We had another op out of Cloud Ring run last night. The ping popped up as I was sitting down, so I logged right in and got in the fleet. We were once again headed out in Sacrileges, so I went with the logi wing in my Guardian. As we were getting ready I stepped away for a minute, got distracted, and when I got back I heard the FC, Kocicek, telling us to align for the Ansiblex. I quickly hit the undock button and got out just in time to pick up the warp and follow the fleet, jumping through not too far behind. By the next gate I was caught up.
Sac fleet outbound
We took the same route we took the other day after the move op, heading up to 6RCQ and into Pure Blind. It was gate, Ansiblex, gate, and so on until we hit our first waypoint, KLY-C0. There an armor timer was coming out on a Pandemic Horde Raitaru, which we formed up and shot, sending it to the final timer.
Just a blob of us flying around
That done, we warped off to a Fortizar of our own and met up with a titan who quickly bridged us off to our next destination, X-7OMU.
Off we go
There again. That was where we had a tough time after the move op, and PanFam and the locals were formed up and waiting for us again, with Abaddons and Muninns and capital support, again. This was another armor timer, thus not the final fight for the structure, so I suppose there was some question as to whether they would show up. Question answered.
We got on grid with the Astrahus, as we did back on Saturday, and started putting damage on it as the time came out.
Circling the Astrahus
Unlike the last fight, where we left the citadel grid to take the fight elsewhere, this time we stuck it out. It did not go well. The gunner on the Astrahus was throwing a mix of damage and void bombs at us, the latter which can disrupt even cap chaining Guardians. The void bomb hits and your capacitor is suddenly empty to the point that your cap transfer modules turn off and if you’re not paying attention you can find yourself drained and falling behind.
Meanwhile the damage bombs were keeping everybody broadcasting while the web on the Astrahus was on our anchor to slow us down, though we kept swapping anchors in order to mitigate that. And then the hostile fleets came out to get us. Things seemed to fall apart about then, though I was very busy following broadcasts for damage.
At one point Kocicek warped us and I caught the warp just as an interdictor bubbled the fleet, so I was alone until I could turn around and warp back to the fleet with a couple other ships that happened to be as quick to align as I. That broke the cap chain where I was until I got back in range, by which time one of my cap buddies was down, as were two of the alternate anchors.
Kocicek told us to starburst as a bubble went up and warp to a safe. I was getting yellow boxed as that happened, but had quickly scooted out of the bubble that was on us and was warping off as damage began to hit. I was going to get away.
Almost on my way out… just pixels left on that align bar…
And then another bubble went up and I was just inside of it, cancelling my warp. I scooted out of that, overheated my hardeners, and set myself to warp once more. Damage was landing and I had to move to align and things looked pretty dicey for a bit there. And the warp drive kicked in and I was off.
The hull is still half full, right?
I had warped to a planet, but wanted to get away from there, so warped to another in order to make at least a mid-point bookmark. But X-7OMU is one of those huge systems and I fell out of warp before I made it to my destination, my capacitor drained.
So there I was, wandering at a mid-point in the system, halfway into my structure, heat damage on my lowers (and no nanite repair paste, I seemed to have forgotten it), and not really in any shape to do anything but hide. However, Kocicek spoke up and told us to warp to him when he said to… so I got that up and ready to click… and he said “Warp to me…” and I was off. And then he counted down from three, so I landed way off from him, but still on grid and close enough to get the fleet warp that pulled us all off to the J-CIJV gate, where we jumped out of the system.
An unguarded way out
We went from there to G95-VZ where we tethered up on yet another Fortizar we have hanging around the region and the repair function slowly took care of my hull, armor, shields, and heat damage.
Repairing on the Fort
From there the way home was pretty straightforward. Once everybody was ready we made our way back to the end of the Ansiblex network and headed back to Cloud Ring from whence we had started.
Back in the Cloud Ring nebula
The fight, such that it was, did not go well for us. The battle report, which looks incomplete to me… though if you don’t get on a kill you don’t appear on the list and we got precious few kills… shows us taking a pasting for very little gain. We lost the objective and over 100 ships for only 9 real kills.
Battle Report Header – Click to Enlarge
But we cannot win them all. Mistakes were made, ships were lost, and hopefully some lessons were learned, as I am sure we will be back again.
During the fight I did see Riverini get called as a target, one of the few I I recall coming up. The experience of the fight was invigorating enough that he actually wrote about in on EN24, his first post in quite a while. There was also a short AAR on Reddit, again highlighting that this was not a shining moment for the Imperium.
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