Alright, so as the fine gentlemen above me have recounted, I enter the field with an armor fleet of middling size against an assorted splattering of mixed stuff from the Russian side.
They have a Machariel at zero on the hole, but I don't want to split our fleet even further, so I instead pick out a Bhaalgorn that's sitting 20km off. Sacfleet has absolutely no issue with grabbing tackle on this kind of stuff, so we get to work burning it down. A few of the opposition warp off to reship, and the Bhaalgorn is bleeding profusely. A Nestor shows up on scan again. We overheat on the Bhaalgorn (hello, C5 Red Giant) and
it barely breaks as the Nestor lands on grid.
We tackle the Nestor and start burning through it, and it smartbombs off our drones. Well, not just our drones. Remember, C5 Red Giant.
So yeah, 14km smartbombs with almost double damage. It turns out, that's a pretty reliable way to kill of incoming missiles too.
And as you know, Unca Titus loves his Sacrileges, and WHC has started to agree with him. And the backup DPS is Ishtars. Our newbros are flying VNIs. This guy is in a buffer tanked Nestor with no other logi are grid, but we're merely very slowly tickling him to death. Of course, his friends disagree with that eventual outcome, and start mounting efforts to extract him while we get more people. The connection shrinks behind us.
Minutes pass. The other Russians launch an attempt to jam our tackle off with EC drones while forcing the Devoter to drop his bubble. We're very glad to actually have something that's not under the smartbomb umbrella, so the EC drones are obliterated before our Devoter has to actually decycle. We catch him at 20% armor. The Nestor stays tackled, and is now hitting half armor. The Russian menace cannot allow this to persist. A second Nestor pops up on scan and lands.
Incoming damage is starting to get a bit scary, so I finally turn around and blap the Machariel that's still sitting at 0 on the hole and force him to jump out. This reduces damage to manageable levels again, but we're still no closer to killing any of the Nestors. A third Bhaalgorn starts his trek from ALI towards us, when suddenly, DScan moves again and a Moros appears. I prepare to extract, since a HAW dread at range under the smartbomb umbrella would probably push us past the breaking point, and we're reaching the limits of our escalation capability for the time of day.
The Moros lands at zero. He then sieges in the middle of our readily waiting blob, far from any assistance his Nestors could provide him, next to two Bhaalgorns, with no smartbombs to cull our damage, and with zero chance of ever actually hitting a cruiser for significant amounts with his guns. I don't look a gift horse in the mouth, so we immediately start murderzoning him with all we've got while the ominous 5 minute clock starts ticking in our heads. His cap rapidly depletes, but cap boosters are a thing that exists now, so he manages to hang on until 4:30 into the timer. I start to consider my options.
We're sitting on a shrink C6 hole to lowsec, with a crippled Moros next to us. We have little chance of actually getting more kills in here if the Moros manages to catch reps. However, we'd likely force him to jump out before the Nestors can get in range, which would put the hole on low mass. If we wanted to leave safely, we'd have to do so before he jumped. However, there's a Moros in front of me dying. It's not the kind of thing I like leaving.
Instead, a second plan crystallizes. If the Moros jumps out, the hole goes to low mass. If our fleet follows, that would then collapse the hole, leaving the Moros stranded with no backup. Of course, this is not an exact science - we'd likely leave part of
our fleet stuck on the inside as well, with a handful of angry Russians trying to exact revenge. In the last seconds of the siege timer, I make a judgment call to push all the way for the kill. The Moros exits its siege timer, and I call for the fleet to reapproach the wormhole but keep shooting. The Moros jumps, and I call for the fleet to follow.
The next moments become hectic. It is quickly called that the wormhole has collapsed, as planned. Some of our fleet, including our two Bhaalgorns, are stuck in the C6. Meanwhile, most of our cruisers and all three of our Guardians have made it to lowsec safely. I myself am sitting on grid with the Moros along with some of our DD, but our other two Guardians are nowhere to be seen. They report being in lowsec, but also report being on the wormhole - which supposedly hasn't collapsed - and with no Moros in sight.
Being forced to pick between a stable time loop and CCP spaghetti code, I choose the latter and guess that the server simply dropped them on the wrong exit hole when the original one collapsed. They warp to me while our brave holdouts inside the C6 leave to a subchannel to try and extract as much as they can from the grip of an angry Russian mob. The Moros meanwhile is tackled, but since all of our neuts were left inside the wormhole, we're lacking the means to finish off the wounded beast. More pings go out, and we find two pilots able to bring neuts to the party yet again.
Eventually, after ten minutes, the cap boosters in cargo depleted, the dreadnought finally
succumbs. We collect the spoils and survey
the carnage. We actually manage to go green in the ISK department despite having suffered heavy losses ourselves in the extraction, with the Moros value outweighing a lot of our own losses. Considering the bizarre situation we found ourselves in against the Nestors' smartbomb screening technique enabled by the system effect, it was probably a better outcome than we had any right to expect.
Final tally:
- Killed: 6.96b ISK
- Lost: 4.97b ISK
- Efficiency: 58.3%
- Status: Moros dead, Titus happy