Up until about a week ago I had an alt out in Malpais and Oasa regions in the Dronelands, that swathe of space that make up the eastern side of null sec where drones are the primary NPCs to fight. There had been a call last November for characters you could afford to “coffin,” which is leave locked up in a ship in space, for an extended period of time. The requirement was that the character needed to be able to fly the current preferred black ops battleship, the Redeemer.
My alt was close enough and had a surplus of unused skill points that he was able to get into the required fit, so he answered the call and off he went. And he sat undocked in space from early November through until the end of June. That is a character committed to a task. There are no handy stations or structures to dock up in so you can clone jump back to home to do something else for a bit. Resupply is from blockade runners that slip in and out of the staging area. If you lose your ship the nearest NPC supply point is on the other side of a long inter-region gate jump… so no bypassing it easily… to Geminate and one of the few pools of NPC space in the midst of PanFam space.
The Dronelands and the long regional jump gate crossings
It is hard to see Malpais, but it is that brownish section in the middle, which makes it a nice place to sit if you want to drop on people in the area. It is also nice and tucked in the middle of the Drones, so is not easy to get at, which means it is a place where capitals running CRABs can be found.
That was the point of the exercise To drop on those caps for big ISK kills and to keep our foes from having completely uninterrupted ratting income.
Dropping on a Phoenix Navy Issue running a CRAB
Somebody sneaks up on the target in a covert ops ship, uncloaks, tackles, and lights a covert ops cyno beacon, at which point we all jump in and join in on the attack.
Black Ops jumping in to the attack
Sometimes it is just the battleships, sometimes… as pictured above… we link up with another group that has bombers out there to drop on somebody.
It is a game of patience and timing. You have to be online and see the ping and get into the game when targets are around. I miss a lot of drops because I am doing something else.
And sometimes it is a false alarm. There is a ping to get to login screens or to just login and get in fleet and then you sit and wait and find that the target got spooked so the fleet might just stand down again or might hang out for a while to see if another target can be found.
I’ve been on drops where we have hit a couple of Hulks because we were on and no other targets were available. (Also, having your half billion ISK Hulk dropped on by a dozen multi-billion ISK black ops battleships almost never fails to yield salty comments from the Hulk pilot in local along the lines of using a sledge hammer to kill a fly.)
Naturally enough, the locals don’t just sit there and let us drop on things with impunity. They have their own local defense reaction force, a mirror image of our own Beehive fleets, which are there to cover capitals running CRAB sites. Their doctrines are pretty much identical to ours, with Redeemers being the striking force of such fleets.
Redeemers with Apostle support in a counter drop
There are occasional complaints about who copied who, but the nature of the doctrine meta is that somebody will find the optimum solution and everybody else will follow along lest they be fighting at a disadvantage. We used Sins and drones for a while for Beehive, now it is Redeemers. If CCP makes some changes it could be Panthers or Windows.
So we sit and wait, dropping or not dropping, getting a clean kill or getting chased off when the locals are on their game and wary. There can also be stretches of time when there are no targets, either because the timing isn’t right or the hunters have real life to attend to… the actual hunting be a time consuming job on its own and something that has to happen before it is time to call the rest of us in.
Anyway, as I said, this had been where I had an alt locked up since November, but then we got the recall… and I almost missed that. I was away for the weekend when the ping went out that we were pulling back to NPC Geminate. Fortunately leadership assumed people wouldn’t all make it right away, so there were cyno alts in place to get me out the following week. I was able to get what is likely my most expensive subcap docked up in a station after more than half a year in space.
Why the recall? I think it was in part that the deployment had gone on that long.
But on returning we were told that there was going to be another expeditionary SIG put together to work out of the NPC space in Geminate and that we should apply if we wanted to keep up on hitting Fraternity and PanFam. So I applied, putting in the comments I was in Reavers and that Zungen said we should apply.
This new SIG turned out to require a vouch from a corp CEO or director, something I was not ready for, but they let me in anyway. I don’t know why. Maybe that Reavers jacket is magic.
So now we’re working out of Society of Conscious Thought space in Geminate and helping out when the coalition shows up for battles like the one the past weekend where we reffed an Ansiblex that led to a 1,200+ ship clash… which the region was clearly not ready for. Lots of tidi.
Battle around the gate… somebody got called primary there…
But the battle report say we did pretty well.
Battle Report Header
And, when it is just us there are other things to get up to. We still have our black ops battleships as well as a couple of additional doctrines so we can go out and shoot structures until somebody shows up.
Shooting somebody’s shiny new Skyhook
Since we’re based out of a station I can get my main out there to join in on the fun. No major wars going on, but there is always something to do.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 