[AAR]NSC - POCO I: Clash with the Overlords

[Rohan Amadeus]

TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!!!!

So as some of you undoubtedly have heard, the NSC has recently put IV POCO's in our system of T22- into reinforce. There's a whole back story about how this happened, but long story short - We're trying to buck off Nocturnal Romance because:

1. We're allowed to now
and
2. It's high time we stop helping pay for someone else's plex.

Sadly we lost a few expensive ships, but fun was had, people saw their first capital ships, and lessons were learned by your FC and that's always a good thing. So without further ado, your AAR.

Roam members (32)

Spoiler

Arrek Lemmont
Athena Firefly
B'aldrick Aivoras
Balin Khazad-dum
Capt Steele
DeanSherman
Decklin Quark Reiger
Dominic Altol
Eadrom Vintarus
Ersin Oghuz
Erwin Madelung
Fifthman
Ford Andedare
Hirmuolio Pine
Jacob Velora
Konstantin Grimm
Kontxesi Buchanan
Kora K
Malik Kusoni
Mary Cazzuka
Mihir Karani
Mols Halleck
Mongo the Mechanic
Nabs Hawk
Projekt Style
Rheaha Preynar
Roger Alleile
Rohan Amadeus
Tal Tracyn
Tasha Menne
Thelith
Zeon Alabel

7 hours prior to the fleet and minutes before I went to bed, I was asked to FC. This is going to be fun.

At the beginning of this, nocturnal romance was already starting to hang around T22 as well as PC9. So I requested that bubbles be anchored on the PC9 gate in T22 as well as a catch bubble set up 100km off POCO I in the direction of the PC9 gate. The reason is we knew that they had capital ships stored in PC9, so we were going to do our best to slow them down and give us some time to take down a POCO.

At this time, our friends from HSC and LSC were coming down (special shout out to you fine folks and thank you for coming over to assist!). So the folks at NSC began the attack when the first POCO came out of reinforcement. Captain Torlek was spotted in a cloaky legion and everyone was put on notice to be ready to warp out if necessary. He cloaked up on grid with us and I had a few ships try to decloak him to no avail.

Intel came in: One of NocRom had logged on in PC9.

By this time, the HSC/LSC folks had joined up with us and we started taking down the POCO pretty quickly. It was asked on comms whether or not we had one ready to anchor down, and response was that it was on the way. We were getting to the end of the POCO dying, and we tried to stop DPS before it went down since the new one wasn't ready yet, but alas it went down (no real tears were lost for this POCO).

(17:23:13) T22-QI
Customs Office +164.54m

We remained on grid to keep another ship from anchoring a POCO that wasn't ours. That's when a phoenix had warped in on us and I had the fleet scatter and warp to a safe and intel had come in that there was a falcon. We had a few bombers in fleet and sent to scout around. At this point, our DST had arrived with the new POCO and I asked Nabs if he was able to anchor the POCO and get out.

Nabs Hawk's response: Only one way to find out.

Super hero material right there.

Where Nabs was successful and reported back that the falcon had TRIED to tackle him...

Hero status unlocked

So our fleet went on to POCO II to start the bash. At this point Arrek had suggested that he reship into a logi exequror, but he was the only one able to do so at this time. So we had him go for it and thought we could maybe, just MAAAAAAAYBE, attack the phoenix and get away with it since we hadn't heard about any other capitals brought in at the moment.

I naively called for the phoenix that warped in on us to be bubbled and miscalculated because

1. We just needed to point him so bubbling him wasn't really necessary
2. I managed to get our fleet bubbled along with him since he warped at 0 with us.

So we lost a couple of....expensive ships:


(17:33:14) T22-QI
Sabre -100.44m
Oracle -178.09m
Oracle -115.46m
Oracle -114.4m
Myrmidon -75.47m

Time to regroup and replan...

We had a couple of people reship and I had a bomber go and check out POCO III to keep some dps on it to keep it from repairing. At this point, we had more people reship into augorors and 1 hero guardian (which Arrek kindly offered to SRP should it go down because yours truly wasn't sure we should only have 1 blingy logi on grid since it's usually the first targeted to go down). Luckily, it didn't go down.

So I offered the idea of making their phoenix work to kill us. We would warp back and forth between POCO II and POCO III because it would take quite a long time for the phoenix to warp between POCOs and we could continue with dmg to the POCO while it's in warp and meanwhile, I had a bomber wait until the Phoenix was in warp back to start applying dps on the POCO to keep the DPS going while we warped back and after we landed, the bomber would go back to the other POCO and wait for the Phoenix to land there. Thus we would keep DPS going as well as eyes on the capital ship.

This idea worked for a bit. However, at one point upon coming back to POCO II, they had started anchor on a medium warp distruptor to try and catch us. Command was given to start attacking the bubble. It took us warping to and from the POCOs to take down the medium warp disruptor. However, it did go down.

(17:53:17) T22-QI
Mobile Medium Warp Disruptor I +2.9m

After the bubble went down, we decided to see if we could try and take on the phoenix with our new and improved logi back us up. It was called to anchor on the FC with prop mods on (which there were issues with this which I will explain at the bottom). Sadly, we lost two more of our own.

Vexor -23.95m
Vexor -19.67m

Sadly we weren't able to do this for long because it was reported that a revelation was coming into system as well as a nidhoggur. I believe we might have been able to fight the phoenix on its own, but with the addition of 2 capitals on field, it was time to get out before more losses were incurred.

Time to retreat, regroup, and plan again...

It was suggested that we start bashing some POCOs in the back pocket because it would take a while for the capital ships to fly back and we could effectively speed tank the capitals in various systems and make them warp around. So fleet was brought back to PC9 and I supplied those that lost drones from fleet warps with drones I've picked up around space. As we were getting this accomplished, a battleship fleet from local syndicate corporations had flown in.

In which the end was upon us...

It was decided at this point to call the fleet so that we could regroup and try this again sometime in the future. HSC people needed to leave due to an event and that meant our dps was going to be about halved.

Unfortunately, the POCO we dropped has already been put into a reinforce timer and we'll have to come back and see if we can somehow defend this and keep it from going down. We shall see.

Thank you again for everyone that came out to support us in our venture to overthrow the oppressive overlords. We'll be trying this again sometime in the near future because there are plenty more POCOs that need to be liberated. So stay tuned and get a ship/clone down to NSC if you're able to! Hope you all had a good time!

Stats
ISK Destroyed: 167,440,000.55
ISK Lost: 627,466,153.81
ISK Delta: -460,026,153.26
Efficiency: -21.064%

Things I've learned:

-First and foremost, I should have done a newbro speech of sorts and asked if people understood commands and had flown in other fleets before. I am guilty of just assuming that people understood because I've been going on a lot of normal roams, but that should never be an assumption. Learning environment and I failed at giving those who were new to the idea of anchoring and fleets a quick lesson before the fleet on how to do so. I apologize to those new to fleet for this mistake.

-Don't bubble up the fleet. I've heard this several times before and it was excitement on my part that I just wanted to keep the phoenix to stay on grid to attack them. I grossly miscalculated the amount of dps the phoenix had and thought we might have survived a little longer on grid.

-One thing that I had to remember, which totally slipped my mind at the time: armor logi reps come at the end of the cycle. not the beginning. Being that we only had 1 armor logi in the first fight, it was unlikely we would have been saved. Should have just disengaged and made life miserable for the phoenix with my sabre. Unfortunately, he was erased from the field right away.

-Sabre could have been used much more effectively with them warping at 100km to where the fleet was at to keep the phoenix from being able to warp onto grid with us.

-This definitely needs to be better planned. If we had full logi support to begin with, and possible backup in other ways, it might have turned out differently, but Plan-Tanking goes a long way to making sure things turn out much more smoothly.

-Insure your ships.

[Fifthman]

That was so much fun and the first battle I've really been in/near. I only understood half the things being said but that's totally on me. Looking forward to more.

[Tal Tracyn]

As i said on comms I went all the way to NSC and only got a loss mail.
Not even a T shirt !
10/10 would bubble fleet again (if FC asks)

[Projekt Style]

While it didn't work out as we had hoped (gudfites) I thoroughly enjoyed your FC'ing and communication. The fleet action also allowed me to fix some things on my UI that I had forgotten about so for me personally it was an enriching experience. I can't wait to go back out with you all again and I really appreciate that the other campuses came out and helped and it's unfortunate they took some losses but that sort of unity and response can lay a foundation for building more effective QRF and force projection within and near Eve U borders.

[Balin Khazad-dum]

it was a good fight, i still dont know why the adrenaline still pumping in my veins till now, i felt like heart stroke when i see my pod in space naked of my oracle, lol
but i still would loose another one, even 100% of my income comes from PI, which is now 100% taxed.

PS.. bog thanks to HSC and LSC to join us, and so sorry for your losses.

[Tasha Menne]

It has been quite a while since I have been able to get out in space, much less in a fleet - this was fun!

I joined the party a bit late after the first POCO went down. From my (limited) perspective I thought the FC did a great job communicating. I was able to understand his instructions with no problem.

I did have issues trying to anchor on the FC. When participating in fleets several months ago I seem to remember being able to right click and get a menu option to orbit at "X distance". That never appeared for some reason (settings maybe?). At any rate, I finally held down the mouse button on the FC's name in the fleet window until the "options dial" appeared and I was able to choose the orbit option.

If plans are made to continue similar activities I will certainly make an effort to participate!

- Tasha

[Thelith]

Thanks for the fleet. I was the guy who had never seen a capital before. The Nidhoggur started yellow boxing me at the end there but the fleet warped out before he finished targeting me. It was... intimidating, to say the least.

I also got the chance to act as fleet scout for the HSC travel campus, which was a little confusing considering I've never really done any proper fleet action before. I managed to do that well enough, though, since everyone got to PC9 safely. Looking forward to playing more with the university.

[Zeerse Solaris]

I'm going to be critical of the doctrine. The oracles are a classic structure bash ship when you don't expect a fight. It's the 't1 ammo that never depletes afk' ship. Looks like 2 of the oracles expected fleet reps, 1 oracle and 1 myrm didn't because they had local reps.

Bombers, if you think you'd have a bigger fight that you can take, would've been a good option to spread out and maybe one or two might be lost in a GTFO situation but most would survive, and even 3 bombers can grind down a poco so you could have split up to spread the enemy too thinly to defend.

You had fun by the sound of it. So well done for creating the content.

Maybe if you're really determined to rid yourself of the POCOs, then it's a uni wide event as we've done in the past. VNIs and Vexors, I still even have a VNI in PC9 for this kind of thing.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/44626108/