Black Sheep in Low Sec

The new corp, Black Sheep Down, went on its first big op yesterday.

It was planned as a corp op, to follow on to our first corp meeting, as something of a bonding exercise, with out fearless tyrant, Meclin, leading us.

But then word got around on the director’s channel and suddenly it became an alliance op.  TNT turned out for our little venture, which got us some more pilots as well as titan support for a bridge out.  More pilots was probably a good thing too, as we were off to blow up a mining tower in low sec and replace it with one of our own.  More is generally better for that sort of thing.  But Meclin sort of got muscled out of some of his leadership responsibilities with this as well, which seemed fine with him.

The call was for a Talos battlecruiser fleet, another fleet doctrine I hadn’t really run into up until that point.  As it turned out, a lot of people in the alliance had not either.  Some Taloses were trucked up and put on alliance contracts at which point they sold out almost immediately.

A Talos Battlecruiser

I was short a skill to fly the fleet Talos fit (Hybrid Weapon Rigging I), so I opted for logistics and piled into one of the Scimitars I have parked all over New Eden.  I made sure I had a Garde II shoved in the drone bay so I could get on any kill mails.  Sentry drones have the range to hit a tower through the POS shield, unlike a standard combat drone, which has to get in close.

We ended up with about 60 pilots headed out to our target in low sec, with a boost from a titan to get us on our way.  Once there it turned out that the tower had no fuel so was sitting there with no POS shield.  I could have stuck with my Warrior II drones.

The shoot went smoothly, with only the occasional factional warfare pilot landing in the vicinity.  We were in one of those systems.  The tower was blown along with two key modules.

Boom

Then a Rorqual dropped in to deliver the new tower.

New tower, new name

While that was deploying and coming online, a chunk of the fleet set to check nearby systems to make sure that process remained undisturbed.

Intel sent us chasing after a couple of elusive targets.  Then a call came in that some neutrals had a Chimera tackled near a POS.  We rushed over there to find no Chimera (it was literally a Chimera I guess), so joined them in bashing the POS tower they were working on.  That put us all on another kill mail.

We moved on quickly from there figuring that, once the POS was down, the two fleets would likely start shooting each other and we were at a disadvantage.  This is EVE Online after all.  Sure enough, once we warped off, they sent us a note asking why we did not stay and fight them.

We had good reason to move on.  While we were off doing that, a couple of ships had shows up to harass the tower deployment operations.  So we moved back to where we started and knocked them off quickly enough.  We chased a few more phantoms after that before finally starting on our way home.

As it turned out, while we were away, some hostiles had been roaming around VFK looking for kills.  We attempted to cut them off as they were leaving the area.  However, in one of those moments of bad timing, we warped off a gate just as they landed on it, so we were not able to follow them through and bubble them on the other side as quickly as we needed to in order to catch the bulk of their fleet.  A couple of stragglers were nabbed, but that looked like all we were going to get.  So it was back to home from there.

Not a bad first outing for Black Sheep Down.  The op was a success, kills were had, the alliance joined in, and we added another moon mining tower to our operations.

As usual, I have some screen shots from the op after the cut.  I was able to get some good shots of drones for once.  I think the ambient light in low sec might be better suited to such screen shots.