I logged onto Eve last night after getting to the flagship in FTL and getting WTFPWN by it. Well technically the flagship ran away when heavily damaged, but my ship was so badly damaged with lifesupport down and the crew trapped by fires, they all died..... slowly..... and horribly. Apparently I need ion weapons to make the flagship easier acording to the #tweetfleet. Will try that tonight!
Anyway, back on Eve Online, and after logging in I saw I had a corp mail saying -FU- were planning an op. For once it was at a reasonable time for me! 17:00 Eve Time is 21:00 for me, so a couple of hours before I need to turn in. Plenty of time. Wife wasn't home from work so I undocked a throw-away Thrasher and went for a roam. Unfortunatly I got snagged by an Atron who is kite fit. My AC's cannot hit him out at 18km and even overheated my MWD isn't fast enough to either catch him or get out of range. I tried some creative piloting but to no avail. He had got me good and proper! I pod back home, jump in a T1 frigate and go back out but I am unable to find anything. Better luck later I hope!
After dinner with the Eve Widow (aka the wife) and a Micheal Cain movie (Demi Moore is still smoking hot) I have 5 minutes until form-up. I returned to the computer, turned on comms only to find the fleet was already underway! WTF? I'm here 5 minutes BEFORE form-up? A quick listen and its clear that they are POS bashing in system, so thats OK!
I jump into a gank tier 3 battlecruiser and join in, blasting POS mods with my big blasters! Then I notice the tower is coming out of reinforced mode in 50 minutes which must be the main op, this current one is just taking out the last of the online defenses. Then I see it is a Ev0ke POS. Interesting!
We take down the last of the limited onlined defenses and head back to station. Intel is coming in, they are coming to defend their POS. And by the sound of it..... there are hundreds of the buggers! We're waiting to get ship types before deciding what to reship into. I'm feeling fairly confident on ship selection, as now back in Nisuwa I have a very well stocked hanger. I can pretty much bring anything to the party from faction battleships to HICs to Recons. I'm not saying I can fly them well, just saying I can bring them!
FC calls for T3 armour cruisers which gets me twitching. It is only a couple of weeks ago that I lost my last armour Loki and in this blog post here I wrote how I was not going to fly Loki's in armour fleets anymore. Thankfully I've been training hard since that last Loki loss and my Gallente Sub-system skills are now 5/5/4/4/4. Best of all, I have a certain curvy green spaceship in the hanger - my new shiny Proteus.
Our fleet is ready, but we're outnumbered by the enemy. Our fleet will be facing off against a horde of Zealot heavy attack ships with a reported 22 Guardian logistics ships backing them up. This should be "fun". We're hoping the 1200 number that was quoted as what they could bring was an error. If Evoke do batphone and bring over 10 times our number, it'll be a short fight!
We undock. Time Dilation instantly kicks in. We warp to the PoS, they warp their fleet to the PoS, and it kicks off, big time! At the start of the fight TiDi is running well and we're punching into them as they punch into us. This is the first time I've had TiDi at a very noticable level, rather strange the first time you experience it!
All is going well, then, suddenly, Archons!
Evoke dropped about 20 Amarrian carriers onto us and they deploy sentry drones. At that point the TiDi system decided it was time for a pint and buggered off down the pub or something.
Whilst the TiDi symbol was still there, we were reduced to the bad old days with the lag monster. Mods wouldn't stop cycling, the guy I'm orbiting apparently died 2 minutes ago but is still 80% shield on my watchlist and the primary and secondary on my target list apparently are no longer around even though my Client insists they are 6000m off my starboard bow, are into armour, and are well worth shooting if my mods ever stop cycling red over and over and over and over.
The combined weight of the Archon's sentry drones and the Zealots mean we're buggered with our logistic ships unable to stop the reppers quickly or switch targets. Whilst their Zealot and Guardian pilots are probably having the same issues as us, those Sentry Drones from the Archons are probably not as effected by the lag. Whatever the case, we're starting to get hammered and the order to bail is called.
I select a safe and hit 'Warp to 0'. Nothing. Try again, nothing. Finally after what felt like 10 minutes my ship starts to move. Then I get a message "External factors are preventing your warp drive responding to this command".
Why does it have to say all that when a "You're pointed numbnuts!" will suffice?
Now the last thing I want is to lose another expensive T3, so I quickly look who is pointing me. It's a single Flabber 6k off. OK crew, new orders..... FIRE EVERYTHING!
I lock up the Flabber..... eventually..... and open up with everything..... eventually. Blasters, TP, point, drones and harsh language. In response he moves out to 16km which is well outside my blaster range, but also well outside his scram range.
"Warp drive active!"
YES!
My warp to the safe takes an age with TiDi still running at a high level (I think whilst the proper TiDi system has gone down the pub, he left a janitor or someone in charge). By the time I land everyone at the POS has either died or got out. The Archons pull their drones, people dock up and time starts to return to normal. My warp to the station is much faster and I dock striaght away. The fight appears to be fairly even, with Evoke just winning on ISK with us at 46.66% efficiency. We have more kills, but we've been trading T3's for HAC's so the actually number of kills is secondary to ISK.
However, it could have gone a lot worse with 149 of them against 88 of us (on the killboard anyway, both sides had about two dozen Guardians each!).
Personally I managed to get on two Zealots, three Flabbers and a Guardian kill. Might have been more if I had been able to activate my guns rather than watch the red ring go around and around and around and around and around and around. Next time may be I should assign my drones to assist the primary target caller?
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