Monday, May 2, 2016

Industrial Revolution

Yesterday afternoon The Mittani held another of his fireside chats which, along with The Meta show on Saturday’s, is part of his weekly one-two propaganda punch.  Both are streamed live on Twitch and our foes log in to watch and rage in chat.  It seems to make them angry.

Among the announcements during the chat (which you can replay here) were some new doctrine fits for entosis work.  They were the Cysknife, the FiestaCat, the Clownshoe, and the Max Tank Maller… the latter seeming to indicate that somebody ran out of cute names.

Of those, the Clownshoe was going to go directly into service after the chat, with a limited number of free ships being handed out by Jay Amazingness for this first official fleet.

Free ships!  Who could say no to that?  And so I was literally the first person in after Jay had formed the fleet.  Not that I was going to get a very valuable ship for me effort.

The Clownshoe, named after a term used by Sapporo Jones, the leader of TEST, in an angry rant about Imperium doctrines (available somewhere on YouTube), is a tanked Nereus, the T1 Gallente hauler that used to be at the wee end of the Iteron line of ships; the former shortest sausage in the pack, if you will.

The tank itself isn’t exceptional, though the fact that the shield regenerates 800 hit points a second helps a lot.  That means anybody hitting one needs to be doing at least 800 DPS, plus the resists, to start breaking the tank.  And then the Nereus also has a drone bay, so can carry some ECM drones to launch and break lock on any attacker, giving it some survivability in the wild.  So it might get away, or at least survive until help can show up.  The fit also has a cloak, so the idea is to be able to hack, fight off any small stuff that might come get you, then run off and cloak up if you need.

So we got into fleet and Jay started handing them out to the first 50 people who joined the fleet.  I got mine and bought a skin for it with some Aurum I had sitting around, just because this seemed to be a comically special event.  Since it was a freebie fleet, there were people who joined up before checking if they had the skills, including one pilot who had to train Gallente industrial.

Then, once everybody had something to fly, we had to sit around and wait for the standing fleet to clear off the undock as CO2 has showed up with some Svipuls.  When we finally got the okay to undock, they were still on grid with us, though far out of range.  I do wonder what they must have thought seeing a pack of T1 industrials coming out of the station.

Confirmed! Goons evacuating Saranen!

Confirmed! Goons evacuating Saranen!

Jay warped us off to the Tartoken gate and the CO2 Svipuls followed us there, though didn’t come through with us.  It was announced on coms, “The first transport is away!”

Jay, however, was being a bad and told us all to jump while forgetting to do so himself, so got himself blown up, not once, but twice getting to us.  After lingering in Tatroken for a bit, he finally caught up to us and led us off to a waiting titan that was ready to bridge us into Fade.

Nerueus' in warp

Nerueus’ in warp

We got there and were bridged in.  Another benefit of going out in industrial ships is the 90% reduction in jump fatigue accrued.

Bridge up, industrials away!

Bridge up, industrials away!

Once into Fade we headed to the VNX-P0 constellation where a capture event was going on for the TCU in MPPA-A.

Along the way we came through a gate and found ourselves face with a 9 ship NCDot gang.  I expected that we were going to get mauled by the mix of Svipuls and Kirins.

A wild NCDot gang appears!

A wild NCDot gang appears!

They locked several of us up and pointed us.  I was on the list of those pointed.

I'm doomed!

I’m doomed!

So we launched our EC-3000 ECM drones, anchored up on Jay, and waited to see how things went.  The droned proceeded to break locks.  The Svipuls hit one Nereus for a bit and got it down to about 50% shield.  I took a few hits myself from one of the Svipuls, but my shield regen kept things happy for me. After about a minute of that, they gave up and warped off, deciding we were not worth the effort.  Industrial success!

From there we continued on to MPPA-A where we split up and succeeded in the capture event.

Hacking my node

Hacking my node

Somebody from my alliance ended up planting the new TCU, so TNT now holds one system for the moment.

Flag found in Fade

Flag found in Fade

We then carried on and reinforced whatever else we could find in the area.  As this was going on, Asher and Boat were taking on Pandemic Horde in O1Y-ED where, despite PH numbers, they managed to hack the station cloning services, which meant that anybody who got podded was sent back to their designated home system or their default system if O1Y-ED had been so set.

That kept PH busy so we kept on hacking whatever we could find.

A couple of us on an ihub

A couple of us on an ihub

After a while of that, PH finally convinced Pandemic Legion that they had to come out and save them, so a PL fleet showed up and we all cloaked up in safe spots and let them fly around trying to find a target.

Cloaked Nereus

Cloaked Nereus

After they wandered off, Jay took us up into Deklein.  Up until that point the Clownshoes has carried on without loss.  In Deklein we would be on our own without Boat and Asher keeping the locals busy.

Wandering into the space of The Blood Covenant, we began spreading out some to reinforce sovereignty objects and station services.

Entosis all the services

Entosis all the services

While that started off well enough, we did eventually provoke a reaction from the locals who can swarming out to chase us off.  Clownshoes began to get blown up.  Those of us who could cloaked up again in safe spots while a Sword fleet showed up to help us, only to get mauled in the process.

Safe and cloaked, the rest of us hung about waiting for things to cool down.  At that point it was getting towards dinner time at our house and, since we didn’t seem to be going anywhere soon, I told the fleet I needed to go AFK in order to fire up the BBQ and cook something for dinner.  Salmon patties for my daughter and some bockwurst for her friend, my wife, and myself.

That ended up taking longer than I thought, so by the time I got back the remains fleet had made its way back to Saranen and docked up.  Left out along in Deklein, I decided to try a bit of “solo yolo” hacking and picked a non-station system to try and hit.  With ADMs low, I only needed 10 minutes alone after the warm-up cycled to reinforce a TCU.

However, the locals were still stirred up and before my fist post-warm-up cycle had finished a small gang landed on me.  Unfortunately, they brought more DPS than my Clownshoe Nereus could tank, so it went pop.  Then I got podded and was back in Saranen.  Still, a free ship, a quick trip home, and a new adventure, I don’t have anything to complain about.

So that is our new thing for now, Clownshoes.  It might be a good time to ramp up a bit of Nereus production, because losses of this T1 industrial are probably going to go up dramatically for now.

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