I don’t know what to call our war with FI.RE and its allies yet, but operations have been ongoing out of Catch to attach Tenerifis for a while now. We’re even starting to get a bit of propaganda about the war. FI.RE put out this video.
If nothing else, the ending lists up the alliances that make up FI.RE coalition, which is not something I have committed to memory.
On Friday things were setup to contest the first system in Immensea, another FI.RE region adjacent to Tenerifis.
Late in the work day for me on Friday I saw a ping go out calling for an Eagle fleet. FI.RE decided to put up cyno jammers in the constellation where the sovereignty contest would take place. Cyno jammers, which would keep us from being able to bridge fleets or reinforcements into the contested area would give the defenders some help, so the fleet was sent out to go stop that and blow up any jammers that might have been deployed.
That seemed like it would be a quick and easy fleet. I figured we would show up, the locals would run away, we would shoot a jammer or two, then head home. So I logged in, got on coms, and into the fleet. I was there just in time and we were quickly off to take care of business.
Flying out for trouble
We did, in fact, catch the locals working on deploying jammers and ended up in a few skirmishes before settling down to shoot one of the jammers they had dropped.
A cyno jammer is an awkward structure to take a screen shot of
We blew that up and continued to chase around the locals. They were not out in force, but had numbers to make the entosis contest over the system annoying. And the timer had come for that, so rather than going back to Catch to stand down, we ended up staying out to support the event.
This was not so popular with the Euro TZ players who had joined the fleet late in the evening hoping, as I did, that it would be a quick op and then home. But how long could this take? We had been out an hour or so already, I had popped some drugs from my redemption queue that had a four hour duration, surely we would be done long before those ran down.
I wish.
Our fleet was sent out after various target of opportunity in between chasing around the locals whenever they showed up. Structures, including Ansiblex jump bridges, were on the list. We spent time shooting them.
This Ansiblex won’t be delivering reinforcements
At one point we were shooting another Ansiblex and a hostile Munnin fleet showed up on grid with us. We had the Ansiblex bubbled from a couple of directions and were spread out around it waiting for them to come engage. But they just wanted to go home, so they warped around until they found an optimal path into the Anisblex and jumped through before we could shut it down.
We also spent time just camping gates, waiting to see if the enemy would come in to go after our hackers. We got one or two people who bumbled into range of our guns, but most it was just sitting and waiting. Some minor excitement occurred when some Sleeper Seeker drones landed on the gate and somebody decided to shoot them.
This only makes them angry
And they kept shooting the damn drone. That can be a hazard because they call for reinforcements beyond what a single fleet can reasonable expect to deal with.
Eventually we got word to the person shooting them… he may have been German… and they had to leave to avoid being blown up. We shoot rats on gates so often… because that is where rats live now in null sec… that it becomes automatic to shoot the red markers. But these ones you don’t want to shoot… even if they are the same name/model as the seekers in the NPE. (Or did they fix that with the latest NPE?)
Then we got called over to cover one of the hackers as the locals, deciding not to take us head on, formed up some Jackdaws to try and slow things down through hit and run and harassment. (The allowed kind of harassment.)
You can bring your Drake if you want to hack entosis nodes
The contest was clearly going to end out way at that point. Once our friend in the Drake finished and was clear, we went back to camp another gate to keep the locals from getting at our entosis team.
Once we won the sov contest and blew up the ihub in Y-FZ5N it seemed like we might be done… and then we were sent off to cover the hacking of a couple more ihubs because the locals were not putting in much effort to defend so it was time to setup the next operation.
A Sigil hacking an ihub
After that we finally turned for home. The drugs from my redemption queue lasted for four hours and had been gone for a while by that point. It was a long day in space. The saving grace, for me at least, was we sat in various locations for extended periods of time using drones to chip away at various structures. I was able to step away and cook dinner, clean up, change laundry, and a few other tasks. Only once did I find we had been warped off to another target. I arrived back at my computer to see my ship sitting at a gate with the fleet a couple of jumps away. I was not the only ship idling on the gate either. If the enemy had known how AFK we were, they might have been less elusive.
Now we have a foothold in Immensea, in Y-FZ5N, with The Initiative holding the ihub.
Southeast Immensea
And my Eagle made it back to our staging safely despite having been rolling without a pilot for a good 20% of that op.
Eagles headed for home through Tenerifis
There were not nearly as many people in fleet when we finally got back. We had structures not too far away that they could dock up in. For some reason I decided to stick it out to the end.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 