And it wasn’t even ours.
Despite not having anything major going on this past weekend I somehow managed to sit down at my computer 30 minutes after a fleet op had formed up and left. So it goes in New Eden, where action operates on its own schedule, and if you’re not around you miss it.
But as the weekend drew to a close I managed to get into one fleet. Thomas Lear pinged for a Typhoon fleet and a support fleet of Jackdaws and ECM. We were forming up to shoot an Astrahus that Pandemic Legion dropped in the system.
Look for the PL logo…
Being a Pandemic Legion citadel it had to follow the long standing practice of being named with a Game of Thrones spoiler. And people ask who the bad guys are in this war.
Names omitted to save your purity…
I hope I blurred that enough.
As with the Fortizars we dropped and lost to our foes previously, it was the expedient course to kill the Astrahus as it went online, removing the need to deal with multiple timers. Shooting it immediately would kill it right then and there.
I joined up with the Typhoon fleet in a Guardian again as logi seems to be in somewhat short supply. I think everybody just wants to fly their el cheapo tier 1 battleships and shoot things. While the fleet didn’t fill instantly, it was still nearly full by the time we undocked and got down to business.
Typhoons scattered about with logi cap chaining in the middle
When we landed on grid with the Astrahus a mobile cyno inhibitor was deployed to keep our foes in Tribute from jumping straight in and on grid to defend the citadel, should they have a mind to do so.
Mobile cyno inhibitor
It is glowing orange-ish because logi was asked to lock it up and put a rep on it in order to keep it safe from attack.
Logi reps on the cyno inhibitor
This turned out to be a good plan, not due to any enemy action, but rather due to a few anxious fleet members keen to shoot anything unfamiliar appearing on their overview.
The enemy did not show up in force. A couple of Bifrosts attempted to play booshing games with us, jumping a few fleet members 100km off. But the Typhoon fit of the day included a microjump drive fit, so anybody who was jumped of in a boosh was able to align back to the fleet and make the return trip with a jump of their own.
The one bit of comedy I suppose was a Hurricane that undocked to contest our fleet… I guess… he showed up.
A wild Hurricane appears…
The support fleet went right after him and he was locked down pretty quickly.
There is a Hurricane in there somewhere
The distraction of the Hurricane did not last long however. The ship was soon coming apart in anticipation of a final explosion.
Ships burning and going critical are pretty…
No opposing fleet arrive however, so after a the requisite amount of time… there is a damage cap for shooting citadels which means there is a minimum amount of time it takes to kill one, which in the case of an Astrahus is something like 22 minutes if I recall right… the target exploded with the usual fury.
Astrahus inferno
It did not brew up with very many pre-explosions, or I was watching from the wrong angle. But there was the explosion followed by the wreck on grid which was quickly salvaged by somebody in the fleet.
The wreck barely lasted longer than the light effects…
At that point we were cleared to shoot the cyno inhibitor, as once you deploy one it cannot be recovered. A small kill mail to add to the Astrahus. I managed to get on both kill mails. Bad logi pilot that I am, I always carry a combat drone and I managed to sneak off into range of the Astrahus to add it to the attack before scampering back to the ball of logi.
The operation over, Thomas warped us back to an insta-dock bookmark on the station we are currently working out of. As it happened, we landed inside the model which ended up looking like a bunch of Typhoons were stacked vertically by the opening.
Typhoons stacked… and sticking out the bottom
Not exactly Elite: Dangerous docking there.
Another day in Hakonen, and more ops are planned for this week.
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