[AAR] Solitude Talwar Trauma (Oct 6 01:00)

[Yuri Levnik]

Howdy all,
We had a smaller fleet tonight, so we decided to get out of the Talwars and upship to Vexors. We flew up to PC9-AY and joined some glorious combat there. Then we flew back home and I decided to fight a fleet I had no business fighting, though I learned several things in the process (sorry to those who lost their boats).

Roam members:

Spoiler

Arashi Shizukana - DD
Calder Ormand - DD
Crimson Herring - DD, 2IC
Imad Gratia - DD
Sioban Mernher - DD
Sturym - Logi, Logi FC
Tyler Arnoux - Logi
Yuri Levnik - Logi
Z0X Ambrye - Scout

We roamed up to PC9-AY and played around with some folks on the way, but all of the action was in PC9-AY. Glen Burney was already running a fleet there, so we merged with the NSC standing fleet and got in some good fights. Glen will push a full report later, but here are some highlights:
We lost Sturym at the start, sacrificial logi, but he got revenge later (;
Exequror -16.2MN
Capsule -0.01MN

Then we got a piece of some kills (note that I omitted a number of losses in here, this wasn't actually all one sided):
Thorax 34.3MN
Capsule 19.1MN
Jackdaw 83.6MN
Confessor 63.1MN
Confessor 65.2MN
Capsule 0.01MN

Pretty good! On the way back, a fleet of Ferox/Caracal/Moa/Cyclone/Stiletto followed us home. I decided to see if we could bait them into fighting us under gate guns. We did convince them to engage, but they were smart about it. They had their Ferox shoot first so it took the gate guns and it tanked them, albeit with some difficulty. I called the Caracal primary since the Stiletto was off grid, but our DPS was not impressive and we lost three Vexors with nothing to show for it:
Vexor -26.0MN
Vexor -20.5MN
Vexor -19.6MN

Important notes here: they had blaster boats, and we were slowly orbiting the gate. That gave them plenty of time to get into blaster range. They also had lots of tank on the Ferox for gate guns and we had relatively low DPS and no logi (our logi having left by that point) so we didn't have a good chance of killing their "soft" target (Caracal) or their Ferox that was taking gate guns. However, now I know how to "choose" which ship takes gate guns for future fleets (;

No stats posted for just our part of the fleet - will leave that to Glen.

Overall, a fun night out with lots of combat!
Yuri

[Budda Sereda]

Looks like a nice fleet!

How many Vexors did you have Yuri in that last engagement? I'm surprised you were not able to kill Caracal or Moa... did they just kite you and warp away? You saying Moa was blaster fit... I'm surprised it survived...

[Crimson Herring]

The Caracal did seem to take a lot of damage without really putting a dent in it's shield tank. After the engagement someone was speculating in comms that they may have fit it with an ancillary shield booster as it was the smallest ship and most obvious primary of their fleet, so as to waste our time shooting it while the BCs tore us to shreds.

[Yuri Levnik]

If you look at the times on the kill mails you can see that all three kills happened in about 2 minutes. Blasters and heavy assault missiles deal great damage to Vexors and we dropped very very quickly. At the time of engagement we had four Vexors and two Caracals.