take about two weeks to get that sort of thing sorted out.  And until that is put in place, you cannot count on being able to buy anything you need.  You fight with what you have brought with you.

Our plan, which I called “plan dumb” even as I was proposing it, was to get back up to 4-EP and haul some more stuff down to 1DH.  Safe travel through null sec on a Saturday night, when everybody is on and looking for someone to kill, seemed unlikely.  But we both figured we might as well have an adventure.  I only had a Megathron and a Harpy moved down to 1DH so far… convoys south seemed to have wrapped up pretty quickly after the deployment order… along with a Rifter left over from the last Delve deployment.  Potshot was already up at 4-EP, while I was in 1DH.  So I would clone jump up to join him and we would attempt to make our way south.

As we logged on, I found that a defense fleet was still up and active and was actually using a fleet doctrine for which I had a ship.  Dingo had a Harpy fleet out chasing around a Pandemic Legion Talwar fleet.  I got into fleet and on voice coms and joined the fun as we jumped around 1DH trying to force the elusive Talwar fleet to battle.  PL bolted after about 10 minutes and we headed back to station.  However, Dingo was in communication with the PL FC and was told they were going to come back for another round.

This seemed like more fun moving ships from Fountain, so I told Potshot to just clone jump down for the pending fight.  He did not have an appropriate ship, so I gave him my Rifter.  That seemed perfect, as we were totally lacking in tackling ability in the fleet, so I told Potshot he could be a hero if he could just get a point on a hostile Talwar.

Rifter and Harpy in warp

And then about 10 minutes later Dingo told us on coms that PL was not going to come back and that the fleet op was over for now.  It was reported that PL, who had also just deployed to the area, was experiencing the same sort of supply problems we were and couldn’t get their act together for another fight.  Potshot never got his chance to be a hero, though I told him to be sure and click on the participation link.  They also server, who only sit and wait for the FC.

So not only was fun cancelled, but our original plan was pooched, as Potshot’s jump clone timer was now sitting at 23:45:00.  And I am not sure either of us relished a round trip to 4-EP.  We began to do the little things.  I undocked to go set some bookmarks.  We talked about how nice it would be to just be able to set a hotkey to “bookmark my current position.”  I wapred out to the safe POS and was there when a cyno went up and a stealth bomber siege fleet jumped into the system, which was neat to watch.  I wish I had been a bit closer, so I could have gotten some screen shots.  The black ops jump effects are different colors.

Then I warped back to the station, landing 100km off, only to find that PL had returned.  They were sitting on the undock in a Gila fleet.  Unfortunately for them, our previous fleet, plus the siege fleet, appeared to have mostly docked up and logged off.  Nobody came out to fight them and I just turned around and hid in the safe POS until they got tired and went elsewhere.

One pilot stayed behind in a Heretic and proceeded to undock, bubble, and dock up for a stretch until he managed to get caught up in his own scheme and got killed.

So, with our plan for the night scrubbed and no further fleets called, we ended up talking about overviews, skill training, other games, and life in general until the hour grew late enough that we decided to call it a night.