[AAR] Battleships with Yuri 19 Nov

[Yuri Levnik]

Hoo buddy, what a fleet y'all... Let me start out with the stats this time and then offer some reflections.

Battle Report

Destroyed: 500mil
Lost: 4.89bil
Delta: 4.39bil
Efficiency: 9%

What went well:

• The donation program covered the price of most of our newfriends' Praxi.
• The fleet was highly educational, in a painful way.
• Strong core comp with four Guardians, a dictor, and armor links.
• MJDs helped get out of bubbles and saved about half of the fleet from explosive death.
• Extraction filaments saved some of those who were able to MJD out.

What could have gone better:

• Form-up took *forever*. Partly, this was due to chat being down, so I couldn't link anything in Fleet chat and there was no MOTD to help people get set up. However, I can't shake the feeling that it was at least partly my fault.
• We only had two scouts, one of them t1.
• A friendly aggressed me as we were about to filament, giving me a timer. So we warped all the way to a HS Thera hole, only to find it was a *medium* hole that we couldn't use.
• I settled for Noise filaments instead of Pochven filaments. I think we would have had more luck in Pochven where the response fleets are smaller.
• Praxis tank of approx 120k EHP is very weak for a battleship and speed, even with MWD, is pathetic at around 600m/s.

What went wrong:

• We lost both of our scouts immediately to an Ishtar, leaving the fleet to cold warp and jump.
• We drew 60+ pilot response fleet of primarily Cyclone Fleet Issues and Scimitars, and several things went wrong. Notably, they booshed 3 of our 4 logi so we were without logi, and they effectively pulled to their desired range by using their superior speed. We were hemorrhaging battleships so I called MJD/scatter, which worked OK.
• My target calling was only OK as I was one of the first to die, I didn't broadcast all targets, and we were spread out so many of us were out of range of the targets I called.
• After we scattered, the fleet actually did quite a good job of avoiding getting probed down while they waited out their capsuleer logoff timers. However, we lost a few additional folks who warped to old bookmarks or warpable objects and got caught.

What I learned:

• Bring more scouts and instruct them to stay alive! I might consider tankier assault frigate scouts (or even fast HACs) in the future for better survivability.
• Load spare scout ships in the frigate escape bay so we can reship scouts in space.
• Load the frigate escape bay in the first place, as a matter of fact.
• MJDs are fantastic.
• RHMLs are great for crushing small stuff, but not very effective against bigger stuff and logi
• Jumping through a gate in Praxi results in a scattered fleet that is very slow to group up. I should have moved us to the ESS or a safe so we could be in a group for range control, logi convenience, etc.
• Have logi anchor on DPS so if logi gets booshed some DPS will come with them. Additionally, MJD after logi if/when they get booshed to get back on them.
• Look into flying faster, stronger battleships than Praxi.
• Strongly consider bringing our own boosher for links and booshing our pathetically slow fleet around.
• Contemplate how to form faster.
• Sabre A was right.

Thanks to the following donors who made the fleet possible:

• Dune Barphsaq 1bil
• Jay Iron 500mil
• Me 300mil
• Caelius West 300mil
• Harnser Kynes 300mil
• Iis Foolio 300mil
• mrbah Chieve 50mil
• Lykos Zahir 50mil
• Olov Starseed 50mil
• Tomlin 50mil

Comments, questions welcome! I'd love to hear y'all's reflections!
Yuri

[Spooky Splore]

Perspective from a newbro, first time in a battleship and only a few fleets under my belt. This was an incredibly valuable fleet, thank you again to our donors!

For the preflight, it reminded me of my pilot days in the Air Force and some of the warning signals you watch out for. If this was 'war time' with assets we couldn't afford to lose, I'd evaluate a delay/cancel as issues stacked up between fleet comms, local, etc. The good part is this is a learning environment, and why we're all here! I'm not sure yet how the form up could have been improved with many of us unsure about fitting battleships.

I can't add much for the jumps and main fight, I didn't notice the boosh at all as I just focused on targeting. My first time using a MJD, can agree it saved me twice.

The scatter ops was where it highlighted, for me, room for E-Uni training potential. I fortunately first realized some of the danger we were in still when we had those earlier timer issues and read about why we don't just combat engage things like that Sabre that followed us forever. What I did not realize was how to effectively keep moving due to combat probes along with the needed logistics around filamenting myself out. I got separated from the fleet once we called for those and, thinking I was relatively safe, had windows up trying to figure out how the heck to activate the filament when not in the fleet. Good practice would have been sorting errors out while in warp as I had made a few solid bookmarks in our scrambling. I'm still convinced I was at a safe bookmark and presuming the scout got a very fortunate scan down.

Unfortunately I also didn't recognize the signs of getting scrammed by the scout who decided to find me instead of the rest of the fleet. I kept trying to MJD, warp, etc in a panic instead of putting missiles on the scout, embarrassed to say I got no damage down then by the time 50+ ships landed on me. It sounded like it was good at least they found me when there were still other pockets of multiple Praxis left together.

Think there's room here for a practical class maybe associated with Fleets to go over panic response of bubbles, scrams, combat probes, etc. while also sorting out escape options between gates and filaments or WHs. It's likely I've missed some of that material too. Being in battleships was a whole new facet as well.

The reasons above make this so worthwhile, I'm far less likely now to be complacent in the timer scramble along with knowing what to look for in larger engagements. It's something I can help ping other newbros about as well as we go.

Thanks again Yuri, been a pleasure to do a fleet with you after following your content in Discord and classes. Looking forward to the next one, really wish I wasn't missing BLOPS for holiday travel!