Tonight I logged with the purpose to review hangar and fit ships just received from Jita, but fleet had a roaming so I joined.
We did travel up-to U4-Q2V, met 15 people who tried to engage us in RS, 2 Harbinger NI, so we traveled back and they did not follow.
Was getting late and people dropped the fleet ...
Episode 1.
... and the moment we docked my alt spotted a gate camp in MHC: they were camping 6E-.
https://adashboard.info/intel/dscan/view/FekTQW0t
As the majority of the fleet already left... I made a ping, and got quite a few people: 2 Scythe logies, 5-6 DD in Caracals, 1 Tackler in Malediction. And... my favorite Drake
The plan was following: bait them on Drake and make sure they aggress, have a tackler burning 30 km from the gate to give the rest of the fleet a good warp-in out of the bubble.
As they were in MHC camping 6E- gate I brought fleet into ZVN to 6E- gate, jumped to 6E- and warped to the gate.
Here I made a mistake, good or bad... I don't know.
Clearly, they dropped the bubble and DID NOT aggress.. thinking I will jump so they follow. They did not even yellow box me.
But I surprised them by aggressing myself. They did not expect this and good 15 seconds I was dispatching Atecake in Sabre.
I believe I called fleet to jump earlier than they aggressed me, but luckily I started getting shots. Maybe not from all of them because they quickly started disappearing from the grid. I switched primary to another ship nearby - did not work, he crashed the gate too.
Another Svipul was 40 km from me, but luckily for us in range for Evil to land a point, so:
https://zkillboard.com/kill/61214807/ +80M
Excellent! I'm not sure what was the exact flow of the battle, so guys please feel in: have you really landed out of the bubble?
I'm not sure if somebody picked up the loot...
Scout reported ZVN gate is clear, we warped to it.
Episode 3.
I asked Evil to check other gates to see if campers were still around.
He found a lonely Vargur. I told "Excellent", somebody more experienced advised: do we have enough DPS to break it?
I thought: we may not, but in kitey ships we can always disengage.... and why to not take a bait? Actually, I forgot my drake is short ranged...
Vargur was not at 0, I asked Evil to point Vargur, and surprisingly, Vargur did not try to crash the gate, but I realized this as a bad sign later.
I warped to the gate at 0, Vargur was at 20, I approached him, asked fleet to warp to Evil, corrected myself: warp at range, but was late for somebody.
Anyway, we landed, started shooting, get him into 50-60% of shield. He started repping, I asked to overheat, when we got him into he (I guess) applied his cap-boosters and repped the damage. After that it was clear even for me: we are not going to break his tank any time soon. Given time he would probably run out of boosters, but his fleet mates arrived quicker.
I first wanted to stay and pickup few easy targets: we had 2 logies (even T1CR, but still and could stay some time on the grid). I asked people to align to celestials and started picking primaries, but they got SO MANY stuff... so I just played safe and asked people to warp off.
My drake was scrammed, webbed, and neutted: https://zkillboard.com/kill/61214951/ -72M
Kitten was unlucky to align to celestial across the bubble and was not able to escape: https://zkillboard.com/kill/61214955/ -27M
Epilogue.
Evil brought fleet back to PC9. And after some break I sat down to write AAR.... and realized, my kill board does have kill of the very first primary in episod 1:
https://zkillboard.com/kill/61215011/ +83M
Not sure exactly, what is the mechanic of the game, but it looks like MC jumped to the same camp and killed Atecake.
Killed: 183M
Lost: -99M
Quite good for the evening.
And yet still these guys keep camping and getting kills: http://i.imgur.com/vInchle.jpg
Why don't we try gate-camping MHC - 6E-?
So, what was good:
1. Got support from NSC via Slack: many thanks to all who responded!!!
2. We did have clear plan and executed it perfectly in the 1st engagement
3. We got a kill really quickly in a time-effective manner!
What could be better:
1. We did not really have any solid plan for the 2nd engagement and it was really an adventure.
2. I guess we could get more kills if I wait a little bit more for people to red-box me before calling fleet to jump.
3. I guess we could avoid losing a Scythe in 2nd engagement.
Any other ideas and feedback is welcome!
