Stealing an Azbel... Almost

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Brock Carlisle
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Joined: 2014.12.01 21:06

Stealing an Azbel... Almost

Post by Brock Carlisle »

Discovery

On 2/9/2020 around 1600 I stumbled into J165412 (C2, HS/C1 static) from ZN0-SR in the back pocket of NSC. Initially there was nothing remarkable besides a few drones and a container in space above an Azbel. But wait. The Azbel was unanchoring. I got excited until I learned that unanchoring takes 7 days, and an Azbel would take an Orca fitted for max cargo to pick up. I decided to keep eyes on it anyway and check back every few hours or so. The highsec static was at that time 3 jumps from Jita, so I parked my trading alt in the hole after injecting it into covops helios (yay for skill injectors).

Planetary Industry

The next day I was poking around the hole a little bit and talking on NSC comms, when an astero decloaked on the can above the Azbel. I still didn't want to expose myself, in the case this new guy was an alt of the owning corp and just watched. The same character started flying around the hole decloaked and ran a relic site I had a perch on before leaving the hole. While I was dscanning and researching the corp, the same guy came back in a Tayra and seemed to loot the can. I realized this guy was not at all in the same corp, so went to Highsec and brought a mammoth back scooping the rest of about ~100M of PI and stront. This was around the time I convinced Xyrin Bacard to put his alt with a cargo Orca in the hole logged off.

Waiting

The following 4 days were not very interesting, as the highsec connection was further away from everything. I spent a little time making safes, tacs, and oh picking up another 150M in PI/stront that someone left around again. It was at this point I started to make sense of the killboard, and specifically the last fight that took place (standup fighter). It seemed to me that The Mighty Beans was evicting Stake Tatare on the 8th around 0300 and the fight involved fighters owned by Stake Tartare from that same Azbel. There was no activity in the hole after that, minus an opportunistic MTU kill, giving a pretty tight window of time. As I found the structure the next day under the ownership of The Mighty Beans, and the corp seemed to not have much activity past 06-07, I figured that 0330-0800 on 2/15 was a reasonable window for unanchoring.

The Perfect Harvester Hole

The day of the unanchoring was the day after the gala event started, and I was scouting for a HSC Guardians Gala VIP roam trying to find wormholes acceptable to attempt a run on the site. The hole I found however was even better than that, a C4 static highsec shattered Pulsar with 85+ Green combat sites and only two wormholes connections out. As it was nearing the end of Cutecumber Roll's PvE fleet, the HSC guys ran only a couple sites before running out of MTUs and calling it. I stayed in the hole and notified WHC, who then promptly brought these wonderful folks to run a harvester:
Spoiler
Danny Algaert
Erywin Chelien
John Echeriedes
Lucius Septimus Severus
Larkvi
Sophia Ligeti
Brock Carlisle
During the harvester I seem to have convinced most of the folks to come sit in the Azbel hole with me and wait for the unanchor as the time was nearing 0300. Also, Biwako Akami WHC resident structure stealer came online around this time offering to add his expertise.

Moment of Truth

The pirates involved:
Spoiler
Biwako Acami
John Echeriedes
Rusting
Lucius Septimus Severus
Brock Carlisle
Xyrin Bacard (under the alias Tyrin)
Around 0430, the quiet hole that I had grown to call home for the past week was starting to get busy. 3 new sigs popped and a few Tengus and Stratioses started popping around the hole. They were not part of the Mighty Beans, and came from a wandering connection. We decided that it was probably time to bring some rollers in the case that this 3rd party would start causing some trouble. We had people scanning down the chain, and also bringing rollers on alts to rage roll, when I made the dumb decision to log off my alt and bring in my main in a tengu for combat support. My failure was one of miscommunication as I thought we had plenty of people watching the hole, while in reality everyone had left the hole to pick up rollers or to scan down the chain. By the time I made it the 10 jumps in my tengu and got in the hole, dscan was chaotic with ships and capsules and containers. I had missed the event by minutes. I crossed the Orca picking up the structure in warp to my perch, chaotically and unhelpfully yelling in comms for everyone to get in the hole. The rollers started rolling, Lucius and I started shooting, enemy pods were getting in the ships that were strewn across space. I started bookmarking cans in the wrong folder telling people to warp to them, causing further confusion, but the calm ways of the WHC folks tempered my angst. Xyrin and Biwako brought their Orcas in and started hauling stuff from containers, with Xyrin having the true pirate mentality in abandoning the fighting and his own Orca to steal one of the enemy's.

The Fight

As we had rolled out the majority of the reinforcements The Mighty Beans, those left in the hole were bouncing around in capsules trying to grab any of the ships they found to fight us. Most of them forgot to turn on their hardeners and died quick. The battle commenced at 0549 2/15:

Kills:
Gila +258M
Raven +181M
Megathron +204M
Epithal +2M
Sigil +4M
Procurer +44M
Epithal +1M
Sigil +1M
Procurer +44M
Epithal +204M
Sigil +204M

At some point, perhaps due to confusion, The Mighty Beans began killing their own ships. It is unclear whether these were manned or not, but it would be hilarious if they were.
Catalyst +7M
Ibis +0M

We only suffered one loss, though technically Xyrin had stolen this epithal, so probably still counts as a kill?
Epithal -1M

What we stole

While we were unable to loot the Azbel, we came away with around 1B in stolen ships/goods, including an Orca (thanks Xyrin for focusing on the important stuff) and a Crane: LOOT

Battle Report
ISK Destroyed: 756,277,456.31
ISK Stolen: 1,035,753,101.52
ISK Lost: 1,038,357.65
ISK Delta: +1,790,992,200.18
Efficiency: 99.99%

Lessons Learned

- Hacking a structure is a thing. But only for reinforcement timers and not unanchoring.
- Always leave someone watching the structure. Work out shifts.
- Leave your ship at a safe and get in an enemy ship for the fight.

Thanks to all for coming out, it was some good fun, and my first WH stakeout.
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Gergoran Moussou
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Joined: 2019.04.09 05:16

Re: Stealing an Azbel... Almost

Post by Gergoran Moussou »

The Mighty Beans are some good guys. The corp that I first joined after leaving E-Uni had several people who joined after the previous incarnation of The Mighty Beans got evicted by Inner Hell (and after that corp disbanded, The Mighty Beans reformed).

Congratulations on the haul. That's some good stuff. I'm sure that you helped teach the loot truck pilot a valuable lesson on falling asleep (the explanation that I got for the question of "Did E-Uni steal some stuff from the Beans recently?"). If the Beans couldn't extract their loot without something like this happening, they didn't deserve to hold onto it.
9th CCI medalist

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