Abaddons in Low Sec Again

The Liberty Squad “good fights” deployment in Placid carries on.  There are no objectives to take, no territory to defend, and not much infrastructure to assail in low sec, unless you want to get involved in faction warfare, and we haven’t started doing that yet.

We are up there just to pick fights with the local power, Snuffed Out, and their allies.  And they seem willing to oblige now and then.

One way they seem to be interested in fighting us is economically by seeding our staging station with contracts for mal-fit doctrine ships that are just a bit cheaper than the fits being imported by the squad.  And, it doesn’t matter how often people say or broadcast about not buying contracts from random third parties, people will just buy the cheapest contract that sounds about right.  I know, I’ve made that mistake myself.

To combat this, Liberty Squad dropped a Fortizar in Frarie, the smallest structure that allows the owner to setup a market.

Named “Little House on the Frarie”

In theory this should stop the bad contract nonsense, since the locals lack docking rights.  In reality, enough people are still in the station that people keep buying the bad contracts.

The Fortizar also gives us another potential point of conflict, a target for the locals.  And they did take us up on that, reinforcing the Fortizar last week.  The armor timer was set to come out last night and squad leadership had pre-pinged about the potential for a fight.  It was time to get the Abaddons out again.

However, the timer came and went and Snuff did not show up.  This is the sort of thing that gets Cainun worked up, so he decided if they were not going to come to us, we were going to go to them, that having worked out so well previously.  So we all piled onto a titan, ready to be launched in the general direction of Snuff.

A Ragnarkok in a POS

We were bridged into their home area where we started looking for something to shoot.  I was in a Guardian this time around, with my alt on the second monitor in an Abaddon.

I still haven’t washed that Guardian

We ended up in Rakapas to shoot a Fortizar of theirs.  At that point things got very busy for me.  Attacking a gunned and defended Fortizar means a lot of bombs flying your way and lots of calls for reps.

Snuff undocked Machariels, at which point we became much less about shooting the Fortizar and much more about getting in position to fight their fleet.  This led to a series of warps back and forth around the Fortizar where Snuff seems disinclined to break tether.

After a while of this Cainun decided a fight was not going to happen.  By his estimation, Snuff Was not going to have a go at us unless everything was tilted in their favor, so he had us align out and head home.

The scout left behind reported that the Machariels warped off to a POS to get on a titan of their own once we left.  It looked like they were going to drop on us on our way home.  And when we spotted the cyno Cainun decided to give that a shot to see what they would bring.

The Machariel fleet dropped on us in Nennamaila and we were in close enough range to engage.  And while they did not bring HAW dreads along with them, they did jump fax support in to keep their Machs alive.  After a few attempts we were only able to break the tank on one Machariel while they were chewing up Abaddons one after another.

Once again, things were quite busy in the logi wing as we tried to keep people alive.

As the battle titled against us, the likelihood of us getting another Mach kill fell away, and Cainun decided to warp us out.  My alt, in an Abaddon, was tackled by one of the Machs however, so while my Guardian warped off to the station to dock up, the Abaddon sat there in the middle of hostiles waiting to die.  This was a double whammy because my alt had gotten the kill mail for the one Mach we killed, so that Abaddon was going to have a very short lived kill mark.

And then I was no longer pointed.  I don’t know if the person who had me tackled found a better target or if I just wandered out of range before it was my turn, but I wasn’t going to stick around and ask.  Already aligned and at speed, I warped right out and docked up with the rest of the survivors who made it out.

That Mahcariel we killed was expensive, but not expensive enough to offset out own losses.  We lost the ISK war by about a 6 to 1 margin according to the battle report.

Header from the Battle Report

And that total doesn’t include what we lost on the Fortizar in Rakapas, which would add another 3 billion ISK on top of that.  At least Abaddons insure well.

We waited in the station until they got bored and left.  They had already gotten their kills, so they didn’t hang around for very long.  After that we went back to Frarie to dock up in the Fortizar.

We shall see if they reinforce it again.  Doing that has worked out pretty well for them so far.  They haven’t killed any of our structures, but when they don’t show up for the timer Cainun feels the need to go find trouble, and he tends to get it.