One of the problems with EVE Online… and, really, any game that depends on PvP for its best content… is that the fun and the fights happen at random times and don’t always line up very well with real life. There have been any number of fights that have gone down while I was at work or had something else going on.
But sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time.
Yesterday, just as I was getting ready to drop work for a bit and get some lunch a ping popped up on my home computer… which is about two feet and a 90 degree turn from my work computer now that I am perma-work from home… announcing that Pandemic Horde was in our space and shooting a jump bridge and it was time to form up and go shoot back.
Home defense fleets tend to be quick and bloody and I had not fired a shot in anger since the big fight at H-PA29 in Venal back at the beginning of December. Lunch could wait a bit, so I logged in and joined John Hartley’s fleet.
The choice of ships was Caracals, the Caldari missile cruiser, loaded with Mjolnir Fury heavy missiles, because apparently the Horde Drake fit has a EM hole in its tank… meaning its resistance against the type of damage a Mjolnir missile brings was low.
I didn’t have a Caracal on hand… we have so many doctrines that I cannot keep track… but some were up on contract. I had to change the fit a bit for the planned mission.
Caracal in the hangar
After a bit of waiting around to fill up the fleet and to make sure people were bringing the right fit… there were changes for everybody… we were able to undock and head south for TN25-J, the system where the bads were shooting our stuff, one gate from Delve and on the route to Paragon Soul where some of the early battles of World War Bee were fought.
Warping off to death or glory
We held up on a Fortizar to let stragglers catch up.
Holding on the Fort for stragglers
Once we had critical mass, John Hartley warped us to the gate and had us jump through and hold our cloak. There were enough people jumping through that tidi slowed things down, but once we started through in numbers we found the enemy waiting on the gate for us. As I loaded in I could see them putting up bubbles to hold us on grid. Nobody was running away from this fight.
We uncloaked and went to orbit and started firing at targets as they were called.
Starting the fight in bubbles
I was interested to see how this would all turn out. We had the numbers, but they had bigger and harder hitting ships. If they had been tanked well against us, it could have gone badly for our side. I made sure my ship was insured before I undocked.
But the EM hole in their tank turned out to be a real thing and we sent enough missiles their way that Drakes began to blow up pretty fast. With tidi and slow module reaction times and the amount of damage we were throwing out I could barely keep up, managing to get missiles away on maybe half of the targets called, and a considerable number of those missiles didn’t reach the target before it was gone.
Our Caracal ball in the middle of things
I set myself up to shoot just on volley per target. They were not lasting long enough for two salvos to have any hope of hitting any Drake called as primary. We flew in orbit around the FC and just locked and fired and reloaded when launchers ran dry. It was a good 30 minutes from the first kill mail I was on until the last target died, a brawl that ran on due to there being plenty of targets and both sides being willing to go head to head.
The last kill was the Horde FC, Mist Amatin, who jumped his Monitor through the gate, but was tackled before he could get away. We all jumped through the gate and the FC had our logi rep him for a bit so everybody could get a hit in on him to get on the kill.
Everybody shoot the FC ship
And then we were done and it was time to go home… and time for me to get some lunch.
We’re done here
We lost 34 Caracals in the fight, but blew up 110 Drakes, which would have been a pretty lopsided outcome. But the battle report was spoiled for us because somebody dropped a Revelation dreadnought on the hostiles, which the Drakes went after with a vengeance, burning it down quite quickly. Out there with a shield tank doctrine we couldn’t do much to help the armor tanked dread.
That Revelation, worth about 6.5 billion ISK, along with the capsule worth another 1.5 billion, evened out the battle report quite a bit.
Battle Report Header
We still came out ahead, but not by the margin we might have. Then again, it meant that both sides came away with their own victory. The trade for the dread wasn’t great, but it always feels good to kill a capital ship.
And I somehow walked away listed on 81 more kill mails. A nice little lunch time fight.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 