The Battle For Rakapas

I woke up early on Friday morning, the first day of the weekend here, and couldn't get back to sleep. So rather than lay there staring at the ceiling I got up and logged onto Eve. As expected I found most of the American contingent were online as well as a surprising number of Euro's. Given it was sometime after 3am EU time I knew something had to be on.

Getting onto comms I found out that the Caldari Militia alliance, Happy Endings, were attacking a POS of our friends, Drunk 'n' Disorderly. They had deployed carriers to support their battleships attacking the POS in the Caldari stronghold of Rakapas. Happy Endings know DnD and DnD know Happy Endings. It was obviously a trap. They knew the cap fleet from DnD would squash those three carriers and Happy Endings didn't have the manpower to counter. So who did they have on the batphone? It had to be someone.

The FC asked for dread pilots pointing out we were going to be jumping into a certain trap!

[ 2012.12.28 02:53:29 ] FC Name Removed ofc > need dreads pls

[ 2012.12.28 02:55:06 ] UTalking2Me > for...
[ 2012.12.28 02:55:15 ] Lord Morgo > conga line
[ 2012.12.28 02:55:17 ] FC Name Removed ofc > caldari carriers in raka
[ 2012.12.28 02:55:24 ] FC Name Removed ofc > obvious bait
[ 2012.12.28 02:55:25 ] UTalking2Me > x rev
[ 2012.12.28 02:56:02 ] UTalking2Me > I like obvious bait

I thought what the hell, the dread is still insured and I'm OK with ISK currently if PL drop so many supers it blots out the sun. Three carrier kills is three carrier kills. So I mounted up and got ready.

We jumped in and primaried the carriers who soon were dying to a dozen dreadnoughts. Then an neutral Arazu lands on field. Actually he lands right in the middle of us. You'd almost have throught he had a warp in. Geeeeeee I wonder what he is here for? 

Sure enough he lights a cyno and a fleet of Black Legion T3's jump in. A big, BIG fleet of Black Legion T3's! Unfortunately there are very few dreadnought pilots who's name starts with A, B, or C. In fact there are none. And to make matters worse, their bloody FC decides to go alphabetically. Come on guys, this A-Z target calling is getting a bit old. Why not mix it up once in a while and try Z-A, it's the new A-Z! In fact Z-E, C-A, 0-9, D would be the best order! kthxs!

So as a "D" I'm first to be primaried and as I'm still seiged the best the friendly triage Archons can do is whisper reassuring words in my ear as I start to go down to the Happy Endings batteships and the Black Legion swarm of T3's. Next up is another Dreadnought pilot who is a "Drak....". Damn if he'd had an extra "A" to make him "Draak...." I'd have been OK! Not sure if we had any dreadnought pilots with names starting with "E", but if we did I bet they were worried. We'd killed the three Happy Endings carriers plus a number of their battleships but I'm going down in a blaze of glory.

I get my pod out as the friendly insurance guys dump 2.1bn ISK in my wallet. I pod back to Nisuwa and listen in on comms as the ECM burst from the Nyx breaks the locks on the other pointed dreads when they drop out of siege and are able to jump out. Unfortunately the other dreadnought that was primaried at the time is still pointed. He makes a valiant attempt to get back into the POS shields but, at 6m/sec due to the Loki webs, he doesn't make it even with the carrier reps he was receiving.

I lost a platinum insured Moros but killed two Archons, a Thanatos and a few BS including a faction BS. So whilst I lost a lot, I killed more than double in ISK terms with around six and a half billion ISK of kills coming from the three carriers and an Armageddon Navy Issue.

The reason Happy Endings was trying to destroy the POS was that the Gallente militia was trying to capture Rakapas. We'd decided to try and take Northern Black Rise over the holiday period and had already had captured Tama. Several Gal Mil corps had erected POS' in Rakapas as we cannot dock in the Caldari owned stations. By having corporate hangers there we could easily re-ship even though we were locked out of the stations.

The next few hours were mental as we started fighting over faction war plex's. There were two fleets, Samurai Pizza Cats and Drunk n Disorderly in one and a general militia fleet in frigates in the other. The general militia fleet was taking the novice plex's (frigates only) whilst we were reshipping at the PoS between Destroyers (small plex) and Cruisers (Medium plex). The fights raged for hours! The Eve-Kill battle report shows about seven and a half hours of fighting!

The best fight was in one particular medium plex. We had a number of T1 logistics supported by armour cruisers. The squids kept piling into the plex, we kept reshipping as we went down. Slowly the squids realised they could not break the logi fast enough with the T1 fest we were having so they came back with Guardians. They esclated, so we did and reshipped to aHAC's. The battle just kept raging. Good use of ECM mods and drones where causing us issues. I fitted a smart-bombing Rupture and came back to address the ECM drones. Eventually the Caldari gave up on that medium, leaving it looking something like this....

In the end the squids gave up entirely and the Gallente had free reign to plex Rakapas to a vulnerable state overnight and bash the bunker capturing the system. However, it appears Happy Endings didn't wait even that long. Sometime in the four hours between us smashing their three carriers/the epic fights in the plex' and Friday's down-time, they dropped out of Faction War. Templis Dragonaors also saw the way things were going and started to abandon the system before we took it (and prevented them from accessing the station they were based in). Surprisingly they pulled back to the non-faction war system of Dantumi. I assume they felt the Caldari system nextdoor would be our next target. And they were right.

So now the attention shifts to Okkamon. One of the last beacons of squidiness in northern Black Rise. In fact it is 96 systems held by the Gallente to 5 held by the Caldari.

All-in-all a great morning of PvP, and its rare you can say that when you lose a Moros in the same time-frame! One stand out lol moment for me was at the very end of the long-running battle in the medium plex. It was hard to see anything with the number of wrecks littering the area. 1sh0t1b33r asked in local if he could buy a Noctis. The one word/two letter answer from one of the Caldari Militia made me think about Grumpy Cat....

Good fight squids..... good fight..... http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=15676105