To expand on this….
Better one bird in the hand
’Better one bird in the hand’ or 'The waiting game' or ‘The Hail Mary pass’ or ‘WHC still fails at spreading points’
Wormholes have connections to other locations. Connections to known space, anywhere on the map. Connections to unknown space, other wormholes. These connections can be static. They will always be there, pointing to something, and it will always be the same
kind of thing. The wormhole campus home has two static connections, one always ending up in high-sec we call Eggs, and one always ending in a C3 class wormhole we call Bacon. These connections can be forced to respawn (‘
Rolled’) and can be an endless source of exploration and discovery. An endless source of content, in other words, when the stars align just right. This is one of those stories. WHC had an interesting string of events last night that started with a freshly rolled C3 and a piece of content that will bring even the most absent WHC members to lift their noses up from under their rocks or out of their textbooks.
While scouting the new connection Gatt2111 reported shortly that he not only found a Rorqual but that it was A. in a belt and B. he was on grid with it. The horn for reinforcements was blown (PVP ping on Slack) and we started gathering intel on the wormhole and its residents. Mere seconds after Gatt landed though the Rorgual warped off back to one of the available Citadels and docked.
Wormhole connections work both ways, if you roll and activate a new connection into a fresh system the signature for that connection will appear in that system as well. Any experienced and competent wormhole dweller will know this and will immediately react to a new signature appearing. You secure vulnerable assets and scout out this new signature. These guys where competent and did just that.
This meant two important thing for us: we would need to keep close eyes on both their and our home system and we would need to appear relatively inactive (or non-threatening) to get a chance at them undocking the Rorqual again and resume mining. I quickly communicated all ping-responders to hold on their login screen and remain in voice comms (Mumble). What follows then is a game of waiting, scouting, communication, hoping, banter, and playing mind games with yourself and your opponents (the waiting game is usually accompanied by the guessing game:
what is the other side thinking?).
Gatt positioned himself on the enemy citadel, and Biwako got himself lost in friendly space before hostile forces could scout out our home. Meanwhile a sizeable cohort of Unistas assembled itself on comms as an audience for our covert eyes intel feed and feedback group. Rorqs tend to have that effect. Our targets (Very Drunken Eve Flying Instructors) soon send in an unconventional vanguard, a Scythe Fleet Issue, accompanied by a much more conventional Probe. Unconventional behaviour followed. The SFI remained on the wormhole. Warped around a bit. Checked out our local ore sites. Burned a 100 kilometres in a random direction, and burned back.
Is he burning a tac? 100km is to close for that. Do they plan on mining in Innuendo? Are they planning on rolling? Weird.
Random Slack banter to keep the conversation going
Some minor docking and undocking was reported in Bacon, but nothing special. The SFI kept warping around. Nothing special continued to happen for over half an hour. Until they undocked a Raven, flown by the Rorqual pilot.
They intend to roll. They will not undock the Rorqual again. Better just make a pass at the rolling battleships. Preferably not on the first pass though.
The Raven made a pass through the Bacon wormhole. Then something unexpected: it warped to the already dying Eggs connection, and made a pass through that as well, and back again through the holes into Bacon. An Occator was spotted in Bacon.
Are they planning on running logistics through our static? Are they trying to bring Eggs to the brink of collapse to continue mining? This is weirder.
Here is where we have a second set-back: two Unistas are spotted on D-Scan in Innuendo. One is not on comms, nor in fleet. (Friendly reminder, don’t do that, especially not in a wormhole. Bob sees and will rain down his wrath upon you.) The other pilot was quickly asked to dock back up and log off. We had been spotted. This set-back may have been a blessing in disguise to awaken the Instructors blood lust: they brought in a pair of Sabres accompanied by the SFI, parked one on the Eggs hole, and one on Bacon.
These guys either intent to keep their chain up but controlled for logistics! Or mining! In a Rorqual! Or, more likely, they intend to hunt and kill our off-comms friend.
The Eggs Sabre soon dispatched of a shuttle entering Innuendo filled to the brim with skill books (be on comms) while his Bacon friend was probably aiming for the Uni Astero (the shuttles owner) that was scouting around (be on comms). Told you Bob would get you, so, be on comms, M’kay?.
An Instructor Talos joined the small but growing Innuendo tag team and engaged our one engageable Astrahus. This sealed the deal. These guys aren’t buying our sudden EU prime time inactiveness. We will never see that Rorqual again. They not only intend to pick a fight but they intend to communicate the desire with anti-matter. New plan. We have a good 20 pilots ready. We need to draw the Sabres, Talos, SFI and their backup out to at least get some fun out of it. I asked to hold back kitchen sink DD and reshipped into a hull tanked Brutix as bait. I did not expect them to engage on the structure (structures shoot back, once manned) so I parked myself on Bacon trying to appear… innocuous?.
Round 1
This sprung the trap but I immediately botched it by
inviting the horde of blood thirsty Unistas over directly. What I should have done is getting myself and the enemy
polarized first by ‘fleeing’ from the Instructors onslaught after fighting a bit. I should have jumped their hole, have them catch me, and jump back into Innuendo, leaving all of us unable to jump through that particular wormhole again for nearly 5 minutes. But with the horde already in space, all the Instructors had to do was jump out to safety and dodge my scram, web and long point. I followed but spawned just out scram/web range of any target. They burned further out of range and left us hanging. No cookies for us. If I had have done this properly we would at least have gotten a couple of kills out of it.
They now have eyes on our fleet. One Sabre is still sitting at a 170km perch. Let’s at least keep them busy for a bit and see if they want to have some fun.
Instructors did intend to keep shooting. Long range capability was undocked (Naga, Cerberus) and some pot shots where taking at my Brutix still sitting on their side. Something might still come of it. We had already been sitting around for well over an hour anyway.
Once my hull hit 25% I jumped back into Innuendo to reship into a Sabre. We switched in and back out a tanky battlecruiser each time to keep the enemy engaged. We still had eyes on their citadel anyway, and the occupancy number was rising. We snuck in Rose in an
Arazu that they may or may not have noticed and tried to get on their perches. The Fog of War is real once the fleets are out, even if you have eyes watching closely.
Instructors started bouncing around in a Rattlesnake as well, warping at 100km from the hole once or twice, which reinvigorated our interest. Time to restructure the kitchen sink to a bit more standardized doctrine. We added two guardians on the hole and a third one docked as backup. A fresh login also volunteered to keep a command ship ready with armour boosts. They seem willing to escalate, and so are we. A second volunteer was found to park a command destroyer (‘jump’ destroyer) with the fleet as well. If they make one mistake… we pounce. If we catch something 100km of the hole our fleet will not be able to warp directly, so the plan was to have the destroyer align, the fleet burn to the destroyer directly, and try and jump as many boats as possible into the fray. If we don’t catch anything now, all these hours of waiting will have been in vain. The Rattlesnake did not put itself in danger again. Bummer. One of the Sabres did undock and warp directly to the 100km perch. Ah well. Let’s just kill this Sabre. Better one bird in the hand…
Round 2
The Arazu uncloaked to grab point. I had my Sabre cloaked on a perch and warped directly on top as well to drop a bubble. The fleet was called in to join in on the fun. The Rattlesnake was reportedly in warp, score! More undocked from the citadel. A Munin. A Gila. A rapier. And… two Chimera carriers supported by a Minokawa Force Auxiliary.
These guys aren’t playing around , these guys are willing to go all in. Risk everything for Bob and glory. Capitals are no joke in a C3. You have to build them locally. Witch usually means you are the only one in there that can field them. Home field advantage is no joke in low class wormhole space. And if you lose them, you need to build them back up from scratch. Faxes are also pretty hard to kill, if you are facing them. You will not have capitals. You can not bring in unlimited backup due to mass restrictions. And with the Ravens shenanigans, and our fleet movement, the hole was already half done (‘Shrink’)
With a hefty 50 AU warp for the capitals we had time to organize. A ping for reinforcements went out, including an attempt to lure my special adviser on all things capital out from under his
math shaped rock. The command destroyer manoeuvre was decently successful and a nice blob of damage was available on field. We could delete the enemy Sabre before the Rattler landed. We had the Rattler in half shield before the cruisers showed up, and dead soon after. Once the capitals appeared on field, the enemy proved very hard to kill. If triage repairs land, EHP goes up. Fast. Some losses on our side. The vulnerable destroyer, a T1 cruiser, a random bomber, a battlecruiser that broadcaster for capacitor instead of armour. Still, we had decent control of the field with our three guards and T2 hull backbone. My Sabre though was of little use after the initial bubble bath. We had a HIC or two present now. Time to reship again. Conci had the fleet smash enemy drones and fighters in the meantime. Fighters that are continuously dropped and recalled do little damage that way.
How to kill a self-rep FAX? All I could think of was: neuts. So, back through the shrunk hole to grab my (cheap fit) Bhaalgorn. Here Instructors made another smart choice: the Rolling Raven Reappeared to Roll the Rest. This turned into a little race to get the Bhaal in. Who will land first? How fast will the Raven burn back? Or will he bounce? How much mass is left on that hole anyway? Enough for both the Raven and the Bhaal to jump through and
not collapse the hole, it turns out. While we positioned the Bhaal to get its neuts engaged, the enemy cruisers withdrew and where replaced with more Rattlesnakes. Somewhere along the way one of the Chimeras warped out after shouting ‘look behind you!’ fooling the 20 ships that
could have held him down. But didn’t.
Now, this is where we can’t really kill their FAX easily and they can’t kill us through our guardian reps, until the FAX runs out of capacitor. Though a quick shipscan proved the Minokawa to be battery/semiconductor fit and not supported by cap-injectors, its large pool of cap was still above 60% and dropping only very slowly. I had the fleet engage the FAX which proved fairly ineffective. Here is where Titus could take over to explain we were doing it wrong. You attack the other ships on grid. Make the FAX rep. Remote repair uses much more capacitor than local rep. And such we proceeded. We started stressing the Rattlesnakes, close to breaking them. It took a while, but the capacitor pool started dropping much faster. Instructors tried to intervene with an added falcon and scimitar, without much success. Once the Minokawas considerable cap pool was dry, there was only one possible outcome.
Clean-up included a travel fleet back home and a DST for the loot. Scout share for this one was 300 million, scouting pays off!
Battlereport:
https://zkillboard.com/related/31001267/201708282100/
ISK Lost: 292,812,291.19
ISK Killed: 8,537,313,852.67
Efficiency: 96.7 %
(So, Tylenos, what is with this wall of text? I wanted to include some internal monologue and comms chatter as well to not just give an overview or factual report but also convey how this fight came to be and how the situation emerged. Also, to add Drama. Because why not? And did you or didn’t you guys see the Chimera on D briefly? We did. Dramaaaa –jazz hands–)
