Okay, so, full disclosure: I didn't plan for this.
The operational concept was to take a wormhole conveniently located right next to TEST ratting space, scare up some krabs, blow them up with our cheap frigates, and either run away or bait out a QRF and die in glorious fire, plugging the muzzles of their guns with our frigates. Thus free frigates for the Uni folks who wanted them, as welp fleets shouldn't be a tax on newbies.
In reality, TEST space was completely dead when we went through, so we ended up going all the way through several regions without spotting anything of interest. Then we got to Delve, and two jumps in, our ceptors found and tackled a Nidhoggur. Analiese remembered he had a cyno inhib in his Malediction about 45 seconds after he tackled the carrier, which did nothing to either light a cyno in time or to shoot the inhib.*
Spoiler
Safe krabbing in nullsec depends less on running away from tackle (when you're in a capital, a Rorqual, or a super) than on the presence of a defensive "umbrella". You get tackled by frigates, you light a cyno and ask for help, supers land on grid, the frigates run away or die.
A cynosural field inhibitor, or "cyno inhib", prevents cynos from lighting within 100km of the inhib after a brief anchoring period. If the inhib gets blown up before anchoring, nothing happens. If you light the cyno during the anchoring period, it stays up for its normal 10 minute cycle time. If you warp a subcap cyno at 100km to the tackled carrier, move a little bit, and light the cyno out of range of the inhib, that cyno stays up. In general, you just have to be awake.
A cynosural field inhibitor, or "cyno inhib", prevents cynos from lighting within 100km of the inhib after a brief anchoring period. If the inhib gets blown up before anchoring, nothing happens. If you light the cyno during the anchoring period, it stays up for its normal 10 minute cycle time. If you warp a subcap cyno at 100km to the tackled carrier, move a little bit, and light the cyno out of range of the inhib, that cyno stays up. In general, you just have to be awake.
Spoiler
- A single heavy energy neutralizer (on a carrier, it should usually be a Corpus X-type Heavy Energy Neutralizer) instantly caps out a frigate, at which point the frigate is slow, unable to escape, and can be instantly volleyed by the carrier's fighters.
- A single large smartbomb makes the "anchor at 500m and use your light drones" engagement completely invalid; the frigates have to back off and use Null, thus massively reducing DPS output.
- Fitting these two high slot modules in place of extra Fighter Support Units would have cost this Nidhoggur pilot a total of 60m net ISK (after the cost of the deadspace neut) and 192 DPS while ratting. Greed is ... good?
Since I did not anticipate burning through 2/3rds of our Void ammo to kill a carrier, we stopped at a station in NPC Delve to restock ammo. Scouts saw a couple opportunities, but they were all either supercarriers (which are a bit much, to say the least), behind a gatecamp, or otherwise not readily accessible. We killed a Myrmidon and a cyno Nereus on our way out of Delve and dodged an angry Ragnarok.
Fountain was essentially dead. We blew up a ceptor and his friends (the left side of this battle report, plus an Ashimmu and almost certainly capital support) fled in disarray from the gatecamp they had maintained for an hour or so. Hmm.
I split the fleet as we exited Cloud Ring, as my corpmates would save a few jumps going directly to Villasen and I wanted to make sure the Uni members made it back to Archavoinet.
I am not aware of any losses during the fleet.
We had a great form-up. Thanks to 17 EVE University members who showed up, the 12 other members of Free Range Chikuns who joined us on a long fleet after we'd already had a short notice brawl that evening, and our one special snowflake from V0lta.
