AAR: That Escalated Badly

Been a pretty dull past couple days, but it got better yesterday. Someone opened a K162 Null Sec wormhole into our system as a back door. After a little poking around we find a K162 from a C3 and we begin scouting. Turns out we stumbled into a small camp with Conquering Darkness preventing U N K N O W N from coming back from high sec. While we debate on how to get them off the high sec wormhole that Conquering Darkness is camping, they solve that problem for us: they warp off and back to their home hole: a C5 which has its connection to this C3 we were watching. We make the move, and chase them.

Unfortunately, the only ship we were able to catch was an Ishtar, who jumps back into his home system as he starts taking too much damage. Our gang follows, I stay behind to catch him if he jumps back and gets polarized. After a little more encouragement he does, and I finish him off and pod him. While that happens though, a Sin lands in our Interdictor's bubble, but he cloaks as soon as he comes out of warp. Unfortunately for him, we got the decloak. As he is entering low armor an Archon appears on DScan, we overheat, blap him, and burn back for the hole. The majority of us jump through as the Archon lands, knowing with our current fleet composition we cannot take it. I stay behind and see if I can hold tackle in my active repairing Deimos, but it proves a tad too much with the new Gecko drones eating me up, so I jump out.

Oddly though, a Proteus decides to follow me in, what I assume, a vain attempt to finish me off without Carrier support. He gets bumped off the hole, and dies.

That went from what was going to be a good sub-cap, no Logistics fight, to a Sin gank, and running from a too-late-to-save-that-Sin Archon. They escalated pretty badly.



Blöd

AAR: Dunk Chaos, Another TLC Fight

I was not here for this fight as I was attending a party, but we have a video of a fight with TLC again, this time instead of in TFP's home system, in TLC's home chain. Was a good fight.

Video (won't let me insert it for some reason, so settle for a link)

Another Video

Kills C3 Side

Kills C6 Side

Letting the video and Battle Report do the talking again.



Blöd

AAR: Dunking The Last Chancers.

Last Friday The Last Chancers. attempted to invade Task Force Proteus' C2 system, until they were beaten back by Rolled Out. On Friday the 23rd they came back again, and we were asked to help. TLC was keeping tight hole control and thus preventing our entrance right away, after about 5 rolled high secs we finally got one that was only 4 jumps from our fleet, we quickly burn over, and the fight begins. Just going to let the video do the talking this time.

Fight begins at 3:30 roughly.

Battle Report

From Chat Logs...
[ 2014.05.24 01:29:18 ] Malcom Bilge > best clusterfucked up fight I have ever been in
[ 2014.05.24 01:29:31 ] Malcom Bilge > 2 fleets.. on 2 comms.. one shield and one armor.. and we pwned them

I may have another video to insert latter, also from a Rail Proteus perspective.

Good Fight.

It also should be noted that this seemed to have stemmed from butthurtness over two mobile tractor unit losses. Full story on Eve-Online Forums.



Blöd

AAR: From the Kitchen to the Work Zone

So the boys have just killed a scouting Cheetah, here is hoping that is leads to a response of some sort, I better grab an Oneiros for remote repairs in case my fleet needs them. If you want to call our composition a fleet, when I land I have a Sleipnir and a Tengu as part of it, shield ships, with my armor Logistic ship. Great combo, lets see if this even works as their numbers rise and they fit up two Guardians for Logistics. I ask Shaded to bring another Oneiros, but it is active tanked and not buffer tanked like mine, meaning it will not last as long against a fleet when engaged. This fleet is turning out nicely, a nice kitchen sink of whatever people want to bring: Sleipnirs, Tengus, Armageddons, basically whatever we could find.

Welping time, jump into the enemy fleet and hope it goes ok, although we do have a slight problem, Logistics are 50km off the wormhole when they jump in so they cannot follow right away. Although to a degree that was a good thing as they were able to melt a Pilgrim of ours and the rest are forces have to fall back to where the Logistics are to receive repairs. In haste to kill more our Armageddon pilot jumps back into system, but gets polarized with 40 seconds left, and our Logistics arrive too late to save him, so we go full leroy jenkins and push the whole fleet through. That burned, losing an Oneiros and a Sabre in addition to the Armageddon.

Lets get a real fleet going this time, I grab a mic and get the fleet whipped into better shape: two Guardians, a Jamgu and a Scorpian for ECM, three Protei, a neut Legion, a Hurricane, and a Muninn. Ten guys, lets see how we do this time.

Same as before, jump in, shoot them. First primary is a Hurricane which promptly explodes, and the next target is a Proteus which is sitting close to us. He holds for a bit until our Jamgu says that he has one of the enemy Guardians jammed, then we chew through his buffer tank and kill him. Shortly after this their Falcon pops due to drones being set on him from the beginning of the fight, while we go on to primary their Tengu, but it is able to slip away, along with most of the fleet starting to bail. We hold onto one Proteus as our final kill, and, well, it was a nice kill.

Was a good fight, one of our members also got a recording of both the kitchen sink fight and the more 'professional' fight.

Video (will insert latter once vid is listed)

Battle Report

AAR: Sparring with Marmite

First day in a new alliance! First things first, get the shit talk on comms out of the way.

After that, fleet up for... high sec war targets? Yeah.. sure.. why not..

We fit up some shield ships with two Basilisks and my alt's Scimitar for Logistics with primarily Ishtars and Drakes for DPS. We march off to Uedama to kick down Marmite's front door, or at least try to.

After a bit of scouting and fooling around we snag a Thorax and Talos jumping through a gate, good old classic gate camping. We try to bait them out and/or off their home station in Uedama, but they won't have it, even after one of our Drakes engages for up to a full three minutes. They do not shoot back at all. Finally, after much boredom, we just land the whole fleet on them and force them to dock, and now we wait.

And wait..

We are getting a bit bored, but very wary of possible neutral alts of theirs watching us. Two Guardians warp in, not war targets, but it is strange to see a pair of Guardians in high sec with no fleet around them and not near an incursion. We guess this is their neutral Logistics, so the fleet moves closer to them to lay down as much DPS as quickly as possible when they become shootable. Sure enough, a Loki undocks and we shoot it, then the whole fleet undocks: Megathrons, Dominixes, Armageddons, and some Protei. We stay to fight.

Their DPS is formidable, making me and my fellow Logistics pilots have a hell of a hard time keeping our fleet alive. We lose a few. a Zealot first, then a Hurricane, but we have DPS as well, and their Guardian pilots get nearly alpha'd off the field, both the neutral alts and the third one that undocked. We are losing more, and they are starting to burn out to our logistics, we have to bail now.

It was a good fight, although I dislike the mechanics of high sec that made it happen (me no like station games). Regardless though, we got a fight in the end and it was fun, that's all that matters.

Battle Report



Blöd

A New Badge

Transcendent Sedition has now changed alliances and is now a member of Protean Concept, joining our friends in Task Force Proteus.

The reasons are numerous and all of them valid. I will spare you the many long boring discussions, just a small update.

In other news, Fight Night was rather boring this weekend.



Blöd

AAR: King of the Hill

So, I'm out in high sec with my characters after a small welp, but that is ok, I can spend all my money and get it back down to under 100 million. I really do hate having too much liquid ISK.

Me being content does not last though, I perk up when Blockade, our newest recruit, shows he is blessed by Bob, once again. Three Ship Maintenance Arrays, a Corp Hanger, and an Ammo Assembly Array, no force field. The POS is offline!

I go from content to being extremely butthurt about not being able to get on the easy kills. My butthurt intensifies when I see two of the SMA kills. A 4.7 Billion kill and a 7.2 Billion kill, with a total of approximately 7 billion dropped in addition to what dropped from the Corp Hanger and Ammo Array.

Total List of Ships that Dropped

Sabre x2

Hulk

Venture x2

Domi x2

Onyx

Helios x3

Tengu

Scorp

Loki

Falcon

Manticore

Golem

Abaddon

Orca

Over the next ten minutes we slowly move out all of the loot, until we realize we have no one that can fly the Golem. We were considering just launching and blowing it up for loot, until someone speaks up that they can fly it with an hour of training, and so we go scan for a high sec to get the Marauder skillbook for him. Little scanning latter, well, that is a crappy high sec, 20+ jumps from anywhere. We keep scanning regardless in hope of a better entrance, until we get interrupted by someone.

Absolute Damage Inc. has rolled into our static, where the loot was, and where the Golem still is, and they start sniffing around the SMA wrecks with a cloaky Proteus. We land a few ships and scare him off, and then cloak up ours. He gets a bit brave a short while latter and decloaks on top of the SMA wreck with the Golem and attempts to shoot it, I am assuming with the mentality that "if I can't have it no one can." He stop him though and decloak a Pilgrim and Stratios on top of him, with others on their way. Pop he goes. Need a new skillbook though.

The skillbook is here for our soon-to-be Golem pilot at long last. The Covert Ops decloak to exchange the book via jet can, or they would have if a Manticore had not bombed them, which blew up the jet can. Guess we should not have done the exchange right in front of the SMA either, its down to 17% hull left. Oddly though the Manticore decides to hang around to get popped.

I finally am back in wormhole space and we try to come up with a plan to keep the Golem safe from being destroyed if they try to destroy the SMA wreck it is in. So we come up with a brilliant plan: get a Noctis and tractor it at 1100 m/sec away, which is too fast for any cloaky ship to keep up with.

Just keep on chugging.

Works well for about 25 minutes, we get it out to 1750km away from the POS Tower, and then the Caracal lands 100km off us. I suppose they were hoping that if they bookmark the wreck and then warp to it they may get close enough, but they did not, and our Rapier pilot was lucky enough to be close enough to tackle it. Pop he goes.

Now they are done with us, or so it seems by a quick local chat. Still paranoid though, we pull the SMA still with our Noctis, out to 2Mm now from the Tower, but it has been nearly two hours since we generated the wreck, so it is close to the end of its life. We launch the Golem to keep it alive, as our wanna be Golem flyer keeps training after he got a new skillbook, 30 minutes remaining.

Nothing else happens other than us shooting each other out of boredom as we wait for the skill to finish. Horray, its done! Two and a half hours for a 1.5 billion ISK Golem, win. Was a good night.

Blöd

AAR: Interruption Night

Normal day so far, scouting the chain, a few simple ganks, you know, good times. Kind of a quiet Sunday so far, Euro Time Zone starts logging off after a while and the Americas Time Zone starts picking up a bit. Scouts head out again to find content for the boys and one of the scouts finds something rather odd: a POS, with two hours left on the reinforcement timer and all the defense modules incapacitated. I'd bash it, but we don't know if we have the people to make it time efficient. I send a small bat-phone to Task Force Proteus to see if we can get a little help, they accept, and form up to meet us.

Elephant on DScan sir!

Two hours latter and we are all sitting nicely on the entrance hole waiting for intel to leak down to us from our scouts. At this point we have gleaned the knowledge from TFP that the invaders who put the POS into reinforced originally was Carthage Empires. At least, that is the best guess we got. A report trickles in of someone who is not Carthage, who is bashing the POS instead. Swag Co is bashing it in a few Ishtars, an Astarte, and an Onerios. We also have an interesting development in our high sec staging system: a member of NoHo has appeared in local, a very prominent wormhole alliance. This makes us a bit hesitant to commit our fleet because we are wary of having a T3 Fleet being crammed down our throats. We decide to move in anyway, leaving scouts on all holes, feeling confident that if a T3 Fleet does come to beat us we can elude them in time.

As we make our way to the bash, Swag Co breaks off their bash and comes back our way, which is back into their home system. An Ishtar jumps in, we tackle it, and it jumps back and two our our Protei, including mine, jump to pursue. We miss the one that is polarized but we tackle a different one and force it to jump into our main fleet, where, instead of risking polarization by jump back, gets blapped by our fleet. Tasty.

We decide to let the Ishtars go, and start the bash with the hope it will not take too long to do. As we land, one of the owners of the POS was burning out of the Force Field in an Osprey, presumably to repair his POS's shields. Our fleet's damage projection shines, as we blap him, and his pod from 80km away with no tackle.

Now I could bore you with mindless statements about how we were griped with anticipation as each percentage point of shield, armor, and hull dropped closer to zero, closer to death, but... no...

Fast forward through killing a mobile depot and finding a Venture and a mobile tractor unit in a safe, we are nearing the end, 4% hull left, we are so close.

Interesting though, scouts report activity down the chain where we came from? Swag Co is back, and bad timing too, one of our haulers which was on the way to help with tower loot has gotten caught, oh well. A few of our fleet break off from the bash and help, and get a small bit of revenge. Swag Co is getting more active though, and are sitting on our way out back to high sec. We break off from the bash completely and form up. They have two Guardians sitting aproximatly 50-60km off the wormhole and four Dominixes along with other DPS ships, while in comparison we have two Guardians as well and four Rail Protei with assorted DPS in addition (mainly Sentry/Drone based). Our Protei do an excellent job at spreading their Sensor Dampeners on the Guardians to prevent them from repairing their Dominixes who are close to us. We kill one Dominix and another jumps out the hole to escape death, pushing the hole to Stage 2: reduced. Fearful of the whole fleet starting to jump and crash the hole (they had a lot of Battleships), I decide to pull the fleet back into the system where we were POS bashing, we don't want our fleet stuck with that POS at only 4% hull left, just sitting there. At this point we realized we lost a Proteus to that engagement, still not sure how exactly, but all is good still.

We split the fleet in two, one to finish off the POS, another to engage Swag Co. I held my Guardian alt off in the last engagement because I wanted to get on some ships kills, and I kinda took over FC mid way. This time I put full focus on my Logistics character and warp my main to the POS to help bash it. The POS explodes, and the guys start ripping into the the things that can drop loot, while I turn my attention to my alt.

We go in, three Guardians with similar DPS numbers from before, but this time we don't care if we get locked out. To be honest, the fight was a blur for me, it was the first fight in quite while in which I did not have to worry about what was on field and what to shoot, I was 100% dedicated to being Logistics and it was all action/reaction to broadcasts from my fleet members. Very satisfying to do something I enjoy but don't get to do often. I could not tell you what the fleet was shooting specifically or how it all went down, it was just me paying attention to keeping everyone alive. The only thing I was aware of was a Falcon 80km off trying to jam me and my fellow Logistics.

It was only after the fight died down in which I realized that Swag Co was refitting as they were dying and kept warping back in more ships. Perhaps they thought that their Falcon could be enough to break reps and kill someone in our fleet (which nearly happened once, both of my logistic bros were jammed at once and I was the only one unjammed at one point). Good fights and respect was exchanged. Shout out to Swag Co for bringing it (it should be noted for this last part of the fight we only had 10-12 people, not 17 as battle report indicates because of the first fight where we lost our Proteus). Good Fight.

While that was going on, the DPS ships that we had left behind to finish the POS were cleaning up and scooping what loot they could, anything high value but low volume basically: Blueprints, Faction Modules, etc... We destroyed SMAs, with one being really nice, even though nothing truly significant dropped, popped manufacturing arrays, laboratories, everything that dropped loot or had the chance to. End result.

So, we interrupted a siege of a wormhole by preventing the invaders from finishing their job (which.. Carthage never showed up oddly), we got interrupted by Swag Co who got their first to start our bash for us, we interrupt them and kill one, they bug us again and we beat them off, and we finish the job on the POS and make off with some good loot.

Again, shout out to Swag Co for being good sports and going balls deep, and to Task Force Proteus for bringing much needed Logistics and DPS to make this possible. Was a fun night.



Blöd

AAR: Fight Night - 5/10/2014

Fite Nite!

Some good baits, some good ganks, some good fights.

Within 5 minutes of me logging in I am greeted with the words 'pew pew' in corp chat. I hop on Teamspeak, and get a bearing on the situation: three T1 Battlecruisers  (Harbinger, Brutix, Hurricane) camping a high sec wormhole in a C2, along with some neighbors in an adjacent C2 who are third party. I grab my trusty old Navy Augoror and prepare to bait the battlecruisers off the high sec. Its a simple plan, I warp 20km off the high sec and shoot them with scorch ammo, they burn out to me, I tackle, rest of gang warps in.

We are ready, I land on the high sec 20km off and start to burn away with my afterburner on to get more range while I shoot the Hurricane. Both the Hurricane and the Brutix start burning out to me and shooting while the Harbinger loads scorch ammo of his own and shoots from a distance, safe on the high sec hole for an easy exit. Brutix is within tackle range, I grab it but I do not call the fleet in yet, I want to see what else may show up, especially if that third party appears. I let them beat me to half armor before I call the gang in. They quickly mop up the Hurricane and Brutix and I am sitting there still taking a beating. The Harbinger jumps out to high sec when our fleet lands. I cut it close though on calling the fleet in!

We fool around with seeing if we can provoke something from the neighbors but nothing occurs, so we eventually head home and cycle our static. My Navy Augoror has been alive way too long for this kind of work....

-----

Ironically the next chain we have rolls back into the previous chain, so we cycle again. This chain we get some activity reported through an end of life wormhole: Illusion of Solitude interceptors camping their entrance hole. There does not appear to be many of them online in the POSs but their home system is MASSIVE and thus allowing for the creation of many deep safe spots to hide ships. We grab some Guardians just in case and make our way over.

Shaded is our bait of sorts this time, taking a cloaky Proteus over and trying to blap the interceptors, but they promptly run away. We wait a bit, try again to bait, this time a Pilgrim and Falcon decloak and try to kill Shaded, with a Sleipnir landing shortly afterwords. We commit, and go a little on the blobby side, killing the Sleipnir and the Pilgrim with the Falcon getting away.

-----

Next chain, seems rather dull and boring so far, C5 super highway it looks like it will turn into, and then we realized the first C5 on the chain is actually Rolled Out, who are mostly ex-members of Sky Fighters. We thought we should give it a chance and take on a larger entity than us, so we form up a nice little fleet for our standards: 3 Guardians, assorted DPS, some tackle, neuts, and a Jamgu. Scouts do not report much in the way of ships: approximately 10 guys maybe who are online and active. A Vargur owned by them jumps in and out of their static but it looks like bait, so we ignore it, we do; however, uncloak a Proteus by it to get their attention.

Looks fairly normal, a few Command Ships come to try to beat the shit out of our Proteus, and our fleet starts to come to the rescue, well, trys anyway. Rolled Out was logging in more people as we were coming to the fight, so the advantage was quickly swinging away from us, but we went in anyway, and damn did they have some DPS, nearly alpha'd some of our ships, and at that point we realized we had no chance, even with us having more Logistics than them.

Rolled Out's Fleet

We run, losing several ships in the process. Good fight though, although I must say I do get annoyed by log off traps at times. And of course it did not help that they had Magnetar DPS bonuses (we did too, but we didn't have the chance to exploit it). Looking back on it I would have liked to have fought outside the Magnetar and seen where the fight would have taken us. We had more Logistics than them but they clearly out performed us in DPS department. It would have been a funner fight, but oh well, it was a good fight all the same.

-----

A few chains latter and much past my bed time that night, the US TZ snagged a Vargur running sites, giving the day a nice little wrap up. Was a good day all in all.

Blöd

AAR: A Cloudy Day

When we are accepting new recruits into the corporation, we do so in a 'normal' fashion. That is, full background checks, API checks, small interview, and of course the Cloudhunter Challenge. Ok, maybe that last bit is not so normal.

Lets back up for a second though. We did not come up with this idea of a challenge, we more or less stole it from an unfortunately now defunct wormhole corporation. One of their directors at the time did an excellent write up detailing the challenge. So before we continue, read up a bit.

Done? Good. So that is one of our final steps in our recruiting process, but instead of asking recruits to come and fight or find us we just ask them to explore wormholes and find something to kill (or die trying). There have been various kills as a result (and some deaths) ranging from Mammoths filled with POS fuel, squishy recon ships, miners, site runners and a few of our own losses. All of which were solo kills by the participants, until today.

The participant in question is Blockade LeBrun. Normal procedure, scan wormholes out, find a target, kill it. He was using his Helios to scout and was planning on refitting to his Proteus to kill something when something was found. Well, what he found originally was a Gila solo bashing a Player Owned Customs Office (POCO). Nice target, very nice. As he burns back to high sec to grab his Proteus he waits for another participant in the challenge to come over to help, just in case it is bait. As he waits however, the Gila is joined by a Myrmidon, and... a Vargur and a Kronos?

You had my interest before, but now you have our attention. There is no way he can take two Marauders plus two other ships. We always offer help to our recruits if they happen across something too big for them, and this is the first time it happened. We start rage rolling chains for a quick high sec exit, after three chains we get one 18 jumps our from the entrance system. As we are burning Blockade notifies us the POCO has just entered reinforced mode and they are warping off; however, not back to their POS, but to a site. We still have time! and we keep moving to the entrance system. A site is finished, we are only three jumps out by now, but instead of the Marauders going to one site together they split up to two separate sites.

Annoying, but doable, we decide to send out Heavy Interdictor to tackle the Vargur while the main fleet takes care of the Kronos. Blockade is still in system providing a little intel on their position, and we go for it. Warp to the site, Kronos tackled? no... Kronos dead. Afterwords we warp over to the Vargur's site and finish him off. Nice tackling Andoi.

Excellent scouting by Blockade and nice job staying patient with us getting over to him. Unfortunately the other recruit had to leave before we were able to kill the Marauders, but in a weird way thanks to him, Blockade waited long enough for him to arrive, so the Marauders could arrive. Interesting how that worked out.

Was best Cloudhunter Challange to date, very pleased to see it being well done. Bob was clearly with this one.



Blöd

AAR: Fight Night - 5/3/2014

Not a very good weekend for me personally, I spent most of it trying to get a Dreadnought out of a C5 unscathed. Long story, maybe some other time.

My corpmates; however, had a excellent run this fight night, starting things off with a bang. Not sure who puts faction modules on a Maelstrom but it is much appreciated. The multi 100 million pods helped as well.

They continue on to gank a few Dominixes as well, and ending the night with blobing a Noctis.

Sorry for the lack of details but I was not actually there this time around, next time.



Blöd

AAR: Free Loot Best Loot

Been a quiet past couple of days so I am posting an old encounter from about 11 months ago. The following is a copy and pasted mail.

Found some guy anchoring a POS in static... and he had some empty ships around it.. including a Drake and a Retriever..

Malcom warps in.. pilots Drake.. blows up a Badger that just warped in with their own Drake.. along with a Venture and the Retriever..

Kill: Den Nik (Badger Mark II)
Kill: Kas Alabel (Retriever)
Kill: Kas Alabel (Venture)

Cheers! o7 Then noticing more stuff on DScan I look around.. there.. floating around a moon.. are like 10 Cans.. 3 Drakes.. and who knows what else.. CALLING ALL PODS!!!

One of the guys we kill switch to a Drake.. Nikita just logged on and we blow that shit up..

Kill: Kas Alabel (Drake)

Nikta and Malcom grab a Drake each and Stragix warps in stealing an Itty Mark 2.. and starts hauling off all the crap in them.. fuel blocks! Stront! BPOs! Ammo! POS Modules! the works!! We start hauling everything out.. Malcom snags a Badger and takes more.. Nikta comes in Noctis (lol wut?) and starts taking missiles.. then.. a pod warps in.. there is still one drake left that he might try to grab.. is he.. no.. he jumps in a Heron?

Kill: Kas Alabel (Heron) oops..

Anyway.. we continue hauling after that.. shitting and giggling the whole way.. Estimated 339mill in loots from Cans (Including Minmatar Fuel Blocks, POS modules, and Strong and whatever else you can think of).. along with 4 Drakes, an imicus, an Itty mark 2, a Badger and a Retriver..

Pics



Blöd