[AAR] NoP Monday Roam! - 2018.01.23

[Kontxesi Buchanan]

Reise was unable to make it online to FC this fleet and asked me to find a replacement FC. Our friendly neighborhood Coaxster stepped up! As I was not FCing, I did not record this fleet so this AAR will be less detailed than usual. There is no Fleet Feedback Form this week, since we were FCed by someone who is not an FCC participant.

PLEASE CLAIM YOUR SRP IF YOU LOST A BLAP CARACAL!

If you lost something that wasn't a BLAP Caracal during the fight with the Monday Mayhem fleet, please send me an Evemail with a link to your loss. The opposing FC, ex-Unista Raido Kudonen, sent me some ISK after the fight to make sure you guys got full SRP.

PARTICIPANTS
Aiden Chance
Aimsucks
Atticus Vex
Brandon Nightshade
Bubba Chee - Logi
Calder Ormand
Coaxster - FC
DOOMLORE
Gemma Solett - Instalocker
Gunman Aldent
Harai Rex - Scout
Jax Renalard
KJ Fluwell
Kontxesi Buchanan - "Heavy Tackle"
Lazarus Tazinas
Mary Cazzuka
NotA Witch
Raxon Noseworthy
Satoshi Tomeii
Sone Eto - Scout
Space Warfare Development
Trevor Grambling
Valen Kess
Wokum
Z0X Ambrye


OBSERVATIONS

(02:19:36) Dastryns
Incursus +3.67m
Capsule +0.65m

I believe this Myrm was fighting some other dudes when we jumped into him. A Sacrilege rings a bell? But he warped off before we could land tackle on him. I think there was also a Hurricane on the other side of the gate, but he was gone once our timers ran down.

(02:35:27) Melmaniel
Myrmidon +92.32m

Our valiant inebriated instalocker was grabbing everything that came through gates.

(02:46:51) Heydieles
Prospect +99.85m
Thrasher +33.57m

(02:55:02) Abune
Thrasher +14.44m
Capsule +0.01m

More gate catches, I think. The Hecate was a nice surprise catch, but the pilot really goofed.

(03:00:55) Oinasiken, Pynekastoh
Hecate +83.45m
Vexor +34.19m

(03:09:49) Rakapas
Vengeance +68.94m

(03:22:56) Okkamon
Executioner +4.57m
Capsule +0.01m
Stiletto +44.47m

The main event! I knew that Monday Mayhem was trying to track us down, but I'm not sure that information ever made it to the FC. He didn't realize who we were fighting until I very aggressively called, "Point Saanguinee!" We spent quite bit of time trying to break these guys, but just couldn't wear down their logi fast enough. Apparently we were damned close by the time we scattered, which is a shame. But they'd just taken too many of us out. We couldn't apply worth beans to them.

(03:33:04) Okkamon
Scythe -9.35m
Caracal -30.03m
Caracal -23.77m
Merlin -10.47m
Caracal -38.69m
Caracal -30.23m
Caracal -50.37m
Caracal -35.98m
Caracal -32.09m
Arbitrator -9.57m
Harpy -58.25m -- Nennamaila? Not sure what happened here
Caracal -14.17m
Capsule -0.01m
Capsule -0.01m

I died in the Monday Mayhem fight and headed home in my pod, so I have no idea what happened afterward.

(03:45:17) Nennamaila
Thrasher +12.33m

(03:56:29) Heydieles
Federation Navy Comet +32.71m
Caracal -32.18m
Capsule +0.01m
Capsule -214.39m
Coercer +30.09m
Atron -5.57m


Stats
ISK Destroyed: 555,278,593
ISK Lost: 595,134,970.76
ISK Delta: -39,856,377.76
Efficiency: 48.268%

I'll try to get Coaxster over here to give us any details that he has that I missed.

[Coaxster]

I wasn't expecting to FC but hey who turns down pew pew right?

For a NoP, everyone was pretty well behaved and on the ball, really. No losses to gate guns even. Except for one when I called a coercer and there were two on field, with only one flashy....oops. Good lowsec ganking. Trial by fire.

Right, the fight. I goofed rather badly on this one, but I'll walk through the thoughts in my head. Intel was only 'there are frigates here! some deacons, AFs, about a dozen' or something like that. No d-scan or info who who the enemy was. Since most folks run from us (me) in BR (ahem), I decided to push the fight quickly (we were cruisers; they were frigs) rather than get more info (mistake). So we landed at 0 (mistake). And in my head I had thought 'frigates oh they'll be faster than us' and didn't actually look at the field (e.g. enyos) until much later to see we could've kept range rather than brawl (which I chose to do in order to 1) keep scrams and webs on enemy logi and 2) make sure they didn't complain about kiting and just leave). Yes, mistake. And I wanted us star-patterned around the enemy rather than bunched up (anchored) to force them to spend time getting into range. Should've landed at range or at least burned out fast (but probably then not gotten much of a fight). Further, as I saw what was on field and realized how little control we had (one griffin IIRC and not many scrams and webs), I knew things were going to get ugly fast. Oh, another mistake was (in trying to keep things simple for newbies) requesting only inferno missiles; this made applying to the deacons a smidge worse (FC also ran out of fury ammo...). Then I saw sanqweenie and ray-d'oh! and bamn all remaining sense vanished (the Weenie had been in channel and knew full well exactly what we were flying). With good target swapping we did come close to breaking their logi; we SHOULD have had them but the dps per ship for a NoP was not quite what I am now used to so things just weren't taking enough dps.

Fly deadly!

-Coaxster

[Raido Kudonen]

Was an interesting fight. I mentioned a couple things to Kontxesi after the fight, but I'd like to do that again in the relatively public forum.

My alliance is somewhat infamous for what we call "snatchfleet", which is a fleet concept built around the Magus' beautiful combination of booshing (the Micro Jump Field Generator that can split enemy fleets and relocate your own on about 5.5 seconds' notice), solid armor tank and utility mids, and a reasonable amount of drone DPS. The idea is to use your command destroyers to split up blobs and position your fleet well, a few Deacons to supplement the remote reps many of your Magi fit, and if necessary a supplementary DPS wing (we've used the Cynabal, the Purifier, and the Talos at different times based on a few different factors).

This version of snatchfleet is optimized for lowsec, since we were planning on a lowsec roam. This means we use ABs instead of MWDs, thanks to the relatively brawly lowsec meta; we use assault frigates for supplementary DPS and "engageability", as well as the ability to go hide in a small plex if we run into a T3D or cruiser gang that's too large for us to fight; finally, we skip the bombers and dictors that we would always bring when using snatchfleet in nullsec.

Importantly for this engagement, we're not quite as brawly as might have been expected - our Enyos are rail fit and can project out to 20km or so, the other AFs can get out to heated web range, and the Magi's drones go far - obviously we don't want to fight at 55km, but also that's why booshing is so powerful in snatchfleet. Given the amazing new assault frigate changes on the way, we might use Ishkurs for even more drone projection in the future.

Okay, so how did the fight go?

0) We'd been hunting the warzone for about 90 minutes when we found you guys. I knew (from killboards) that a Uni Caracal gang and an NC. Confessor gang were out in the warzone, and we headed toward Ikoskio intending to catch the NC. fleet (because INIT. and NC. don't exactly like each other, and because NC.'s Confessor roams are a different version of fake snatchfleet that they borrowed from us). When scouts found the Caracal gang on our route and said that you all were flashy, I noticed that most of our timers were down and figured that would get us a pretty good fight against a good number of Caracals and what I assumed would be 3-4 Scythes.

A scout on the gate called that the Caracals had redboxed on him shortly after an IVY scout frigate crashed back into you guys. I made the call to jump straight in while you still had weapons timers.

1) I was about 80% sure I'd lose some or all of my logi when we gated into Caracals; when I heard that they'd redboxed one of my ceptors and jumped us in, I was expecting the Caracals to be clustered up 20km-30km off the gate and planned to anchor everyone, clear any fast tackle, and boosh up and back to close the range (and maybe boosh another time or two to split up the Caracals a bit). Seeing the Caracals - and even better, the single Scythe on grid - at zero on the gate let us spread points and webs (no scrams in snatchfleet!) and immediately put DPS on the Scythe, so that if my logi broke we'd at least probably win the DPS race and hold the field at the end.

2) Wait, frigates holding the field against Caracals? Ehh, sort of. There are two massive caveats, in this particular engagement, to the general principle that RLMLs hard counter small ships.

2a) Command bursts. Snatchfleet predates the shift to on-grid links, but has benefited tremendously from that change. It means that for the low, low cost of swapping out the remote armor rep module that our Magi default to, you get a free bonused command burst per "links Magus". Since AB Magi are actually faster than AB assault frigates (for the moment), the Magus' only defensive disadvantage is its "high" sig of 67m compared to the ~30m of a logi frig or assault frig. So we had difficult-to-kill support ships that really cut into the much-vaunted RLML application of Caracals.

2b) T2 resists. Obviously resists are great, but in this kind of environment, the great resist profiles mean that logi is way more effective than it ever could be normally. This further reduces applied Caracal DPS, which is huge when you consider that every 20 volleys, Caracal DPS goes to zero for like 30 seconds.

3) The upshot is that I'm pretty confident fighting anything like equal numbers of cruisers in snatchfleet. If there had been a lot more Caracals (say, 50% more), I would've taken the fight still, but would have tried to split the Caracals up with command destroyers and brawl them down in detail after killing whatever was scramming the logi frigates.

As things went, the fact that there was only ever one Scythe on field (why???), coupled with perhaps poorer damage application from the Caracals than I would have expected, let us barely keep the Deacons on field long enough to steadily clear Caracal DPS.