Always Something to Clean Up in Space

After having caught the first move op back to Delve last week I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself in New Eden.  I haven’t ratted in over a year, and I haven’t mined in much longer than that, and have no desire to do either.  When you see those Delve numbers on the monthly economic report, I contribute nothing to those two categories.

Meanwhile the peace in the north has meant few strategic operation opportunities.  I like strat ops because the have a goal and I am a very goal oriented person.  Roaming just to roam, unless it is with Reaver, isn’t something I enjoy.

Fortunately it appears that NCDot was looking out for me.  It must be because I am friends with Matterall.  They left a couple of Astrahus citadels in Aridia set for US time zone timers, so when a fleet went up to go shoot them I was awake and ready to go.  It was going to be Hammerfleet doctrine, which is built around the Ferox battlecruiser, which meant that I would get to show off the Cordite Blossom SKIN that CCP briefly offered as a fundraiser back with the September update.

Cordite Blossom Ferox at a jump bridge

The fleet was under Dave Archer and, of course, he didn’t tell us what we were up to, just that it was a strat op.  The presence of spies and the requirements of operation security means we rarely get told much until something is already happening.  But that it was a strat op in a doctrine that is often used to shoot structures, and because there was a small carrier op under Zed Starshine going with us, it seemed like a good bet that there was a citadel out there that needed bashing.

And that we took the jump bridge to 1-SMEB pretty much guaranteed it was in Aridia.  So off we went, shepherding the slower carriers that would be used as the firepower for the shoot.  Getting there went smoothly, except for the point when somebody in the fleet set off they cyno by accident.

That wasn’t what he meant to do

That sort of thing doesn’t happen as often as it could.  But it was quiet enough in the area that we left him behind and he was able to catch up.

The Astrahus itself was being gunned, so as we orbited the structure it threw various things at us.  For the most part that kept logi awake with something to do.

Paints and webs on somebody

The unaware and incautious were in trouble however.  Small stuff had to warp off to stay safe and the few people who did dumb things, like lighting their microwarp drive when a bomb was coming in, paid the price.  But losses were minimal.  When the heard had been culled of the incompetent the gunner started in on our drones and we had to pull those and pick up with guns.  However the fighters from the carriers carried on without issue.

Unfortunately, this shoot was just for the armor timer.  There was no kill mail to be had.  The kill was set for three days down the road.

Timer counting down

Then we moved to another system and did it all again, shooting another gunned Astrahus to take care of another armor timer.

The Ferox line and a planetary atmosphere

That set up another timer for a kill next week.

After that it was a quick run back to 1-SMEB where the carriers could jump and we could take the jump bridge back home.   So I managed to get in on at least one fleet this month and helped clean up some hostile structures.  We’ll see if I remember to check for the fleet that will go get the final timers and the kills.

An Azbel in Aridia

I had not been out on a coalition fleet op for almost a month, since the camp of the Keepstar in 68FT-6 that followed Judgement day and the demise of Circle of Two.

But my activity tends to be a reflection of the coalition’s activity.  I am not much for random PvP and gate camps and the like.  I enjoy operations that have an objective, and after the downfall of CO2 there wasn’t much going on with the strategic front.

And then The-Culture started falling apart in Fountain, stepping aside to let coalition allies The Initiative land in their space, which started to stir things up in the central-west of null sec in New Eden.  This also brought The Initiative into conflict with LowSechnaya Sholupen, which ended up losing their space in Fountain as a result.

Fountain as The Initiative moves in

Oddly enough, if you compare the current sov map (from which the above clip was taken) with the one from a year ago, LowSechnaya Sholupen was in the process of losing that very same chunk of space to The-Culture.  Some things never change… or always change… or however you sum that up.

We have had an opportunistic relationship with LowSechnaya Sholupen, or LSH, over time.  During the great retreat from Saranen to Delve they picked off… “sholuped” as it was termed… some careless Imperium capital ships attempting to make the run.   But we have also spent some time allied with the and helped them fend of The-Culture before, cooperating to bust towers and citadels that were encroaching on what they saw as their turf.

However, when things settled down we reset each other, it being more fun to hunt us than to be an ally when times were quiet.  LSH sat in Aridia and picked off people coming to Delve while we were up in Hakonen, and then picked off Imperium pilots attempting to return from the north when that deployment was done.  We shot them, they shot us, nobody thought too much about it.  And then we came into conflict over sovereignty in Fountain and we started hitting their assets.

Or that is my understanding of the situation.  I’ve spent most of the last couple of weeks either at EVE Vegas or playing RimWorld and derived most of that from what I heard on Saturday night.

A Saturday night ping.  A couple of hours in advance a ping went out announcing that there would be a strategic op forming up, with a guaranteed kill mail and a possible fight, at 05:00 UTC, which comes out to 10pm local time for me.    That isn’t all that late, or it used to not be that late.  I’ve become my grandfather, something or an early riser a lot of mornings, so I tend to be in bed at 10pm most nights.  Furthermore, a strat op like that can possibly run for hours and I’d been up since 5:30am local time as it was.  But I had taken a nap that afternoon and there were no plans for Sunday, so I decided to hang out and join in.

At the appointed time a ping went out for a Machariel fleet for the op.  I was already logged in and so joined fleet right away and hopped into my Mach.  I would normally fly logi for an op like this, but I bought a Machariel for a fleet a while back when they were short on DPS and now I am determined to fly it at every opportunity… and there aren’t that many… until I lose it.

Wilhelm Machariel

Our Mach doctrine has a large number of refits included so the first part of any op is getting everybody on board with the fit of the day.  Usually the FC has a link to the fit in the fleet chat MOTD.  Our FC, Dirk Stetille, was a bit behind on that.  Not that it mattered.  People will show up in a Mach fleet and immediately start asking on coms what the fit is without bothering to check the MOTD.  It is one of the annoyances of being in main fleet, people asking questions immediately without checking in the usual places.

Anyway, I got myself fit and undocked.  There I watched the capital fleet under Thomas Lear, which was going with us, undock and start heading out ahead of us.

Sitting on the Keepstar undock

As usual, the capital and sub-cap fleets were sharing voice coms, which adds its own element of confusion when one FC gives instructions that only apply to one fleet but fails to specify which fleet they mean.  Still, despite the usual amount of questions and people showing up late or being in the wrong ships or asking if they can catch up, we did get our act together and get under way in fairly short order.

We moved off to a nearby jump bridge that we would used to get us to 1-SMEB, and from there into Aridia, where we were told to hold and wait.  Of course, some people jumped anyway and the FC had a heavy interdictor put up a bubble around the jump bridge which prevents anybody from using it.  Well, anybody besides interceptors and interdiction nullfied ships that aren’t affected by bubbles.

Held in place on the jump bridge

We stayed there until the capitals got far enough ahead.  Then Dirk had the hictor pilot turn off the bubble and we jumped through and aligned for Sakht and the Aridia region where LSH lives.

We plodded along a bit with the capitals, then were warped to a perch off of an LSH tower that we proceeded to warp to and shoot.

Hitting an LSH tower

We successfully put the tower in a reinforced state.

Tower shoot finished

That immediately led to questions about the kill mail we were alleged to have been guaranteed.  At that point Dirk had to explain that we had indeed formed up more quickly than expected and were actually early for the timer we were planning to hit, so we stopped along the way to reinforce an LSH tower.

From there it was on to the main target of the night, the LSH Azbel in Yahyerer.

Arriving at the Azbel

We landed at a perch as carriers from the capital fleet jumped in with us.  We then warped into gun range of the engineering complex and opened fire.

The LSH Logo on the Azbel

The structure was being gunned by an LSH pilot, but the defenses were not much compared to what we brought.  We were fit for passive tanks and were using projectile weapons, so capacitor draining void bombs were of little use, and we spread out so that other bomb flavors were not much help.  Fighters were launched, but between our light drones and the carriers covering us, those were dispatched quickly.  The Point Defense System managed to catch a few support frigates that wandered too close to the structure in order to tag it and get on the kill mail, but other than that we just shot, reloaded, and shot again.

There was a minor bit of drama, as is usual, about people broadcasting for reps prematurely. (Or broadcasting for shield reps in an armor fleet.)  Dirk asked us not to broadcast until we were down to 60% armor.  That was more damage than anybody in a Mach was taking and so the logi discussion quieted down.

The Azbel itself was worn down until finally it exploded in the usual magnificent blaze, leaving a wreck behind.

Azbel Boom!

Then there was the question of looting the wreck.  The kill mail shows that a lot of capital ship building components dropped along with a pile of fuel blocks.  Thomas Lear brought a Rorqual to loot, but the sheer size of the loot… over 3 million m^3… meant that only a bit could be grabbed.  So we shot the wreck instead, terminating what was left of LSH’s dreadnought construction operation.

As we were heading out a Raven had the ill fortune to stumble upon us as we were heading to a gate.  He managed to jump just in time, but a few people ran him down and caught him, giving us our only non-structure kill for the night.

In the wrong place at the wrong time

You know that stumbling into 300 Goons in a system has to be a panic moment.

From there the capitals started back towards Delve while we hung about covering their departure.  At that point Dirk said that anybody under 60% could broadcast, and I think we all had some armor damage.  You could see some on almost every Mach.  Dirk said he was mildly impressed that so many of us could hold off.   We were then going to head back home ourselves, but first he had a couple more targets of opportunity for us along the way.

First was another tower to reinforce.  This went more quickly when another group of caps and supers showed up to add their firepower to the mix.  There was a moment of comedy when two Leviathan titans bumped on landing and went flying off.  It wasn’t a huge bump, but they went pretty far off from the rest of the caps.  But their firepower meant that the tower was reinforced in short order.

Second tower reinforced

The, finally, there was one last tower.  This one had been reinforced earlier in the day, but had so little stront in it that it came out that night.  So we headed to that with the capitals along as well and blew it up.

A True Sansha’s tower coming apart

With that second kill mail in hand, it was time to head home.  Fortunately Delve was only a few gates away.  We had gotten participation credit already, but Dirk gave us a second one as the three hour mark was upon us.  And that wrapped things up for the night.

We will see if there is more to do in Aridia or if LSH will come to some accommodation with us.

Meanwhile, screen shots from the op collected up in a gallery.

Sitting on the Keepstar undock

Held in place on the jump bridge

Hitting an LSH tower

Fighters painted

Azbel starting to burn

The explosion is just about to hit

Azbel gone critical

Azbel Boom!

The Azbel wreck

Damage from the Azbel

Levi’s bumped

Revelation lit by laser figre

Caldari tower being hit

Jubliee skinned Avatar

Supers at the tower

True Sansha’s tower being hit

A True Sansha’s tower coming apart

Astrahus Busting in Aridia

Citadels are all over New Eden at this point, with the medium sized model, the Astrahus becoming a common site just about any place I fly.

Saturday gave us the opportunity to clean up a few of these citadels.

A fleet went up on Asher Saturday evening (at which point it was already Sunday in New Eden) with the objective to go shoot some things, which is usually a euphemism shooting structures.  It was an Augor Navy Issue fleet, which meant lasers, which are good for structure shoots as you generally don’t have to reload a laser unless a frequency crystal burns out over time.

I was actually in the middle of something and didn’t see the fleet was up until almost 45 minutes after it had been announced, generally a sign that it might be too late to catch up.  But it was Saturday evening, structures take a while to shoot, and we haven’t been going too far afield for these sorts of things, so I decided to log in all the same to see if I could join in.

Logged in and on coms, I was able to spot where they were using the map option that shows where fleet members are located and the destination was linked in fleet after I had set out, so I was able to take gates and link up with the fleet shortly after they had arrived at what sounded like was their second target for the night, an NCDot Astrahus that was coming online.

An Astrahus in Aridia

When a citadel finishes its deployment cycle, it then has to go online, a process which isn’t too long, but which can be interrupted by shooting at it.  This is the best time to kill a citadel, as it cannot defend itself during that time and you can kill it right then and there without any additional timers.

I appreciate that CCP decided not to carry on with the whole entosis link module thing when it came to citadels.  Everybody shooting something is at least a bit more interesting (and much prettier when you’re using lasers) than a fleet sitting around watching one person use their Fozzie laser on a structure or command node.  But to keep citadels from just being blapped quickly out of existence by a supercap fleet when coming online, there is a cap on the amount of damage that can be applied.

For an Astrahus, if you are applying damage at the cap, it takes 22 minutes to kill one when it is vulnerable.  So we were out there with our Fountain allies, LowSechnaya Sholupen, blazing away at the citadel named, if I recall right, Steak and Onions.

ANIs shooting the citadel

This was the second NCdot Astrahus on the list of targets for the night, another having been popped earlier in the evening.  NCDot apparently wanted to seed the route down to Delve with citadels to cover any potential move op, but didn’t use a neutral alt corp and subsequently didn’t show up to defend the citadels as they went online.

And so I got to see my first Astrahus explosion. (kill mail)

Citadel goes critical

I will put the explosion sequence I caught in the gallery at the end of the post.

After that, our we diverted off to help LowSechnaya Sholupen with a tower belonging to The-Culture (formerly that part of Black Legion that wanted to live in null sec) that was coming out of reinforcement.  They even provided a titan to bridge us over to the fight.

An Avatar tethered on a different Astrahus

Given how careful we tend to be with our titans, it was kind of fun just to see one hanging out on a citadel waiting to bridge us.  We were bridged out but arrived a little too late to get a kill on the tower.  The shields were already up past 50%, so they could add more stront.  Along the way there Asher was looking for somebody with a cyno… and eventually somebody had to go buy one… during which time it came out that, while nobody had one, several of us came armed with festival launchers.  SynCaine was in fleet and called me out for being on that list, so I targeted him and sent some copper fireworks his way.

SynCaine’s ANI

The cyno was so we could bring in a few LowSechnaya Sholupen to join us in the fight that eventually developed around the tower, where we traded a few ANIs for a Minokawa fax machine and some Rattlesnakes, which won us the ISK war for sure.  On the down side, mine was one of the ANIs that went down.  Hopefully somebody looted that festival launcher.  Good thing I brought down an extra.

If you look at that kill mail, I clearly forgot to clear my cargo hold after moving the ship down to Delve.  Ah well.  I was at least reminded to empty out the cargo holds of a few other ships.

I was able to watch the battle from my pod as the hostiles couldn’t spare any attention to blow me up.  That put me on a couple more kill mails as a pod, including the one for the Malediction that had tackled me.  When the fight was over I had to warp over to the POS to get somebody to blow me up and send me home.

That was it for the moment.  The fleet headed back home and there were some administrative things to look into.  But a while later a Confessor fleet went up in order to bust the third Astrahus of the night, and the second for me.  Keeping to what seemed to be a food theme, this one was called Meatball Sub.

Your meatball sub will be up in about two and a half minutes

This citadel shoot also went uncontested.  We got ourselves anchored up and, once the timer finished its count down, opened fire on it.

Confessors firing on the Astrahus

LowSechnaya Sholupen and a couple of their allies joined in for this kill as well.  Even with a smaller fleet… no dreadnoughts helping out this time around… we seemed to be able to hit the damage cap fairly easily.  You can tell when you’re there as you will start registering zero damage hits every so often as the damage output exceeds the cap.

I tried to get a different camera angle on the second Astrahus when it exploded, but the underside view wasn’t dramatically different.  And it all leaves the same wreckage in the end.

Astrahus remains

Once done it was back home to Delve.  Not exactly a huge set of blows against NCDot.  Astrahuses are pretty expendable.  But it was nice to finally get to see a couple of them explode.  If you’re going to shoot structures, you ought to get a pretty payoff when they blow.  More explosion pictures in the gallery from the op below.

ANIs shooting the citadel

An Astrahus in Aridia

The explosion starts

Citadel goes critical

And it goes boom

A nice orange glow

An Avatar tethered on an Astrahus

Bridge up from the Avatar

LSH dreads and the dead Minokawa

My pod roaming around the fight

Confessors firing on the Astrahus

The second Astrahus starts to light up

Astrahus remains

Seven Cynos to Sakht

There is no reward under the opportunity system for “achieved maximum jump fatigue” in EVE Online.  I know, because if there was one, I would have gotten it last night.

Just four seconds late on the screen shot

Five days is the hard cap on jump fatigue, a change that came in with the Parallax expansion last November. (Did you know that Parallax was the last named expansion in Syndicate?)  Before then, from the launch of the Phoebe expansion until Parallax a little over a year later, you could ruin a character for jumping for long stretches.  Now you can max jump fatigue out on Sunday and be fresh and ready to go the following weekend.

Just don’t plan to do any jumps over the days in between.  The wait between jumps gets a bit harsh.  Here is where I stood after maximum fatigue hit.

That is almost as long as a DBRB fleet feels

So how did I end up with all that jump fatigue… or, more to the point, why?

Opportunity!

The night before, after making my jumps, I did managed to get my cyno alts inserted into the next two destinations.  So when I got home from work, I  jump cloned back to my carrier from Sakht and did those jumps almost immediately, thinking that I might have to spend the rest of the evening getting the next jumps into position.

Another jump in the Archon

As it turned out, these two locations represented the most difficult spots into which to get a cyno alt, since they involved flying through NPC null sec in the form of the Syndicate region.  All the cyno spots after that involved runs through relatively safe, and mostly deserted low sec space, with a quick jaunt through one of those high sec enclave in the middle of low sec that makes you wonder what sort of job CONCORD is doing.

And… well.. with cynos alts in position, why not take the jump?

If I had known that back end of the route would be that easy to get into position, I would have structured my jumps differently.  I would have let the ~50 minute fatigue from the first jump wear down to below the 10 minute mark before making the next jump, keeping my fatigue from building to over an hour.  Maybe, I might have not bothered with the timer on the last couple, but by that point quick jumps would have left me with jump fatigue that would have been gone over night.

Instead, not knowing which jump might be the last one for the night, I took them about as soon as I could, and the jump fatigue started to build; an hour, four hours, ten hours, twenty three hours, three days and change.

Exotic stations under strange stars

After five jumps I was sitting on a lot of jump fatigue already, and had a 90 minute count down until I could make the next jump, but by that point I figured “What the hell!”  I had an alt ready and waiting, so I lit the cyno.

Burning the beacon at the last station for the night

And then it was time to jump.

Somewhere in Aridia

That was it for the night.  Jump fatigue was at maximum and the next possible jump window was over eight hours away.

And I still wasn’t in Sakht yet.  Sakht was seven jumps from where I started and I blew my load in six.  As I said above, if I had known I was going to get this far, I would have done it differently.  But now my carrier, with a pile of ships in the hangar, is just one jump from our staging station in Sakht.

I sent my in-alliance alt ahead, and he made it all the way there.

Destination gate in sight

The smart bombing battleships were taking a night off from gate camping, so it was an easy set of jumps.  And now I have my main alt, my combat alt, in our staging system.  He even made the trip there entirely via gates in an frigate with only a cyno module fit and 250 units of liquid ozone in the cargo bay.

My carrier road trip is almost at an end.  I just have to not screw up on that last jump.  Given my ignorance or capital ship operations, I am surprised I got this far without any real incident.  I managed to place my cynos on stations in a fashion that wasn’t horrible.  I think worst landing I had put me 3km off the undock, distance quickly covered.  The rest were under 200m, with most showing 0m.  The tactical overlay option that shows the landing zone for your cyno when you mouse over the module gets the credit on that front.

So easy, even I understood it!

I also only lost one of my cyno ships.  I bought four Kestrels, named them Bait 1 through Bait 4, and only Bait 2 died, getting blown up on a gate in Syndicate.  I expected cyno ships to get popped sitting on the undock much more frequently.

Hell, I expected my NPC corp cyno alt to get popped by my own side at some point, being in a “Not Blue, Shoot It” coalition and all.  But he never got shot.  In fact, he got convo’d by a GSF pilot at one point asking about his name (a misspelled Jack London reference) during which I said I was just a lowly Imperium cyno alt, and which point I was told that I was holding up somebody’s jump as they were paranoid because a neutral was sitting there on the undock. (I forgot to dock up after the cyno went out… and still nobody shot me.)

Anyway, it was an adventure, getting my carrier from Saranen to Sakht, a 13 jump multiple day event.  EVE Online is one of those games where you have to focus on the journey most of the time, because the destination is usually just the starting point for the next trip.  But if you’re sick of my traveler’s tales in New Eden… and I admit that I haven’t gotten to see anything as cool as this jump… there are probably only two, maybe three posts left in the “Getting to Delve” series, I swear.

Now to let that jump fatigue wear off… wait, I still have one more jump to go.