Drake Fleet goes to EWN-2U

The economic war in the north of New Eden continues.

It is we of the CFC, versus Raiden and their allies, in an effort to deny each other the economic largess of tech moon profits.

It is a war of timers and time zones as each side attempts to disrupt production and destroy infrastructure.

And so the call went out again for another fleet operation.  Structures in one of our systems, EWN-2U, had been put in reinforced mode, meaning that when the timer ran out on that, Raiden would be able to destroy them.

For a weekday fleet operation, this one started later than usual.  Thank the timer I suppose, but I was able to join up after work.  Again I was part of the Drake fleet.

We rallied in the usual location and moved off for our forward staging area.  I was a bit surprised to come out of warp right on top of one of our Avatars, a titan class supercapitals.

The face of an Avatar

The Avatar was there to bridge us out to where we would defend.  The question was, would the enemy show up?

We waited for the cyno to be lit, the target for the jump, while we all hovered at 2,000m from the titan.

Fleet awaiting deployment

By default, the hold ranges you can pick are 500m, 1,000m, and 2,500m, but by this point I had finally figured out that the “hold at range” button on the overview could be set to a different value.

So we hung there in space, waiting.  Would we go, or would we stand down once more?

The announcement came through that the cyno was lit.  We were to jump through, deep into the Branch region.

We jumped in one system over from our destination, EWN-2U.  As with the previ0us night, Zarks was our fleet commander and Raegelan was the Drake anchor ship, the person we were all supposed to follow every time we dropped out of warp.

We formed up, if only for practice in the system, PKG4-7.  As somebody noted, having the systems “BKG” and “PKG” in the same region seemed… unfortunate.

We flew around a bit, then got the order to align to the gate to EWN, which happened to be 90 degrees off of our course, so our trail formation turned to become line abreast as we took the warp to the gate.

Then we were in EWN.  We flew to the station bubble where the Maelstroms of the Alpha Fleet were waiting.  We cruised some more, wondering what would happen.

And then the count of players in the local channel started to climb rapidly.  Raiden was coming to contest the tower.  They were going to play in our time slot.

We warped away from the station, then warped again, then warped back to within sight of the station and could see the Alpha Fleet already engaged.  Blobs of enemy ships appeared around them.

The battle joined in the distance

We warped to one and the routine of battle started.

Shots hitting Alpha Fleet

Zarks would call targets, flagging them in the fleet window, where we would lock them up and get a shot.  Zarks, who sounds calm at all times, would read out the first three letters of the name of the target and call it “primary” or “secondary.”

This would change rapidly as an enemy ship would warp away after taking damage or become the targeting of shield reinforcing ships and become practically invulnerable.  Lock, fire, lock, fire, lock, lock, lock, fire.

The changes in targets often came faster than my ship could target them.  For a while I was hitting every other indicated target.  If my launchers were cycling at the wrong moment I could miss two or three targets.

Then the other fleet would warp a few hundred kilometers away and we would follow.  Then when we started taking damage, we would warp away.

Turning to align for another warp

This went on for a while.  Only once was I targeted by the enemy, and I barely had time to notice.  As my shields went down, I called for reinforcement and then we warped away from the battle for a moment.  So while my shields never got repaired, I never got hit again either.  Score one for the psychic reppers I suppose.

We went back in again, but during this pass both Zarks and Reagelan were unshipped and warped us to an asteroid belt to regroup.  We were taking damage and losing ships.

Drake popped in our formation

But then the news came down the line that the Alpha Fleet was in much worse shape.  The Maelstroms were taking heavy losses.

The decision was made to merge the two fleets.  We left Drake Fleet and joined Alpha.  Or most of us did.  It turned out that we were a bit better off than we thought, as a reinforcement fleet also showed up at about that time.  Those of us who could warped to Dabigredboat, the Alpha Fleet leader and went back into action.

Dabigredboat, or just Boat, has a different style.  While Zarks has the calm demeanor of a DJ on a classical music station, Boat is much more… frantic.  But he does impart an energy as he shouts target names over coms.

Pouring out missile fire

For a while it was the same as before, lock, lock, shoot, warp, lock, lock, shoot as primary and secondary targets were called out.  And then there was a change, a moment where the battle turned, where we had peeled back enough of their support ships and suddenly we were making kills.

Two kills, not sure whose

Boat changed up and started calling out to just shoot anything in range, which always makes me a bit nervous, since the overview has a habit of flagging a friendly every so often.  But it was lock and shoot and kill.

Then the enemy faded and we were on the field alone.

And we had won.

We warped to the PKG gate to catch as many as we could trying to flee and managed to catch a few, but that was the end of organized resistance.  The tower was still up, repaired, and out of danger for the moment.

Boat then announced it was time to loot while he went and got his dinner out of the oven.  I managed to scoop up some faction ammo before my tiny Drake cargo bay was full.

And then people started clamoring to head home.  Boat however was still off getting his dinner ready.  So people started organizing their own groups to head home.  A few people tried to burn though solo, but it was a long way by slow boat and there was, of course, a gate camp.  There is always some PvP corp waiting for battles so they can pop stragglers.

The route back to Deklein

We nearly had a decent size blob of ships ready to pound through and gate camp, because even a 20 ship camp comes apart when 100 Drakes jump through, when Boat finally got back on coms.  He got people pointed in the right direction and started the flight back home, though we had to stop and chase every single red or neutral than we came across, all the while hearing about how juicy and tender his chicken dinner was and how somebody at some time tried to bed some other player.  But we got home.

The kill mails had already started getting linked around.

The overall battle shows us making 161 kills for 217 ships lost.  When measured by ship value, the ratio was a little closer, with use killing 21 billion ISK worth of ships for a loss of 24 billion ISK.  The joy of cheap Drakes taking down Tengus worth ten times the price.

While we lost more ships, we ended up in possession of the system and the moon mining operation, something that can generate several billion ISK in revenues every month, continued.  The Raiden summary seems to align with this.

And I managed to get my first ever PvP kills in EVE Online.  I only started playing the game in August of 2006.  It just took me a while to get around to it.

Over 600 pilots we involved.  Time dilation, the slowing down of the battle so that the server side end of things can keep up, kicked in during the battle.  I think we got down to running at 65% speed at one point.

And, because I am never happy just playing the game, but feel some need to chronicle these sorts of events, there is an associated movie on YouTube.

This is clipped together to give some sense of how it felt, while the music, another title from the EVE Online sound track, gives the whole thing the proper frantic feel.  There is a segment in the middle where I left the UI on so you can see me flailing about to target and shoot.

And so went my first actual null sec fleet battle.  It was frantic fun while it lasted.  It didn’t seem like two and a half hours.  Except listening to Boat talk about his chicken.  That did seem to be on time dilation.

To Soar with Titans, To Sow Destruction!

When I last wrote, I was hanging around in Mittaningrad, so named, as I understand, for the heroic defense that took place there back in July, looking for something to do.

Me, still at Mittaningrad

With fleet ops active, screwing around in empire space or hunting rats in the asteroid belts were officially verboten, so something to do would mean getting into a fleet.

Fortunately, as I logged on to see what was going on last night, there was a convoy forming up to bring people out to our advanced staging point, from which fleet ops were being launched.

With Gaff’s help, I was able to join the convoy fleet just as it was leaving.  In fact, due to my fumbling, I was actually a couple of jumps behind it for most of its run.  It was a good thing somebody pasted the route into the fleet channel.  And with a 100+ ships breaking trail, and a couple of stragglers along for the ride, I do not suppose I was in horrible danger.

I arrived at the staging system, left the convoy fleet and joined Gaff in second fleet, and I did so, as usual, just in time.  It filled up to its maximum 255 ships just after I joined and a third fleet started assembling.  There were a lot of people out there.

So I warped out to the second fleet leader to see what I could see.

And what did I see?

Lots and lots of ships… including mother ships and titans, classes I had never seen in person before.

A Nyx floating around waiting for ops to start

There were lots and lots and lots of ships, and more showing up all the time.

Masses of Maelstroms

But, as usual, I was behind and flailing to figure out what was going on, where I should be, and what I needed to do.  I took a few screen shots before it was suddenly time to jump out.  This required me to be within 2,500m of the titan opening up the jump and I had managed to drift off while I was agog, so had to get into position.

Fleet jumping from the titan

At jump in there was a fight… I think.  I took some shield damage as White Noise stealth bombers tried to disrupt the fleet.  I think I saw the bad guys, but due to distrust and inexperience of using the overview as a PvP tool, I was afraid to start shooting just anybody I wasn’t sure about.

And by the time I was sure, they were dead.

We faced stealth bombers a few times, but they did not seem to be that effective.  On the fleet channel it was said that they launched too close together, used the wrong bombs, launched from too far away, and a few other foibles.

But in general I never saw more than 20 at a time, which versus 255 in our fleet… plus the other fleets… made for no odds at all.

We sustained a few losses from that first encounter, but drove on to the initial target, where the fleets formed up.  We were waiting for a timer on the player owned station tower to run down, at which point it would be vulnerable to attack.  White Noise had a number of towers set to time out in a relatively short window and we were there to kill them all, along with structures being protected by the towers, including CSAAs, which I am told have nothing to do with the California State Automobile Association and everything to do with building titans and other capital ships.

Blobs of ships warping in to the target area

These were, as The Mittani put it, with his usual turn of phrase, the “hell wombs” that we needed to take care of in order to ensure victory over White Noise.

We arrived at the first target and had about a ten minute wait before we could start the attack, so I floated around taking pictures.

Titans and lesser ships

Titans and dreadnaughts

When we arrived we were told to pick a random direction, turn on microwarp, and spread out until the fleet commander (FC) said stop.  My “random” direction was away from the tower and I ended up way out of range of my heavy missiles and could not get back in before the first tower and all its structures were destroyed.

First tower goes with me out of range

I do like how the titans were looming over the kill.

Then it was time to align and warp off to our next target.

Titans attempting to align

Here I made sure to get in close and when the timer expired, I was able to open fire.

My Drake blazing away

The control tower is in the center of the kinetic missile explosion, while you can see one of the CSAAs in the foreground.  And very quickly it went boom, and then the secondaries blew as well.

The structures went next

I think those pictures were all from the same kill… though there seems to be a planet missing in that middle shot, so it might be from another tower kill.  Same idea though.

According to the kill mail, I did 0.04% of the damage.  Titans and dreadnaughts were doing the heavy lifting, though even the top contributor only just got past the 3% mark.

First Time on the Kill Board

If you look at the mail, there were 281 Maelstroms, the most popular ship in the fleet, involved in the kill.  There were also 26 Drakes, including my own, though I do not think I ever saw more than one other at any given time.

Then it was time to move on to the next target.

Aligned with a school of Maelstroms

Landing on a gate or a similar location in a large group is quite a sight now that trails are back in the game again.

Trails, trails and flashbacks!

And from there it was servicing a target, moving, and then servicing the next.

Another titan based jump

Eventually we arrived at the final tower of the night.  There was a 25 minute wait for us before we could attack, which allowed me to get up, stretch, and then go explain to my wife what I had been doing for the last two and a half hours since I disappeared into my office for “just a minute.”

This also gave me time to set up Fraps to take a movie of the final attack.  It turned out to be a long attack too, at least relative to the previous ones.  The titans and other capital ships had gone off to do something else and so it was just second and third fleet left to do the killing.

This is a picture of the attack in progress, so you can see some of the details, including the pair of CSAAs sitting in the bubble.

Attack on the last tower

And then there is the movie.

I started recording the movie 4 minutes into the attack and the edited out the first 5 minutes of the movie, as it was pretty much a loop of use just shooting.  There was a lot of fire and reload, fire and reload going on.  Basically, imagine the first minute and a half of the video going on for around ten minutes.

I also had to put in a new audio track.  Enjoy the music.

It turns out that Fraps will capture all your other commo, so the original sound track was chatter from the fleet coms.  While I do not think it divulged any Goon secrets (Lord knows I heard little enough of value during the whole op on that channel), I thought it better not to broadcast, though there was a good exchange in there about the White Noise response to all of this, which I gather was somewhere between, “We can rebuild!” and “We’re letting you get away with this for a reason! You’ll see, and you’ll be sorry!”

The video also plays in higher resolution, at least up to 480p when I tried it.

And with that most people in the fleet were tired and want to go home.  We had to “slow boat” nearly 20 systems to get back to our starting point.  One of the gates on the way back was camped and a few of those rushing to get home got killed.  That camp may have caused nearly as much damage to our fleet as the total White Noise defense effort.

However, I was in the middle of the returning blob… never less than 100 fleet members in local… so saw nothing but wrecks.

Gaff, in checking the kill boards, discovered that his character was on top for our corp for the month of December so far, though he was, by his own admission, “kill whoring” and targeting his guns individually on multiple targets to get in on as many kills as possible.

But even I appeared, for that moment at least, in 8th place with nearly 60 kills on the books.

Not bad for my third day I guess.

And quite a third day it was.  As much as I would like to say that the Goons do this every day and twice on Sunday, I gathered that this was a reasonably special operation.  I was lucky to be there at the right place and at the right time.

Now what will we do tomorrow?