The Missing Tree

A little after 5:30pm last Saturday as I was making myself some dinner there was a sudden loud sound, like somebody dropped a bunch of metal parts on a hard floor.  A crash, if you will, from somewhere outside.

I put on my shoes and went outside to see what I could see.  Around the corner and up the street a bit there was a car that had run into a tree.  In our neighborhood there is a stretch of space between the sidewalk and the street, the curb strip, and in front of each house there is a large tree planted there.

By the time I got over there some of the neighbors had already gathered around the car, a Pontiac Bonneville, and the woman who had been driving it was standing next to the car yelling into her cell phone.  She looked to be shaken but okay.  The airbags had deployed, so she was probably spared any serious injury.

The crash

She was not interested in any help and was aggressively telling the neighbors to go away and not call the police.  As I walked up I could see she had an ankle monitor on, which probably explained why she was not interested in any help from the authorities.

One of the neighbors insisted on calling the police however and the woman then fled the scene, running up the street away from the direction I had come.

The fire department showed up first, which is expected as the firehouse is just two blocks away.  The head of the crew asked about the driver and we gave him a general description and a “she went that away” response.

An ambulance showed up shortly thereafter, but left after a brief interval, there being no driver to check on or transport.

Then the police showed up and started going through the car and asking about the driver.  The fire crew, seeing there was nothing for them to do either, made like the ambulance and drove off.

By this point I had wandered off to check on my dinner in the over, but I stepped out and peeked around the corner whenever I heard something going on.

A flatbed car carrier showed up next and the police blocked off the street while it got lined up on the car, cranked it onto the truck, and carried it away.  I could see a detective on the scene as well, probably from the county and probably looking for the woman with the ankle monitor.

Things got quiet for a bit, then a couple of big trucks rolled up.  I walked out and saw the crew dismount and start sizing up the tree.  They had a wood chipper in tow behind one of the trucks.

The tree which, as you can see in that picture, not only shed a considerable number of branches but also ended up noticeably off true, appeared to have been declared a hazard in need of immediate attention.  In a quite 15 minutes of loud grinding and chain saws the tree was gone, the trucks rolling off into the evening.  It was a little after 7:30pm.

My wife and daughter, who had been at Ikea, came home as the tree crew was finishing up.  I told them what had happened and said that if they had been a few minute later they might not have seen any evidence that anything at all had occurred, unless they noticed that a tree was missing up the street.

And then I realized that the people who live in the house were nowhere to be seen.  There is usually a car in the driveway, but nobody was home.  I am sure the city or the police will notify them as to what happened, but I have to wonder what they thought when they got home and everything was calm and peaceful… except that the tree on their curb strip was missing.

The O-PNSN Keepstar Blows Up

After the rebuff at the Y-2ANO Keepstar last weekend, PandaFam changed their tack and decided to go after the Keepstar in Fountain that was the furthest from Delve.  That was the Keepstar belonging to The Bastion in O-PNSN.

O-PNSN is a good dozen gates from Delve and, perhaps more importantly, to get there the Imperium would have to travel through I-CUVX, PandaFam’s forward staging system.  They would be closer to the target than us and could reinforce multiple gate camps against any fleets attempting to gate their way to the fight.

I had actually flown out to check on the Keepstars the other night and was surprised to find that the final timer was looming already.

Final fight in 21 hours or so

Seeing that the battle would be start towards the latter half of my work day, I flew out in an ECM burst interceptor the night before hoping to be able to join in, or at least peek in on, the battle.

I was in luck.  Kun’mi had an ECM burst interceptor fleet up so I was able to join up with them once they arrived in the system, then watch the count down to the start of the event.

30 seconds left on the clock

The fight itself looked like a return to form.  Again, using fighters elsewhere, as PandaFam did at Y-2ANO, did not turn out well for them, so they once again focused their fighters on attacking the Keepstar.  Their carriers sat on their Fortizar, bubbled up so they wouldn’t warp off in case of a disconnect, and sent the fighters out early so they would arrive in time for the final stage to begin.

The PandaFam Fortizar anchored on grid with the Keepstar

Our subcaps were set to try and extract a heavy price in fighters while their subcaps were out in force to suppress ours.  There were Ravens on the field again to help keep the timer paused, but this time PandaFam was using them and they managed not to get blotted out in a single bomb run.

Meanwhile, we were hanging on tether on the Tatara on grid waiting for Kun’mi to warp us off into the thick of things.  Our job was just to be annoying, to slow the enemy down, and to whore on a bunch of kill mails.

I’ve explained this before, but as a refresher, Kun’mi would probe down a hostile group and fleet warp everybody at them… everybody was all 8-10 of us depending on when in the battle we’re talking.

My Malediction amid some Feroxes

When we land, we immediately start to warp out again, hitting our overheated Burst ECM as we aligned.  The wave from that has a good chance to break the target lock on any ship within 26km, which can be annoying for DPS and deadly if logi loses lock on somebody they are repping.

You get a lot of target breaks when you get right in the thick of a hostile fleet.

A lot of Feroxes were out and about

And everybody you tag counts as though you attacked them, so if they end up getting blown up after your run, you get on the kill mail as a participant.  This can lead to some serious kill board padding.

The odds, however, were very much against us.  It was about four to one against us in the system, so winning the objective really depended on the enemy screwing up.  If they limited the number of mistakes they made, they would kill the Keepstar and win the objective.

There were a few crazy moments.  We did a run on a fleet and got out just before it got bombed and wiped out.  The Bastion had some dreads in the Keepstar that emerged to fight against the odds.

The Revelation explodes, soon they would all be wrecks

And the enemy did not make any critical mistakes.  I mean sure, Progodlegend, one of the TEST leaders, got his Damnation shot out from underneath him and the kill mail showed that he hadn’t bothered to fit the rigs that were in the cargo.  This was made more amusing when he was trying to return in another Damnation, got caught along the way, and was blown up again, and that kill mail showed he had yet again not bothered to fit his rigs.

We kept on doing our runs whenever Kun’mi could find us a target.

In on another fleet… just within range

However, I got distracted at my end for a bit and had to tab out.  I tabbed back to find we had been warped in and I had been tackled.  I set off the ECM burst, hoping to break enough locks to be able to warp off, but I was out of luck.  My Malediction was blown up.  A lot of Jackdaws on that kill mail, a lot of missiles in flight my way.

The battle was still going on and the enemy was kind enough to pod me, so I jumped into an ECM burst Ares and flew on back.  With tidi running strong and restricted to that system, the battle would wait for me.

However, the server itself was clearly having problems.  I had to disconnect coming into the system as I ended up in the eternal warp tunnel.  Once I got logged back in and was in the system, the UI wasn’t working for me.  I wasn’t able to rejoin Kun’mi’s fleet and none of the right click menus were working for me… oh, and my capacitor and all the UI around it was missing.  I could only warp to bookmarks in the bookmarks window I had up, so I ended up tethered on the Tatara again hoping the game would catch up and fix my problems.

But it was not to be.  So I just moved the camera about and watched as the Keepstar slowly headed towards destruction.  Fighting carried on, and I got a nice shot of the arcing votron projector hitting a Ferox fleet.

Zap baby!

I stuck around and watched the final moments and the Keepstar exploding.

Flames erupting from the structure

The fighting carried on for a while, but eventually things started settle down.  I saw almost 3,200 in local at one point, a big fight for a weekday.  By the time it dropped to about half that number the server finally caught up and deigned to draw my UI finally.  I could travel back home now.

The battle report shows things going heavily in favor of the attackers.  Pandemic Horde put more people on the field alone that all of the defenders combined… and they can’t all be spies.

Battle Report Header

We killed a lot of ships… but that Keepstar weighs heavily against us, ringing in at 200 billion ISK.  Without that, not a bad exchange… but without the Keepstar in play nobody would have put up with those losses.

There is some question as to how many fighters we killed.  They don’t always get recorded correctly on zKill and do not get counted at all unless a full squadron gets destroyed.  So if just one fighter gets back, no kill mail.  But, in the end, we lost the objective.  The Keepstar died.

As for my time, zKill put me on 227 kill mails.  That is four and a half pages of kill board padding right there.  Enough to put me in the top ten for KarmaFleet, a totally undeserved position.

Padded kill board

But my kill board also shows how delayed the server was.

Up until I was blown up, all my kills are credited to my Malediction.  After I was blown up and podded, there are a few where there is just a question mark.  You’re not supposed to get credit if you leave the system, but things were out of whack, so I am sure the process leaves some margin of error.

But after a while… and this covers a whole page worth of kill mails… the credit goes to the my Ares.  However, I was unable to join a fleet or warp to anybody to set of the ECM burst, I was just sitting in system.  But as the server caught up, it no doubt had me on the list of parties that had applied some sort of damage or effect, checked if I was still there, then credited whatever ship I happened to be in at the time.  Again, getting kills when you’re in your pod is pretty common.  But I was podded, got a new ship, flew the 15 gates to get back, and then didn’t do anything, yet got the credit for ships I had tagged before I was blown up.

The magic Ares

And that still leaves 30 where the server wasn’t sure what to do with me, so just put a question mark for my ship.  Quirks of the game.  We should probably be happy it works as well as it does.  There were times when we were up close to the Keepstar when commands seemed to take a lot longer to execute than even 10% tidi would explain.

On the Keepstar trying to warp off

So it goes.  The invaders have now killed four of the six Keepstars in Fountain.  The one in KVN-36 is next on their list.  The armor timer comes out a couple hours after this post goes live.  The armor timer is the tough one, the one that will take more time, so it will likely be an even longer fight.  We shall see if the Imperium has any tricks left, or if the attackers do us the favor of making a mistake, when we go to defend it.

Addendum:

• Mailvaltar was there

Daybreak Sketches Out some EverQuest II Anniversary Celebrations and Other Items

Destined to remain ever in the shadow of World of Warcraft, EverQuest II has its fifteenth anniversary coming up in November, just a few weeks before WoW celebrates the same milestone.

Oddly monochromatic logo, but sure

Daybreak published a Producer’s letter for both EverQuest titles yesterday which give some details, and more hints, at what to expect from the coming anniversary.

The EverQuest update says that the senior title, which turned 20 earlier this year, will celebrate the EQII milestone with the launch of a new progression server.  Go figure.

This will be a new style of server, with players starting as level 85 heroic characters… nice to use a mechanic that is already in place… and content through the House of Thule expansion unlocked, with further expansions unlocking every 2-3 months.  The details are not set yet, so there will be further updates as the plans mature.

The EverQuest II update offers both more and less when it comes to anniversary celebration details.

A progression server for EQII is also planned, also featuring players starting off with level 85 heroic characters, with content unlocked through the Chaos Descending expansion.

There are also mentions of completely new server-wide event on live servers, including a dragon themed event that will reward players with something never before seen in the game.  As before, more details will be made available as the events draw closer.

The Producer’s letters for both games also reference the coming expansions for each game.  While no names or themes were mentioned, both will see a increase in level cap, boosting the top level in EverQuest to 115 and in EverQuest II to 120.  As is customary, the current expansions for both games are now available for a discounted price.

There was also a mention of in-game bonuses for the coming US Labor Day holiday, and a reminder that the next update for EverQuest II, which includes the annual summer panda event, will land on August 27th.

August 27th is also the official opening date for WoW Classic, so in a way history continues to repeat itself.

Finally, there is also a poll linked in both producer’s letter related to a possible EverQuest oriented player event, possibly for next year.

Addendum: The latest episode of The EverQuest Show has some extra screen shots from the next EverQuest expansion which they have posted to their site if you want to examine them for clues as to what to expect.

Also on this topic, Inventory Full has a post up about both producer’s letters.

And Massively OP has their own update on the letters.

Summer Movie League – A Good Week for Good Boys

Week eleven of our Fantasy Movie League went on past and it is clear that I should have been paying more attention.

Being the leader overall I sought to play something of a conservative lineup.  Back on Monday night that meant 3x Hobbs & Shaw and 5x Hollywood, because the early estimates put that as pretty safe.  The was even a hint that it might be the top earner again, confidence in the new titles being somewhat sketchy.

And then… well… I am blaming the coming of WoW Classic for distracting me because I didn’t really go back and look at forecasts or which way the wind was blowing for the weekend.  And given that everybody else seemed to have picked up on where the week was headed… well, it was a bad week for me.

Bhagpuss even gave me a hint, mentioning that Good Boys seemed to be looking very good on Wednesday of last week, but I didn’t take the clue, so when the league locked and became visible on Friday, I was clearly the odd man out.  Everybody else who picked had at least one screen of Good Boys.

When the Saturday estimates came it, I was in 7th out of seven who picked, a situation that only got worse come Sunday.  The final results did not make things better, with Good Boys piling up $21.4 million, well past all estimates, so the results for the week ended up looking like this:

1. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $128,365,213
2. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $125,762,910
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $125,633,270
4. Conical Effort – $107,071,667
5. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $89,391,600
6. Joanie’s Joint – $86,197,240
7. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $80,944,180
8. grannanj’s Cineplex – $44,487,408
9. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $30,509,473

Remember week 4, where I was the only one who went all-in on Yesterday?  Well, this was the opposite of that week.  A least I stayed ahead of the two people who did not pick but still had some viable screens carried forward.

The perfect pick for our league was 5x Good Boys, 1x Lion King, and 2x empty, worth a little over $134 million, which made it more valuable than the perfect pick for the standard rule set, which rang in a million behind.

But nobody got the perfect pick, though SynCaine was close.  The scores then go down based primarily on how many screens of Good Boys people went with, with filler separating the close picks.

All of that left the the overall scores looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $1,051,585,775
2. Too Orangey For Crows – $1,031,812,091
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $941,115,614
4. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $918,351,656
5. Conical Effort – $873,997,889
6. Joanie’s Joint – $871,510,090
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $848,776,622
8. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $826,649,988
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $731,422,446
10. Goat Water Picture Palace – $557,351,870

I stayed in the lead, but Bhagpuss is now less than $20 million behind me and, as we just saw, during a chaotic week jumps of that amount are totally possible.  He just closed the gap between us by $40 million after all, so I need to pay attention.

SynCaine got a solid jump as well.  He would need another big week to be a threat to first place, but it could happen.  Without any big moves, the nearest fight seems to be for fifth position.

The alternate scoring looks like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 80
2. Too Orangey For Crows – 77
3. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 64
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 62
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 59
6. grannanj’s Cineplex – 52
7. Conical Effort – 48
8. Joanie’s Joint – 48
9. Goat Water Picture Palace – 45
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 41

I did make the executive decision that I would award no points for a zero score, which means that Goat is no longer accruing alternate scoring points.

Bhagpuss closed the gap between us here as well and, frankly, could have made it a tie race if he had made it to first.  The buffering effect of the alternate scoring means that there is still a tight race for third place, with Cyanbane holding onto that spot for the moment.

And so it goes.

All of which brings us to week twelve, the next to last week, and a lineup of choices that looks like this:

1. Angel has Fallen – $253
2. Ready or Not – $175
3. Good Boys – $167
4. Overcomer – $148
5. Hobbs & Shaw – $114
6. Lion King – $114
7. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark – $81
8. Angry Birds 2 – $78
9. Dora and the Lost City of Gold – $71
10. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – $69
11. 47 Meters Down 2 – $59
12. The Art of Racing in the Rain – $38
13. Blinded by the Light – $33
14. The Peanut Butter Falcon – $26
15. Spider-man: Far From Home – $25

Gone from the list are Toy Story 4, The Kitchen, The Farewell, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette, while last week’s top priced picks are decidedly mid-pack, save for Good Boys, which got the usual pricing punishment that best performers tend to receive.

At the top of the list this week is Angel has Fallen, which is the sequel to London has Fallen and Olympus has Fallen, though the films have been so chaotic that, despite having seen both, I did not realize that London and Olympus were actually connected movies.

Shows what I know.

Olympus grossed $30 million its opening weekend, while London hit $20 million.  The LRF puts Angel has Fallen at around $18 million.  That seems a little optimistic for a third sequel, but it is also opening up against less direct competition than the previous two titles.

Next up is Ready or Not, a “black comedy” that sees a possibly Victorian era bride (just judging by the poster) who realizes her soon-to-be in-laws’ plan for a game of hide-and-seek has turned into a game to hunt and kill her.  She turns the tables and hilarity ensues.

Didn’t we have another Most Dangerous Game rip-off already planned for this summer? The Hunt I think?  It was pulled due to recent mass shootings, or because the president criticized the idea, or possibly because preview audiences didn’t like it.  But Victorians killing each other is fine.  Most people killing each others in movies is fine I guess.  I’m sure Angel has Fallen will be knocking off more than a few.

There is no LRF for Ready or Not, but given the Angel estimate and the FML pricing, $12-13 million seems like what somebody thinks it ought to do.  I guess.  There are B-list names in the cast, but nobody who is a draw in and of themselves, so I really don’t know.

Then there is the Overcomer, a Christian faith-based drama about a high school basketball coach finding himself in Christ.  Written, directed, and starring a former pastor who is on his sixth such film, the LRF is calling for $3-8 million depending on how things play out.  The films by this group have never done less than $6 million, while the FML pricing seems to indicate $10 million is expected, so maybe count on that end of the spectrum?

And, finally, there is The Peanut Butter Falcon, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn staged around a man with Down’s Syndrome who runs away to achieve his dream of becoming a professional wrestler.

Already in limited distribution in 47 theaters, it is expanding this week.  The theater count will influence this.  The reviews are excellent, so it is a wild card, though the name might be fighting against it as much as anything.  It’s position near Spider-man: Far From Home seems to predict at least a $1.5 million box office for it, and its low price means that it doesn’t need to go beyond $2 million to be a best performer contender.

So what to pick?

Safe seems to be an anchor on Angel, but there is a gap where Ready or Not could under-perform just enough, around $11 million, to grab worst performer, which would ironically make it an excellent choice.  Good Boys could pull that off as well, thanks to the rules of the league.  But that is a pretty thin line to walk.

(Also, I was wrong previously, or it got changed, but the FML Cineplex Builder takes the odd rules of our league into account so long as you select our league from the drop down.)

A mix between Angel and Peanut Butter could work, if you believe the latter will break out.  That is my Monday night lineup.  We’ll see if I stick with that.  All I know is that I need to pay more attention this week.

Anyway, get your picks in soon.  The league locks late tomorrow night.

The August Update Brings New Badgers and More to EVE Online

Given the “everybody on vacation” reputation that CCP has for the summer months, I always wonder if there will be an update in August.  It looks like there will be one this time around, even if it was delayed by a week.

The first thing on the list for the update is the launch of the Secrets of the Abyss event.

Coming to The Agency and an abyssal pocket near you…

When Abyssal Deadspace was introduced as part of the Into the Abyss expansion back in late May, they were all the rage.  CCP even gave us some stats as part of their presentation at EVE Down Under, including the fact that more than 11K ships were destroyed running them during the first week.

That was May and this is August.  Whether there has been a slackening of the pace of people running these site or they just want to get more people interested, today sees the launch of an event through The Agency interface encouraging people to run them.

The event is set to run from today through September 4th and, as things go with events run through The Agency, there will be a series of daily challenges encouraging players to run the sites to accrue points that add up to prize rewards.  In addition, the suspect timer that flags players who run level 4 and 5 sites, opening them up to being targets in high sec, has been turned off for the duration of the event so players won’t have to worry about that aspect of them.

The update also has some changes as to how events and rewards are displayed in The Agency as well as new Neocom icons for the filiment and mutaplasmid windows.  The New Player Experience will also now display its objectives via The Agency.

On the graphical front two groups of ships are getting updates.  The first are the Caldari industrials, the Crane, Bustard, Tayra, and sturdy old Badger, are getting a complete re-do.

I am not enthusiastic about this as I think the current models for them are just fine.  Granted, they haven’t changed at all in a decade, but they still pretty much define what a Caldari hauler looks like in my mind’s eye.

Badger back in 2008

The Crane especially has been my hauler of choice for ages, unchanged and looking good.

Crane from 2008

Now when I log in my hauler will have a whole new look.

The new Crane look

Right now that looks like the case for a pocket grooming kit, or maybe a Munnin that let itself go.  I am sure I will get used to it, but it is one of those passings that reminds me just how long I have been playing this game.  And this is the second badger change I’ve seen, since it used to look like this back in 2006.

Also getting a graphical redo are the Gallente Navitas and Thalia logistics frigates.

The new Navitas

Unlike the Caldari haulers, this change has no impact on me.  I do not think I have ever flown either ship.  Still, I am sure this will mess with somebody’s memories a bit.

Also on the list of updates is improved performance for laser effects which should improve client performance in big battle where lots of lasers are being fired.  Also in this area is a change that should help with the problem seen under heavy load in the X47 fight with people logging back in and finding that their skills had not loaded leading to ships being recorded as kill which later turned out should have… and did… survived.

Then there is the usual list of smaller fixes and changes that one expected with any update.

The August update has been deployed as of this post going live.  For more details there are the patch notes and the updates page for your review.

In addition to all of that, this is also apparently GM Week for CCP, a new event which includes the chance of finding and blowing up the GMs… or, it seems, GMs teleporting botters to the Yulai system in high sec and flagging them as suspects so they can be blown up.  There is a hint that there could be more of that today in Yulai starting at 19:00.

Foray into Nalvula

HICS JOIN THAT FLEET – HAVE TITANS TACKLED – WE ARE DREADBOMBING – GO GO GO

~~~ This was a broadcast from the_mittani to all at 2017-08-20 22:45:34.680221 EVE ~~~

A flurry of pings showed up Sunday afternoon, of which the one quoted above is merely a representation of what I was seeing.  It looked like something interesting was going on and I happened to be sitting down at my computer at almost exactly the correct moment.

It isn’t as though there haven’t been any ops to go on.  There have been plenty, and I have been out on some of them.  But none of them seemed to pass the threshold of interesting, or at least interesting enough to write about.  Do I need to write a post about another run into Tribute to reinforce another tower?  We did dash across New Eden via a pair of Thera wormholes in order to catch some capital ships down in Wicked Creek, but the fact that we got there too late takes some of the edge/interest out of the tale.  Without a fight the story becomes more about travel, indecipherable Scots accents, and the occasional person being dumb on coms.

Anyway, I digress.  Coms were not an issue for this fleet op.  Getting in and getting to the destination was laid out pretty simply.  I was a couple of minutes behind the curve, so when I got online and in coms Asher was telling people to undock and warp to a titan to be bridged.  At the far end of the bridge, targets were already being called.  I just had to get there.

I was a bit worried about that.  I wasn’t in Hakonen, I was in Jita.  That put me a jump clone and a couple of session changes behind the fleet.  EVE Online protects itself, in its way, but not letting players do some things with a delay.  After jump cloning the session timer keeps you from doing a number of things, like swapping ships or joining a fleet for 10 seconds or so.  It feels like forever when you are in a hurry, but I bit my lower lip and hummed as I watched the tiny white timer circle in the upper left hand corner finish its revolution so I could get in fleet.  They I got into a Typhoon and undocked.  I considered joining up in a Guardian again, but I was late, Asher was saying that more DPS was better, and some days just shooting things is all you want to do anyway.

As I was entering warp to get to the titan, Asher said on coms that people who were not in GSF, and who thus could not just wander through the POS shields to get to the titan, should warp to a planet, then warp to the target to avoid getting stuck.  So I hit the POS shield and bounced off as I watched others stream past be, unobstructed by the defense barrier.  It is at times like this that I wonder why I just don’t join KarmaFleet and enjoy the benefits of not being that guy stuck outside the bubble.

I was able to warp off to the planet indicated, then warped back to the titan at 10km, so as not to bump it.  I landed and pulsed my propulsion module once to speed up the time it took to close the gap between me and the titan, whose bridge was already up and sending people on their way.  I was almost there.

Need to be within 2,500m

And then the moment I was within range the bridge expired and disappeared.

Fortunately the plan was to just keep bridging people as they showed up, so in a few seconds the titan, a Leviathan, was again aglow with bridging goodness.  I right clicked on it to select the destination to jump through to, and couldn’t find it for a second.  I am so used to null sec designations for systems, being in all caps and sporting a hyphen, that an actual name name just blends into the list.  I looked, didn’t see it, right clicked again, just in case I had done so too early for the name to draw, didn’t see it again, right clicked a third time and really looked, found it, and selected the destination.

As the titan bridged me through my next thought was, “Nalvula? Isn’t that literally next door to Hakonen?”

Yes, Nalvula is connected to Hakonen via a gate.  But sometimes it is better to bridge people in even that short of a distance.  Doing so landed us directly in the middle of the fight and avoided any sort of gate camp that might have been setup along the direct and obvious route.

Nalvula was a busy place when I landed.

A pile of titans and other capitals on grid

Hostile titans were on grid as advertised, though I am not sure I would go so far as to declare them “tackled.”  That word implies we hold some sort of advantage and that we need to rush in and start shooting quickly lest the tackled titans escape.  There were more than a few about as the system filled with people.

Local under 1,000 when I arrived

Furthermore, they seemed to be multiplying.  Being within easy jump range of their super capital staging, PL/NC’s response to a titan being tackled was to log on more titans and pile on so they could use their big shiny toys to shoot things.

The glare of more ships jumping in

When I got into the system and on grid with the fight, I locked up the first target.  We were going after hostile force auxiliaries.  The Typhoons were putting their missiles on the one broadcast, being instructed to find and put their energy neutralizer on another with a name that starts with the same letter as you own name (“W” for Wilhelm in my case), and launching drones to try and pick off hostile fighters that were roving the battlefield.

Time dilation was about in full effect, not at 10% most of the time, but in the low teens as the battle went on.  That is a fine distinction, 12% isn’t much faster than 10%, but when it hit 10%, the minimum speed, and the system is still stressed, odd things start to happen.  So 12% can be immeasurably better than 10%, since 10% can have added problems.

Slowly I got targets locked, starting sending missiles and drones down range, and found a hostile Apostle whose pilot’s name started with a “V,” the closest letter I saw, and started motoring into range so I could put the energy neutralizer on him to drain his capacitor.  Meanwhile, the ball of capital ships was lit by explosions and doomsday effects.

Explosions in the midst of the ball

The first Apostle we targeted went down, but a secondary target had already been broadcast, so we were on to that.  I had managed to get within range of my neutralizer target only to realize he wasn’t a hostile but one of our cooperating, but not blue, allies, so I started sorting the list by name again to see who else I could go after.

The second target went down and we locked up and started in on a third.  My drones were wiped out by somebody’s smart bombs, so I launched the remaining ones in my drone bay and sent them after some fighters further afield, away from the thick of the smart bombs.  Ships were exploding almost constantly on the field, with doomsdays lancing out to strike the dreadnoughts that had jumped in with us.  As somebody noted on coms, they aren’t called “suicide dreads” without reason.

At some point along the way a command destroyer activated its area effect microjump drive nearby, booshing some of us 100km away from the fight.  Given the range the Typhoon missiles have, this didn’t stop any of us from blazing away with them.  However, it put a damper on any thoughts of getting my energy neutralizer on a target.  It also likely ensured I survived the battle, as I was now annoyingly far off for fighters to bother with.

As the third target went down for us, we stared on a fourth.  But then the FC at the moment… Asher was not on grid with us… had us change to target Grath Telkin, the volitile CEO of Sniggardly, one of the main corporations in Pandemic Legion.  He would be what one might call a “prestige target.”  Everybody likes to shoot CEOs, FCs, and anybody mildly space famous.

And Grath seemed to be going down well enough when there was a hiccup and my client started behaving badly, then quit on me.

Client chooses this moment to die on me…

You can see that Grath was into deep structure by that point.  He was going down for sure, but if I wasn’t online there was a good chance I wouldn’t be on the kill mail.  What good is a prestige kill mail if you don’t get on it?

I shut the window and clicked the button on the launcher to get Wilhelm back online with one of those firm clicks you use to let the computer you mean business.  Surprisingly the computer seemed to take notice of my emphasis for once and I was back in the game quickly.  Meanwhile, tidi did me a favor.

In a normal, non-tidi battle, if you disconnect the game warps you off to a “safe” spot and leaves you there.  When you log back in it then warps you back to where you were previously, which can be awkward if your fleet has moved on, and slow if you’re in tidi.  But with tidi in full effect, the game never got around to warping me off, so I was back on and in my spot.  I got back into fleet, targeted Grath, and had missiles down range in time to hit him to ensure I was on the kill mail.

Later I noticed that not only was I counted on the kill mail, but that I got in the final blow, which made it my kill mail, such that that matters.

The luck of the final blow

If you’re going to be on a prestige kill mail, then getting the final blow in is about all you can ask for I suppose.  However, I did not notice that I had gotten that kill mail, or another one, for a while.

We were still shooting targets as they were broadcast and the hostiles were still jumping more and more capitals into the system as our dreadnoughts were scourged from the field.  Afterwards Asher noted that for a dread bomb to work, you need enough dreads to kill the target, plut 3-4 more for every force auxiliary the enemy fields, and the enemy was pouring Apostles onto the field.  That was why we were shooting and neuting them, but it wasn’t enough.

There was a titan far from the enemy pack at one point, and we turned out attentions towards it, hoping that it might get tackled since it was too far off for help from the Apostles.  However he dropped off of targeting as he entered warp, signalling and end to that effort.  And then the command to “take fleet warp” came over comes.  With the enemy still dumping capitals on us, our own dreadnought force almost spend, and our Typhoons being chewed up by fighters, it was time to extract.  We had done about as much damage as we were going to do.  I let my Typhoon align towards the Hakonen gate, tried unsuccessfully to recall my drones, and took a few last screen shots as I warped away from the fight.

Local closing in on 1,300 as I warped off

It was about then that I noticed that I had gotten the kill mails, so I had to zoom in on my ship to find the kill marks, the other benefit you for getting in the final blow.  When you’re in main fleet with a couple hundred people, getting the final blow is a rarity.  These were the first two marks I received on a Typhoon.

Two more orange dots on a hull with many orange dots

On the long warp to the gate I thought the battle went pretty well… for me.  Not a lot of dithering or travel before hand, just shooting stuff for a while when we got there, another vista of capitals and super capitals to survey, a short trip home, and a couple of kill mails.  What more could I ask from a fleet op?

For the coalition however, the battle report was pretty grim.

Battle Report Header

There wasn’t an objective to win, save for “blow up ships,” which leaves us with the ISK war.  That did not go our way at all.  Even removing our two temporary allies from our loss column only drops the total by 10%.  Still, a victory for Jita I suppose as both sides resupply from the nearby trade hub.

And a victory for those wanting some screen shots.