A two-part Dragonslayer vs Hitmen

[Kora K]

A lot of it has been said on comms or this AAR, so I'll just add this : thanks you Laura & management for letting us play with structure. I think a lot of people enjoyed this new kind of content, we got some experience out of it and more importantly, we have closer ties with our temps allies (Voltage and friends, ABA, La Division Bleue).

[Zeerse Solaris]

Don't want to repeat anything but Exeqs over Augs for simplicity in a big newbro fleet, but other things:

Day 1 squad names, didn't really give anyone an idea what squad they needed to be in without asking (or had to be in MOTD which people had to read and quite often don't).

Maybe we had enough of a comfort zone to get everyone to cycle once on the moros to get on the kill but heat of the battle.

Day 2, we probably didn't have enough people to start splitting up the fleet, but we could have had a squad keeping damage up on the azbel. Vexor sentries for example.

*edit as there were some really good positives.

FCs were calm and collected despite action of unusual size going on.
Good organisation and cover story was good to add the surprise on day 1.

[Sikandar Cole]

Gentlemen and Ladies,

In the future, please do not hesitate to batphone TGRAD / The Initiative., when your adversaries batphone LowSechnaya Sholupen. All we need is a heads up to get organized and respond.

[Catbriar Saissore]

Just a quick thought from reading Baro's post:

Small Fleet:

Logi can add everyone to their watchlist. The huge advantage is we can see the state of your shields, armor, hull and proactively start making repairs long before you ask.

Large Fleet:

The whole fleet will never fit into the watchlist so we put in the most important from our perspective. That does leave some open slots in our watchlist.
My thought would be: If there are ships that are critical to the mission (tackle?), then give us the names and we can add them to the watchlist and proactively assist them.

[Raido Kudonen]

Okay, some brief comments in no particular order.

1) Obviously if you could have predicted LSH were going to be involved, batphoning INIT is a good move because we hate them. I'm guessing they were in and out in one or two siege cycles, which would have required you actually knowing in advance.

2) Speaking of, this sounds like a good time to plug a class on scouting and intelligence gathering, since it is possible to spot bad guys pre-staging.

3) Your handling of the trappy part of the first op was really good, and much of the second op was as well. You absolutely need HIC points to reliably lock down caps in lowsec, although for 4-5 caps on Day 1 you could've done it with a half dozen ceptors as long as you brought enough tackle.

4) Your Hurricane fits are extremely bad (you took the Goon armor cane fit from their Hakonen deployment last year and made it worse), and the fitting choices speak to broader doctrinal problems with the engagement.

• Armor Hurricanes are generally not viable in a fleet setting because the fitting tradeoffs between tank, prop, and guns are really quite extreme. With the arty fit, you have a paper thin tank (46k ehp is barely decent by cruiser standards), okay-but-not-great DPS, and an MWD why? Caps are far from quick, and you don't need to kite in an arty fit.
• The reason to match subcap tank to capital tank is because your capital force has FAXes ready to support the subs, never because your subcap logi can support the caps. (Subcap logi doesn't rep enough to make that a worthwhile exercise.) So there's no need to default to armor because your carriers are armor tanked; you'd only need armor for cap reasons (if the Raitaru had void bombs - you don't mention one way or other).
• The reasons to pick armor, then, are passive tank and utility mids; the reasons to pick arty are capless guns. It turns out that combining these two is impractical up until you hit T1 battleships (you can fit a plate and arty on a Hurricane Fleet Issue if you want, but you end up spending almost as much as on a T1 battleship and you get less tank).
• Bottom line: If you want to go full capless mode for a serious citadel bash prior to Tuesday (the patch day for void bomb removal), Tempests + Geddons is pretty much the way to go. But it's also pretty well possible to go shield Canes with dedicated tackle and do fine on a citadel grid. Even Feroxesare basically okay.

5) If you drop dreads to kill enemy caps, don't warp off (even to re-pause an armor timer) until your dreads/FAXes have gotten out of siege and can jump out/warp to station or citadel. Once you've committed caps for cap kills, you've made the fight about killmails instead of structures. (This is especially true when you only shot the Raitaru to get fights to begin with.)

Overall, though, you guys did a lot of good stuff. Congrats on several billion of cap killmails and commiserations on the losses.

[Tiberius Auduin]

Thanks everyone for flying with us, sorry for the "Ruse", I know it rustled a lot of jimmies, but we had great content and even greater learning experience.
Thanks to Glen for helping us with the management and Breeze, Decklin and Kora for the countless of hours of planning and nice conversations.

We didn't have enough tackle that is now established, we need an inty wing. Leading rock squad aka cannonfodder on the first day was nice, but I got primaried very fast and missed the nice km's.
About the hurricane fits: given the info available at the time and SP distribution, this was the best solution at that time.

So we have INIT cap support you say?

[Zarquu Fussuhfusus]

So we have INIT cap support you say?

Against LSH and with some notice in advance, quite likely. This is one for the diplo's to handle though. Please don't anyone go stumbling into INIT comms demanding FAX+carrier support because we don't have enough people/DPS to kill a 9-man Rokh gate-camp.

[Yuri Titov]

Never expected to see Uni teaming up with La Division Bleue.
If you're batphoning anyway, reach out through alumni slack to peeps maybe, we could've joined in