Rebuffed Again in X-7OMU

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.

Northward for Structure Defense

There was supposed to be a big USTZ op on Friday night, but it didn’t come off.

That was fine by me as I hadn’t been on Jabber for a couple of days so totally missed the build up.  But on the Fireside on Saturday The Mittani brought it up, apologized that it  didn’t happen, but assured us that an op would be coming up at 02:00 EVE time in order to defend timers on a couple of Fortizars up north that are part of the coalition power projection network.

The primary doctrine was to be the Sacrilege fleet, which was hyped a few times during the Fireside and in pings as the day went along, so it was probably not surprising that when 02:00 came around and the ping for the evenings fleets went out, that is the one that filled up almost immediately.

Asher was our FC and while the speed with which the fleet filled might not have been surprising, the fact that we were all in the right ships, with sufficient mainline DPS ships, boosters, and enough logi did seem to surprise him a bit.  It is a rare thing for everybody to show up on time with the right fit.  I guess if you ping at us enough about getting ready for a fleet some of us pay attention.

I opted to go with the logi wing for this op, refitting a Guardian I had in my hangar in order to meet the changes that the Surgical Strike update made necessary.  And naturally I went with the  Frontier Safeguarder SKIN from the Generosity Celebration event.  I collected the whole set for subcaps as well as a couple for force auxiliaries.

Bright and flashy

I like those SKINs even more than the Emergency Response set.  They are loud and colorful and the red and blue lights flash and it is a pretty obnoxious package, which is what I look for in a SKIN.

Meanwhile Asher was having to tell people there was no room in the fleet.  We were at 256 and he needed space to get scouts in with us.  People went off to the Munnin fleet, which I might have done as well, but I always fly with Asher when I can so I stuck with it.

We later found out that somebody in a Sacrilege joined the Munnin fleet but stayed on our coms and somehow made it through the whole evening without realizing they were messed up.  John Hartley, the Munnin FC said the Sac just carried on with them, sometimes on anchor, sometimes not, but never seemed to be fazed by their predicament.

The Munnins filled up too and a third fleet, this time Jackdaws, was formed up to handle the overflow, and then a bomber fleet for people who wanted to go that route.  This was a pretty big form up considering it was well outside of EUTZ and well into Saturday night… though I guess people aren’t really going out on Saturday night right now.

Asher was especially happy with the fleet composition as it only had a single Vigil frigate.  The Vigil is a newbie friendly option that lets people target paint to help the main line apply damage.  But you only need a few and there are times when vets pile in with them just to go along for the ride.  But when you have just one Vigil in the fleet, that pilot suddenly becomes special, their ship is the fleet morale ship, and ends up on the logi watchlist, and so it was with M4X HEADR00M.

Pilot of our morale Vigil

Once important issues like that were settled it was time to undock and start heading north.  Our destination was Pure Blind and we were off down the Eye of Terror network of Ansiblex jump gates.

To the Ansiblex

The route, at least to the Pure Blind boarder in Cloud Ring is generally a quick run… it is only 11 gates or so… until you start pushing about 700 pilots through it at the same time.  There were a lot of us jumping through together.

Gate activation for a fleet, each line representing a ship landing

And things got progressively worse as we moved along.  Delve is always active and so gets processing resources assigned to it that meant we only saw a little time dilation kicking in.  Through Fountain, a quieter region, it was more noticeable.  And then we hit Cloud Ring and we were clearly stressing the system.

Tidi hitting us hard

That is the game slowing down to 17% of normal speed for us.  We weren’t shooting anything, we were just using gates to travel.  But loading into a system is a heavy task and with three fleets going though at once.

But we pressed on, getting to the Keepstar on the boarder.

Sac fleet in warp

It was about then that information began to get passed along about the disposition of the enemy fleets.  Pandemic Horde had put together a Harpy fleet with about 100 pilots, while NCDot had wrestled together around 50 pilots for a Munnin fleet, which meant that the likelihood of there being a big fight was about nil.

At that point the fleets split up.

The Munnins went off and found a Naga fleet to wreck, then headed back home.  I never heard what the Jackdaws got up to, but word was that the bomber fleet managed to get itself wrecked shooting a structure.  And so it goes.

And the Sac fleet, we stood to and watched over the repair cycle of the Fortizars that had been reinforced.  We saw Horde in their Harpies come by a couple of times, but they didn’t want to close with us and were more than quick enough to stay out of our way.  We sat on a gate hoping to maybe catch them, but it wasn’t to be.

Sprawled about a gate in Pure Blind

At that point Asher sought to entertain us with story time in fleet.  He asked people to x-up in fleet chat if they met certain criteria for a miss-spent youth then called on people who did x-up to have them tell their story.

I thought this was going to be the time to go to the no-chatter channel, as the average person has trouble keeping stories of their life short and to the point.  My experience in life is that when somebody finally gets to the phrase, “to make a long story short…” it is far too late to hit any definition of the word “short.”

But Asher was a pretty good emcee for this, and kept people from getting too far into the weeds.  And we all learned about Jason Padgett, who became a mathematical savant after somebody beat him up.  Only one person ended up saying, “…to make a long story short…” at which point several people keyed up to say, “Too late!” as the tale had already rambled into the weeds.

The Forts repaired themselves and the hostiles didn’t look like they had much fight in them, so we flew off to reinforce a Pandemic Horde Astrahus, just to leave a calling card.  The Astrahus hadn’t even been fit yet, so we were able to knock it down through shield and armor.  Meanwhile, the “describe your crime” show went on.

After that we went over a couple of systems and shot a United Federation of Conifers Fortizar.  This had been fit, but nobody was home so we just put drones on it.  Then somebody from the UFC flew in to gun the Fort, so people who were paying attention pulled their drones.  Those who were asleep at the switch promptly lost their when the point defense system, the PDS, was switched on, wiping them all out.  So it was on to missiles to set the first timer.

Sacs firing away

Meanwhile the gunner started launching bombs at us, which woke logi up as we had to start repping people as they took damage.  I got  a good look at the logi wing around then, and was happy to see that my cap transfer buddies were both using the same SKIN I had chosen.

Cap buddies represent

Apparently we were shooting this because Brisc Rubal said on the Meta Show that he does not like the UFC, to the point that he has a coffee mug in support of his statement.  I guess they shoot at him or have some TISHU refugees or something.

Brisc, who will be running for CSM15 I hear

That kept us busy for a while, though at one point, just as we were done, M4X HEADR00M veered off and took a lot of damage from a bomb or the PDS or something got him.  It looked like the morale Vigil might go down.

Vigil in trouble!

However, he managed to survive by warping off.  At least I think he did.  I checked over on zKillboard and didn’t find a kill mail.

After that Asher warped us to one of the Guristas sites from The Hunt event, not knowing that you needed a key to get past it and had to be flying a destroyer or a frigate even if somebody had a key.

The Gate to nowhere

That lesson learned, we turned for home.  With just out fleet coming back we put less stain on CCP’s servers and did not invoke as much tidi as before.

Back home through Cloud Ring

Once you get through Cloud Ring it is just a few gates and you’re back home in Delve.

The last gate home

Overall the fleet lasted about three hours, which was kind of long.  We got two PAPs for it, which was good for those who need more.  And we even had the swarm DJ spinning for us, if you cared to tune him in. KarmaFleet has a regular Saturday Night Swarm op that usually includes him, but that had been cancelled in favor this.

It would have been better if we had gotten a fight, but it wasn’t too bad and the story time was amusing enough to keep us going.  And, of course, our structures were saved.  Op success.