Saturday, October 27, 2012

Bad Intel

Timing is everything. Today it was really bad. I had logged in earlier than normal and did a number of things including my very boring PI shuffling. I then left for a while to deal with other things. When I came back, I sat down just in time to join in with a fleet to kill a Loki.

Four of my corpmates were online and they tackled the Loki as I was reshipping. I warp in to the Loki and land 40 km from the wormhole. The first frission of alarm shot across my neck and I quickly hit d-scan. Before the scan completed, a large fleet started landing on top of us.

I quickly tried to get out of range and warp but to no avail. My Proteus died in a flaming ball of fire. When I asked about a sig check, one of the team members had checked and missed identifying a new incoming connection from a C5 wormhole.

Why oh why! I wish I had been 1 minute later sitting down. All of this pain would have been avoided. In the meantime, I may was well go buy a new Proteus while I am in high sec.

Friday, October 26, 2012

A T3 skirmish

We are scouting our static chain when one of the scouts reports an Orca in the C3a wormhole. While we are getting a fix on the POS another scout reports a Proteus on d-scan. Based on the name of the ship, we believe the pilot is from Kill it With Fire and they are not the inhabitants of the static or the C3a.

I am asked by the FC to jump into the C3b and deploy probes to see where they are coming from as it is believed the pilot is bringing in a new ship from high sec and hasn't bothered to rename it yet. My scout jumps and drops probes on the wormhole since nothing is on d-scan.

I cloak up and locate the tower before sending my probes out for a blanket scan. There are only 3 signatures in the system and based on the signal strength, they are all almost guaranteed to be wormholes. One is the wormhole I just came through, one the static low sec and the other is a K162 from a C5 which has been massed down.


I  pull my probes, report what I have found and then hit d-scan as I start my warp to the C5a wormhole. However, d-scan shows a Legion and Zealot so I stop warp and continue watching the C3b->static connection. A Legion, Zealot, Tengu and Proteus show up and jump through to our static.

Our scouts track their movement to the HS and we put a Drake in the C3a on the static connection. Meanwhile the rest of our fleet is in the static on a perch above the C3a. It only takes a couple of minutes before the Drake is engaged. They most likely recognized the bait but were hoping they had the fleet to deal with whatever came through.

The Drake held for a while and then jumped into the static and held cloak. Three of us were assigned to cross jump and tackle on the other side while our Broadsword put a bubble up in the static and the rest of our fleet engaged.

The hostile fleet followed the Drake but jumped back quickly when they saw our fleet which polarizes them in the c3a. We spread tackles and pin 3 of the 5 pilots on the wormhole. The Legion of Ghost Speed is the first to die followed by Ghost Speed himself. Next up is Santafee who is also in a Legion. Santafee managed to nuet out the Broadsword just long enough to escape with his pod.

Bronski Bomb was in a Proteus with a huge tank and managed to burn outside the bubble before his ship went down. Stark diver in the Tech 3 Falcon (Tengu) warped after the bubble was up and was podded in the encounter.

The Zealot and a cloaky Proteus were able to escape during the encounter. Good fight!

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Killing a Chimera

An alliance wide call goes out that there is a fleet sieging a tower with a static high sec. We are going to disrupt that POS bash and kill a capital ship which is on the field. Ship type? Shield fleet since it is a pulsar. Crap! I do not have a shield PvP ship.

I jump into an alt and grab a passive tanked PvE Tengu. At least I can put DPS on the called targets and the logisitics pilots will have no trouble keeping me alive. I do not have a point, but with a fleet this shouldn't be too big a deal.

The rally system is called and I start moving that way along with various other members and friends of the alliance. Asking who wants in on a capital kill is like throwing someone who is cut and bleeding into a shark tank. Everyone wants in on it.

We arrive at the staging system and people start trickling in. Because the tower is a small tower, we decide to go as soon as we have 2 logistics pilots in the staging system. Less than half the scrambling pilots are in system when the second Basilisk pilot shows and we head to the target system.

The wormhole is bubbled but we quickly burn out of the bubbles and one of the local pilots whose tower is under siege is asked to make a hero tackle on the carrier. He tackles the Chimera and the fleet warps in and starts firing on targets.

The DPS splits and the carrier pilot cannot keep everyone up. Ships start to go down as more of our fleet arrives. Calling targets is affected as their are close to 20 floating ships inside the POS. However, we manage to kill a good portion of the sieging fleet and they manage to bubble their own carrier. Once the field is cleared of all piloted hostile ships, we focus on the Chimera and make fairly short work of it.

We loot and shoot the field and head back to the now crit wormhole to find several stragglers from their fleet warp in and try to make it out. A few make it, a few don't and we collapse the wormhole during the process.

A fleet scout scans down the new high sec and the fleet exits with smiles on our faces.

Engagement Report: http://talun.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=14614942

Friday, October 19, 2012

A busy evening

I log in and ask what is going on. Not suprising, the answer is nothing which is exactly what was going on when I logged out previously. The static chain is uninspiring but I go ahead and jump into the static and discover much that the scanning was very sloppy. Instead of the expected 4 signatures, there are 23 signatures which resolve to rocks, gas, mags and radars. Less interesting than I had hoped.

Since one of our directors is putting up a new tower and needs a route to high sec, we roll the static away and start over. When the old wormhole dies, we get 2 new signatures instead of the expected single signature. Along with the new static, we also have a K162 from a class 5 wormhole.

There is no visible activity in the connecting C5 so we roll that wormhole away before starting our scouting of the new static chain. A couple of scouts jump into the new static and I take a short break to handle a few real life mundane chores.

As I sit back down, there is an emergency call for battleships, falcons and webs on the static. The only thing I can determine from my limited questions is that they are running from Combat Probes. Huh? I never did figure this one out. There was more to this story than what I know. As requested, I jump into a Falcon and watch them roll the wormhole.

My curiosity dies with the wormhole and just as I start to jump into the C4 to start scouting, we have another K162 open from a C5 into our home system. I look around in the system and see nothing particularly interesting so we decide to close it.

We jump 4 battleships through and then warp them off before landing the carrier on the wormhole. The carrier jumps and the pilot starts screaming about an incoming fleet. As he is calling out ship types on d-scan, we scramble into a kitchen sink pvp fleet and warp to the wormhole. The carrier jumps back, the wormhole dies leaving the fleet on the other side. At this point, local lights up. We have evidently trapped their scout in our system.

In the meantime, we discover that there are 9 active pilots in our new static with 4 Tengus, a Drake, a Hurricane, a couple of scouts and a couple of transport ships moving around. However, there are no wrecks at the moment so we are watching a waiting. As we are waiting, we continue talking to the scout trapped in our system and discover that several of us were in a corp with one of their fleet members at one time.

Eventually, after multiple ship changes, gathering some PI, making a trip to the local market, random warping for no apparent reason and anything else you can conceive to do in a wormhole, two Tengus and a Drake warp off and disappear. Supposedly into their static C4 (c4a).

Since the rest of the pilots are now logged off and with no visible presence in their home system. We scan down the wormhole they jumped through and move our fleet up. The scout who was in our system tags along in a borrowed Guardian for fun until we can find him a way home. One of our scouts jumps into the c4a and reports they are in a site with wrecks. He uses d-scan to figure out where they are and warps in to get a fix for a fleet warp in.

However, as he is moving into position, the Drake explodes from sleeper fire and then one of the Tengus also explodes. Our scout uncloaks and whores the killmail for the second Tengu and the fleet warps in save his Proteus and manages to catch Celius prime and transfer him to a cloning vat.

Meanwhile, I am sitting in the static on the c4a wormhole along with a HIC. The remaining two pilots jump into the static into our waiting hands. One pilot tries to run for it and the other jumps back to the static. Plethura Zom tried running for it and failed much like his ship in the c4 site.

Our scout deploys combat probes and we start chasing the pilot around the system. We put a HIC in one of his safes once we find it with the bubble up and continue chasing him around with ships and probes. We offer a ransom and based on the value of the other kill mails we were willing to take 200M. He refuses to respond to the offer and eventually he revisits the spot where we have the HIC waiting. Rick O'Shea would have been much smarter to negotiate the ransom when he is running around with those implants in wormhole space.

They lost 2 Tengus and a Drake to the sleepers in a C4 site and then 2.5B ISK worth of implants to our fleet trying to get back home. Obviously, this wasn't one of their better days.

We still need to get this neutral scout out of our system so the wormhole is rolled again looking for a route to k-space. This time we get a static with a connecting C3 but there is a Tengu and a Noctis on d-scan with wrecks.

The neutral pilot deploys probes, gets an unbelieveably fast lock on the Noctis and warps in for the tackle with his Cheetah. Our fleet jumps in and very quickly we destroy the Noctis and send Plinarr back to k-space. We loot the wrecks as the local Tengu pilot curses us in local. We deploy probes and find the C3 which contains a EOL connection to high sec. The neutral pilot jumps to high sec with thanks for the interesting evening. We pull back and roll our static again, still looking for a good high sec route for our director who is putting up the POS.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Defenders at last

I have always wondered why so few people are willing to defend their home system. Tonight was different. We jumped into a static to see a couple of ships and a tower on d-scan. With a static C4, that in itself has been rare recently.

Scouting the POS reveals that both ships are piloted and a combat probe is also visible in system. We assume that with a single probe up, it is only a matter of time before they know of our connection so we deploy core scanners and start resolving signatures.

Sure enough, a couple of minutes later additional probes show up and several hauling ships and mining ships show up in system. Evidently, the locals were mining in their static C3. Makes sense, since there are very few signatures in the local system.

We find the connecting wormhole (c3a) and jump a Harbinger through on our static and a Drake on c3a to see what kind of response we will get. Probes start moving in on our home connection and we are pretty sure they have the wormhole pinned. One of the pilots jumps into a Dominix and warps to c3a.

Our Drake engages and we jump our fleet into the static and jump to the c3a wormhole. While we are in route, a Falcon decloaks and jams our Drake and the Dominix warps off as the fleet lands. We have shown our hand and have nothing to show for it.

We warp back to the home wormhole and are discussing our next move when the locals reship into what appears to be a combat fleet. They have a Maelstrom, a Dominix, a Abaddon, a Hurricane and a Drake. In addition, the Falcon pilot is still out there somewhere.

We bubble up the home wormhole hoping they will warp to us and for a nice change of pace, we get our wish granted. They warp in and the fight begins. They target our Broadsword while we go after the Dominix.

A couple of our pilots hold back waiting on the Falcon to engage and once it does, it is called as primary. Unfortunately for the Falcon pilot, the bubble has dragged him in close and the Falcon explodes rather quickly.

As the Falcon dies, our Broadsword is forced off the field at critical shield levels so there is no hope of catching the capsule. We return our focus to the Dominix and take it down as well. Meanwhile, I have been primaried and as the Dominix goes down, I am forced to leave the field as well since I am now deep into armor.

Our remaining fleet goes after the Maelstrom and takes it down while the remaining members of their fleet bug out. We give them a good fight in local and then roll the wormhole instead of hanging our disrupting the rest of their play time.

While this group did not manage to get a kill, they were able to force a couple of our fleet members off the field. Instead of having us disrupt their entire evening, they put up a fight and we withdrew once it was over. I tip my hat to these guys for being willing to engage and defend their territory. If we had not had an escape door at our back, they would have gotten a Broadsword and a Proteus.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Taking bait

The corp has been scanning chains for quite some time when I log in and the first thing I am asked to do is jump in a HIC and collapse the static. Evidently, they have been chain rolling wormholes looking for someone to kill.

The scouts head into our static and report combat probes on d-scan. However, the probes are not moving so they scan out the system and jump into the neighboring C2. This wormhole also has probes out and they find a C3 connection, a C5 connection and a high sec exit in the C2. A little cat and mouse activity occurs with us seeing a Helios and Loki on d-scan but only getting eyes on the Helios.

The other group then sends a Drake into one of the anomolies. This looks and feels like BAIT! However, that is not going to stop us since it means is that we may get a good fight out of them. We assemble a couple of guardians, a falcon and our dps and warp in on the Drake.

As we drop in on the Drake, they have pilots start pouring in as well. I see at least 2 Lokis, a Legion to two, several Tengus, an Oracle and a Scimitar. The fight is on, their Drake goes down pretty quickly but we lose an Anathema and a Falcon in the site before they bug out and head home once they see our Guardians land.

We chase them to the hole and I manage to tackle their Scimitar on the other side, while another group tackles an Oracle. Our Broadsword shows up before the Scimitar goes down and we send XYON back to the cloning vat. Once these ships go down, the FC calls us back to the wormhole.

Before I can make it back to the wormhole a Legion warps in and collides with me about 20km short of the wormhole. Needless to say, I immediately tackle the Legion and notify the FC that we have another target tackled on grid. We finish off the Legion and loot the wreck to find some nice deadspace modules. Not sure what he was doing warping in when everyone else was fleeing for their lives, but I appreciate the new gear.

Good fights are exchanged in local and discussions start about round 2. We have finally found a group willing to fight and our scout reports they have moved a carrier onto the field 90km from the wormhole. We get organized and obtain some additional help from our friends at LOST before moving in for the next round.

Unfortunately, this round went to Fantabulously Terrific Wonderment. We have never heard of you guys, but you brought a good fight. We ended up with our Guardians too close and some of our DPS too far away. Their Bhaalgorn was able to disrupt our cap chain very quickly and once the Guardians went down, it was only a matter of time before we lost other ships.

A full accounting of the engagement can be found here. Even though we lost, it was a fun fight with nearly equal numbers of pilots. I think both sides had close to 20 people engaged.

Since it is late and I was given a free ride trip to high sec, I make the few jumps over to Jita and log for the night. I will have to replace my Proteus and implants sometime when I am not so tired.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Finding some pew

The past weekend has to count as one of the more boring weekends in my wormhole history. It was a holiday weekend in the United States and I had a considerable amount of time available which I spent looking for targets with nothing to show for it.

However, that is about to change. As I log in, my corpmates have caught up with some people ratting and managed to kill a couple of Tengus and the most expensive Drake I have ever seen. Of course, I have logged in 10 minutes to late to participate in this action.

After they return from the engagement, we roll the static and continue looking for targets. Nothing! Not even a mouse is stirring. Finally, since I have a compelling urge to shoot something, a couple of us decide to run some sites in our static before we call it a night. We have a nice static with several lucrative sites and a quiet connecting C2.

Scouts are deployed and we run three sites before switching out for a salvager. We are cleaning up the third and final site when we see a Buzzard and a Tengu on d-scan. There are no new signatures and since we have a scout on the C2, there is no way the pilot came from that direction. Either the pilot came from our home system or someone logged in who lives in the static.

We scurry home leaving 5-6 of the wrecks unlooted and unsalvaged. We deploy probes to find that there is a new wormhole in our static. Our scouts report that they now have probes in both the static and the connecting C2. Activity has found us!

I jump into the new wormhole in our home system to find a rather quiet C5. After a little scouting around we decide to collapse the incoming connection. Four battleships and a carrier later, the incoming connection is dead and we set a trap on the old wormhole for the returning pilot.

The static wormhole still has combat probes active in it. We give it a few minutes but nothing happens so I go check out the C2. As I jump into the C2, a Buzzard decloaks and jumps into our static. I wasn't fast enough to get the pilot name but the ship tag does not match those belonging to the C2. The C2 now has a third Orca which I will assume is piloted since it was not there on our earlier scouting trip.

With known activity and combat probes in the static, there is nothing I can do about the activity in the C2 at the moment. I head back into the static and ask for a Drake to return to our site and retrieve the rest of our loot. Maybe whoever has combat probes will engage the salvaging Drake and give us something to shoot at.

The Drake lands in the site and begins slow boating to the wrecks and sure enough the combat probes start moving in on him. It takes a minute but they get a lock and a few seconds later a Tengu uncloaks and begins shooting the wrecks. The Drake burns toward the Tengu and tackles him while the rest of the fleet jumps into the static.

Once the tackle is established we warp the fleet in on him and get additional tackles and webs on him while waiting on our HIC pilot to show up. The Tengu is then burned down and lestradd is sent back to the cloning vat. It seems we have caught and killed a pilot who lives in the C4. I guess he didn't like us running his sites.

During the fight, I catch sight of another Tengu and a Pilgrim on d-scan plus the unaccounted for C5 pilot and the activity in the C2. I deploy probes again in the C4 to find a new signature. Scanning it down reveals an outbound connection to a C2. What a minute! What? I bookmark the wormhole and warp back to the original C2 to find it gone. I guess the occupants of the C2 didn't like the looks of our fleet and collapsed the wormhole while we were busy killing the Tengu.

This leaves the C5 pilot stranded out of our reach so we head home. A bit of ISK for the wallet and a nice T3 kill for our effort.

Friday, October 5, 2012

Ending the day with a satisfying kill

My day starts off with a scouting report of an Orca closing a wormhole 3 systems out. I verify that I am sitting in my cloaky Proteus and head down the chain at best possible speed. A little demon on my shoulder is screaming in my ear that I really should change ships to a HIC but I ignore him.

I get in position just inside 5 km of the wormhole and wait. Our scout reports the Orca is in route. He jumps into the system, I decloak and we both jump back. The Orca and I are 13 km apart when we pop out of the wormhole but the Orca is a slow ship and I have plenty of time to burn into range and put a scram on him.

Target lock is acquired, scram is applied and I am burning toward him to ram him. 2000m, 1000m, 500m and he warps off! I should have listened and brought the HIC. I wave in local to the pilot, and he waves back from the safety of his tower before I head back home. It is doubtful he will be willing to give me another chance.

The next step is rolling the static wormhole looking for something to do since the current static is barren of life. Rolling, rolling, rolling! We roll the wormhole 5-6 times finding nothing interesting in any of the systems. We finally come across a wormhole that has a few sleepers and eager to fire on something, we run the 5 sites before rolling the wormhole yet again. This time we have 4 Tengus and some wrecks on d-scan.

Our CEO goes looking for the tower while I go check out the outer planets and find more wrecks. One of the Tengu pilots has gone offline, another has switched to an Anathema, a Noctis has turned up at the tower and there is an unpiloted Scorpion floating. A check of the corporation shows a small corp that is only 30 hours old.

In a few minutes, the Noctis pilot warps back to the outer planet and finishes salvaging there before moving on to the next site.  I swap places with our CEO and he gets out of d-scan range to deploy probes. We narrow down the location of the Noctis with d-scan and he initiates a scan. The first scan comes up with an 86.9% result. Lousy CEO scanner! He throws the probes off grid and resets for a second attempt.

The second scan is successful in getting a lock and the fleet is instructed to jump and hold cloak. The CEO locks the Noctis and calls for the fleet to warp in hot. The Noctis explodes and we send Lee Ang to a cloning vat. I have no idea why the Noctis didn't drop the loot from previous sites while he was at the tower earlier, but we appreciate his generosity. A 770M ISK Noctus kill is a sweet find.

The Noctis pilot logs off immediately upon hitting the cloning vat. The Anathema pilot wakes up and warps off. We deploy probes and start looking for wormholes. While we are scanning, the Noctis pilot comes back online and the Anathema is observed jumping into a K162 to a C5 system. Our scout jumps in behind him and we move a couple of interceptors and an interdictor up to the inbound C5 connection.

Our scout reports it is a blue system and there are active pilots. We notify them about our activity and wait for the Anathema pilot to jump back. He jumps and I lock him down quickly only to have him jump back. I follow but he manages to get cloaked before I can lock him and even though I know where he was last seen, I am unable to decloak him.

Now he starts trash talking in local. We are not adverse to a little smack talk ourselves and the insults fly freely. While this is going on, we ask our friends to collapse the wormhole for us. They are more than happy to oblige, possibly just to get rid of the annoying chatter in local.


A couple of minutes later, our friends land 2 orcas and jump the wormhole quickly bringing it to the verge of collapse. Less than a minute later, the Anathema pilot jumps back in. This time he is not willing to jump back through the dying wormhole and my fast locking Stilletto proves more than capable of locking him before he can cloak and escape.

He screams noooooo in local and attempts burning out of range, but his resistance is futile. Our CEO yells "nailed yo ass!" as the cocky pilot's Anathema explodes. Even better, my boosted lock time enables me to catch the pod and send Almaa2001ro back to a cloning vat. We scoop more sleeper loot from the wreck and head home smiling.

Without the trash talk, it is doubtful we would have bothered with the Anathema after he eluded us the first time. It wouldn't have been worth the trouble. Combining the totals from him and his alt, we destroyed over 900M ISK and took home over 400M from their efforts. Welcome to wormholes, jackass! Your nullsec experience is no good here.

As a reminder of the experience, I anchor a can in a safe close to their tower with the message, "Almaa2001ro is pro, he died here". Please enjoy the reminder of our encounter for the next 30 days.