[AAR] NSC Battleship Stupidity

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Adrien Claremont
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Title: Campus Manager (NSC), FCC Staff, Lieutenant, Graduate, Management

[AAR] NSC Battleship Stupidity

Post by Adrien Claremont »

Have you every suggested something and them immediately, when the fight starts, you think... "Well this was a stupid idea"

We had a fleet of about 12 or so "small things" on the PC9 gate in JH-. They were made up of our local frenemies 404/Sons of Bane. Conscious of the number of pilots we actually had in fleet, I tried to form a small fleet initially of Feroxes/Ospreys however no one answered the ping on Slack. With only four of us x-ing up in the Standing Fleet, we decided to YOLO brawl in some battleships.

This was probably (actually more than likely) a more serious error in our judgement.

I personally had the option of two battleships in my hanger. One was an armour buffer Typhoon, with torps and target painters designed to try and hit small things. The other was a triple rep Hyperion. Now in my head, the thought process was along the lines of "If I scram/grapple their frigates, I should be able to apply large blasters" and "80k ehp on the Typhoon is only a battlecruiser sized tank. With no logi, those triple reps look nice...".

So, having decided to bring battleships to a T2 small thing brawl, I brought the zero application blaster Hyperion (bad call number 2). I couldn't hit anything at all. I'll let Mongo and Dominic talk you through their ship choices.

Ok, the fight then. Initially Eadrom was booshed off in his Ferox while we had to bounce to gate pings to get over to him. His Ferox, while lasting seriously longer than you would have thought, died as we finally managed to warp our super slow battleships to him. Then the bubble went up, and the brawl began. Almost initially (very well might have been there during the Ferox loss), a enemy Scorpion landed on grid which jammed us all out. I tried to call a couple of the lighter tanked ships as primary to remove some of the enemy DPS, but very quickly it just became a challenge of getting our battleships out.

Dominic lost his Tempest, and then rest of the fight revolved around both myself and Mongo calling for Crowbars to clear tackle off our ships. Both of us came very, very close to running out of cap injectors. At this point I was too busy focusing on managing all the modules on my ship rather than what was going on in the wider fight. Either the Crowbars managed to scare off tackle, jams landed, or the enemy capped themselves out trying to hold tackle for so long, but as soon as I saw that scram image disappear I hit the MJD and GTFO. Mongo also managed to get out at roughly the same time.

In the end, it was a fun fight for all the wrong reasons. Jams from the enemy was a disappointment, especially considering we made of point of letting them know we'd try and form something for them, but now we know they keep a Scorpion docked in PC9.

Roam members (5)
Spoiler
Adrien Claremont - Hyperion
Dominic Altol - Tempest
Eadrom Vintarus - Ferox, Talwar, Griffin
Jackson Millenius - Vexor, Cormorant
Mongo the Mechanic
Kills and Losses

(20:16:46) PC9-AY
Ferox -75.97m
Kestrel +6.91m
Tempest -229.53m
Hyena +51.28m
Vexor -33.05m
Talwar -8.21m
Cormorant -18.18m
Griffin -1.9m
Capsule -6.59m

Stats
ISK Destroyed: 58,198,493.39
ISK Lost: 373,423,269.05
ISK Delta: -315,224,775.66
Efficiency: 13.484%

Overall evaluation
  • (Positive stuff)
  • Usual faces formed quickly for some "content".
  • It's not everyday we fly battleships, so it was a great learning opportunity especially around the crazy number of modules you need to keep an eye on.
    (Negative stuff)
  • At no point did I think to call for drones to clear off the enemy frigate logistics (Navitas) which was keeping their interceptors up. This was stupid, and the thought only came to me once the fight had finish.
  • Stupid ship choice, as I was just throwing 250mil onto a grid that I couldn't hit anything
  • No one answered the ping in Slack
Image
On reflection I think something like hull tanked, brawling Brutixes would have been a far better option. We didn't have the numbers to fly Caracals or anything else kitey/RLML as they could probably just survive a full clip. Maybe a small gang of Cerbs might have done better, but I don't have any Cerbs to hand in PC9.

While I've posted this a laugh to some fun we had locally last night, I am genuinely interested to hear what other people would do when trying to form a 4 man gang against a 12-15 man T2 frigate fleet.

Cheers guys.
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