In the age of Fozzie Sov, with jump fatigue, Entosis Link “warfare,” unrest in large sections of null sec, and updates every six week… just listed them all out and on about half of them my brain was, “Oh yeah, that one, I remember it now”… there is a certain comfort in the fact that you can still go shoot a player owned starbase, or POS, in the same old way to which we’ve grown accustomed.
Not that I have any particular love for POS shoots. But they have remained a staple of null sec… and low sec… operations throughout my time out there. My first big fleet op in null, nearly four years back, was a POS shoot and included my first kill mail (it is interesting to see who of the 561 pilots on that kill mail I recognize as active today; The Mittani is in there), and I have been on many more since then.
Shooting a White Noise POS in December 2011
And they do give kill mails, which can be a surprising draw.
Shooting a POS in September 2015
You can debate kill mails and what they mean and how we should count them or score them or flaunt them or ignore them, but people like them all the same. A ping for a fleet that just says “POS shoot” will earn groans… and command is aware of that, so they never say “POS shoot” in a ping unless it will be a kill. If they add that, then people will pile in.
A kill mail is surprisingly important to people. I do not know anybody who talks about the quantity, or even the quality, or their kill mails. Aside from the occasional amusing one… I hope they didn’t spend all of Gevlon’s money on that… that gets shared around, they don’t get talked about a lot where I fly. Yet getting one is still a big deal. I think it is more a matter of recording a moment of time where you were in space and in a fight and making a difference. Even in a fight you lose, it is cheering to be able to have drawn a little bit of blood from a foe. I try to get on at least one kill mail every month as something of a heart beat to prove I am still alive in the game. This can be tough because I usually fly logi, but I keep a combat drone handy just in case. Again, kill mails are important to me for a somewhat oblique reason.
And the absence of kill mails is something which people have pointed at as a flaw of Fozzie Sov. While sitting around and shooting ihubs, TCUs, and SBUs, is a thing of the past, so are the kill mails for those items. Instead, somebody in an interceptor waves their magic Fozzie laser over a thing while the rest of the fleet stands guard. It saves on ammo, but we still have to hang around, and it isn’t any more exciting if the other side fails to show… and the other side usually fails to show.
But we still have towers. The graphics have been updated and some of the details have changed, but a POS shot today isn’t much different that a POS shot back in 2011. Everybody gets on grid, the defenses, if there are any, get shot offline, then everybody shoots the stick… the control tower, the central structure for a POS… and hopes that the defenders didn’t bother to fuel it up with Strontium Clathrates. If the defender has, the tower will go into a reinforced mode and we’ll all have to come back when the timer runs down if we want a kill mail.
A tower timer is supposed to allow both sides to be able to prepare for a fight.
But if the defender has neglected to “stront” their tower… and the attacker doesn’t know the status on that until the tower shields get down below the 25% mark… it is possible you’re going to get a kill mail tonight.
And that is what the Reavers have been up to of late, shooting towers, setting timers, hoping that the owner forgot to fuel up, and getting the occasional fight, all in the chaos of Fountain.
We’ve been there for a while now, which if you follow kill mails of known jacket pals… kill mails are intel amongst other things… and care about what we’re up to you could have figured out, so I suppose this is safe to write about now. I try to balance operational security with my desire to record what I have been doing.
Yes, back to Fountain, which is probably just behind Delve and Querious when it comes to null sec regions where I have never lived yet have spent a lot of time flying in and through. And, as was pointed out on a fleet the other night, Fountain also seems to be the breaker of alliances. People who live in and own space in Fountain seem to head to low sec or crumble. TEST, Brave, Fatal Ascension, and most recently Black Legion have all lived there and ended up being changed by the experience. I think only LAWN came out of the region unscathed, and that was likely because the LAWN gnomes felt at home in a region with constellations named after things like unicorns and griffons. Mythical creature solidarity.
Is it the region or the people it attracts that does this?
Anyway, the region is, as noted, now in a state of some chaos with Black Legion’s sovereignty being picked up by a range of successor groups, including an alliance named, perhaps a moment of hubris, The-Culture. Love the reference, but can they live up to that name?
The Balkanization of Fountain
So the region, which also remains convenient to home, has become a place to blow up some towers and, as noted, look for the occasional fight. (Map clipping from the usual source.)
A tower goes down
One of the oddities of alliances coming to the edge of collapse in the region is that it is fairly valuable space. The ratting is good and we invaded the place back 2013 for the stated reason of taking the moon income. (There is my timeline of the Fountain War for those interested in reliving the “good old days.”) So it is a place worth holding. We will see who ends up with it in a few months I suppose.
In the mean time, there is no point in not exploiting a few of the better moons.
Putting up a tower in Fountain
That will generate some income… or at least attract hostiles for fights. Plus it “feels” like EVE Online as we know/knew it, shooting something out in space with the possibility of danger lurking. And it gives us something to do besides watching the comedy of Northern Coalition, who wants fights, and who has teamed up with Mordus Angels, who clearly does not want fights, trying to coordinate together to do something in Imperium space. They make a timer and call it ~content~. And so it goes in the New Eden of Fozzie Sov.
Finally, on a side note, Reavers chief Asher Elias has started a podcast to talk about null sec and ships and doctrines and getting fights and has posted the first episode over at SoundCloud, with the first guest being Ron Mexxico of Pandemic Legion.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 