While We Were Away…

On the Monday before EVE Vegas the Reavers, along with a couple of other groups, started deploying south to Curse.  With no real war on, and things turning quiet in Pure Blind, NC seeming to slow down and MOA off to greener pastures, the deployment was something to keep us busy.

The ostensible reason for the deployment was to defend the Phoebe Freeport Republic, which had been under assault by TEST.  That was your role play hook, if you needed one.  In reality, it wasn’t like we set standings to blue with PFR.  We just wanted to go brawl with TEST and whoever else we could find.  So we packed up our various doctrine ships and started heading south.

I see at least three doctrines, plus logistical support

I actually got in the first move fleet with both my main and my alt each flying a Basilisk, the current favored shield logi.  They work with Tengus, they work with Feroxes, and… hrmm… not sure about Cormorants.

We moved via the usual route, which is to say through wormholes.

Fleet standing off a wormhole waiting for orders

With battlecruisers and support ships and a couple of carriers along with the usual mix of ships, we were pushing the limits on the wormholes we used.  Our exit hole went critical and collapsed when one of the carriers went through, sending it off into the weeds in the system.  Fortunately, it was also the last ship through so nobody was stuck.  But nobody was going to be following our route or catching up later via that path.

We managed to get to our staging system in Curse and got people setup with setting the station as their home.  There were more move ops to follow and a few ops to start off against TEST, but by the time we got to that point it was time to start packing for EVE Vegas.  I jumped my main and my alt to high sec clones with learning implants and left EVE Online the game behind for almost a week. (According to Raptr I played less than one third as much as usual last week.)

I did, however, have Jabber running on my iPad and could see that ops were being called.  You can see from the latest report over at the Null Sec Updates blog that a series of battles were fought between us and TEST down in “Content Creek” as it has been dubbed. (You might need to scroll down a bit to find links to all of the battle reports.)  We apparently even took the system R4N-LD for a bit, though not everything went our way it seems.

So yesterday afternoon I saw a warning from Asher that we had a timer coming up and an op planned at approximately 23:00 EVE time.  I got myself into game early, clone jumped to our staging system down south, strapped on the Basi, and waited.  Like a few other people, I even got onto voice coms early in anticipation of the upcoming op.  Azure and Argent even put up a fleet just to keep us occupied and to get a pilot count as we waited.  The time designated time came and passed and still we sat and waited.

Then the word came down that there would be no op down south.  Something else had been going on while I was away.  Well, I and apparently a large portion of officers and FCs in The Imperium.  It seems to be a regular occurrence with Fanfest and Vegas, with that group away somebody shows up to take advantage.  This time NC apparently used this opportunity to reinforce things in Pure Blind, so the call was to clone jump back up to the north to join fleets running up there.

Of course, having just jumped both characters, I was out of sync.  But it looks like more timers and more fights possible up in Pure Blind tonight.  And we shouldn’t have too far to travel, as the coalition staging system, 3V8-LJ, if where one of the timers will come out.

So back to space and stabilizing the situation after time away.