Just a quick battle report from 0.0 for my high sec friends. Tonight I was in the best fight of my EVE life, and got on the killmail for a Titan.

I’m going to leave the politics entirely out of this report. You can find that other places. I expect ISD will have a news report tomorrow, and there will probably be a COAD thread soon if there isn’t one already.

I’m sitting in a station when word comes in that a neighboring alliance has come into our system with a fleet of about ten battleships and is sitting outside our station. Our FC scrambles a handful of people to respond from one system over, while he and I and a few others undock to engage the battleships and get them aggressed and bubbled.

I was in a Drake and our repping was largely armor. So, predictably, my Drake was first primaried, and popped quickly. I was not podded, and managed to redock.

Meanwhile, our fleet was wiping the floor with the invaders.

Then their falcon uncloaked about 80 kilometers away from the station. Just as I’m undocking in a Blackbird (it was handy), there arose a mighty and unexpected shout: “Holy shit, an Erebus!” A moment later: “And an Avatar!” Yup, there were two Titans on the field.

Well, if that didn’t make the shit hit the fan. You have no idea. Our FC began shouting all kinds of orders. Bubbles were ordered, communications systems were activated, allies were alerted, everybody within twenty jumps who might possibly be interested in cooperating with us for a few minutes to get on this killmail was summoned. All this was a bit above my pay grade; I jammed the Falcon (who still had a cyno up), motored over to it, and helped kill it. Then I went to get in a battleship.

By the time I got back, things were getting hot and heavy. There was a lot of screaming and shouting. By now there are three enemy carriers on the field in addition to the two Titans. But we’ve got them all surrounded by a huge swathe of bubbles, we’ve destroyed every shred of support, and we are popping every hostile cyno ship just as fast as it appears. I am not really a battleship pilot (my large gun skills are lacking) so I’m in a half-assed T1-fit artillery Typhoon set up to support some recent alliance sovereignty ops.

We are popping carriers. Slowly. It’s exciting. Enemy support shows up now and again, has to be dealt with. We are taking losses from Titan guns and smartbombs, the hostile carrier fighters are doing some damage, but bottom line, we are holding the field and cleaning up. Alliance mates and friendlies keep pouring in. We keep pouring on the fire.

When the last carrier pops, both Titan pilots logged out. Then it got real exciting, as the cry went up to bring all capitals to the field, put everything in siege mode, overload all guns, pour max damage on the Avatar, and try to kill in the fifteen minutes before its logoffski could save it.

Here is a picture of the Avatar under fire, courtesy of one of the corps in our Alliance:

Surprisingly little enemy support showed up during the 15 minutes. It was very close, but we killed the Titan with 54 seconds to spare. I burned out my guns near the end, but I wound up showing up on the killmail with 1% of the damage (55,205 points to be precise). I am sharing the glory with 144 other people.

It was by far my best EVE fleet fight ever. Not only was it my first Titan killmail, I got on three carrier killmails (also my first ever) and got the final flow on the Falcon that brought in the Titans. Plus, I got on quite a few other killmails for the night, and all I lost was the initial Drake. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in an EVE fleet.

P.S. The looting and salvage was excellent, although I did not personally get my salvager onto any of the capital wrecks. (Picture me making a sad panda face.)

And then, of course, there was the big story a few days ago about the Kestral that got popped in Jita with 74 Plex on board. (22 billion ISK, six and a half years of game time, $1,200 U.S. dollars. On autopilot. Piloted — if you can call it that — by the CEO of an alliance at war. Durr….)

Now there are ideas in EVERYBODY’S head.

So there’s a public jump clone facility in the corridor outside the Ironfleet hangars in our main base near Jita. It’s dusty and mostly unused, but yesterday it made a funny whiirr-thump, whiirr-thump noise as I was drinking my afternoon coffee and perusing my copy of The Citadel Times. About ten minutes later, Jim Bridger walked into my office like he hadn’t been gone for a year, sat down on my couch, put his goopy wrinkled bare clonefeet up on my desk, and spoke a line from an ancient Arth movie: “Cletus, I’m bored.”

It turned out he was feeling the weight of his security status and wanted to engage the services of Ironfleet Towing and Salvage to do a spot of loot pickup, just in case he should “accidentally” get a little bit twitchy with his artilleries somewhere in high security space. He’s got a Maelstrom with eight very large artillery cannons (somebody once said you could fire a Volkswaagon out of one, but I don’t know what that is, some kind of pre-space Arth personnel transporter I think) and Jim is a master with an artillery cannon. He’s of the opinion that he could one-volley the average hauler on autopilot, and all he needs to do is find one loaded with appropriately valuable cargoes. It’s a little bit shady, but hey, there’s a space recession going on, or didn’t you hear?

So I had the hangar crew dust off an old Bustard I like to call the “Grab ‘n Go” and spent much of the day following Jim around while he scanned the cargos of autopiloting Badger IIs. He didn’t find the perfect one, but he did dock up and switch into a cheap Thrasher named Popcorn (nothing but T1 guns and T1 gyros) when he found a shuttle sitting neglected in space in Jita. The pilot was sound asleep, slumped forward with his face mashed against the forward view port, drool and snot kinda oozing across the plexi; and a cargo scan revealed one implant aboard worth about 20 times the ship Jim was flying.

Jim’s trigger finger twitched when it shouldn’t have ought to have:

2010.08.11 00:34

Victim: terror generation
Corp: The Last Crusaders
Alliance: None
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Gallente Shuttle
System: Jita
Security: 0.9
Damage Taken: 557

Involved parties:

Name: Jim Bridger (laid the final blow)
Security: 4.0
Corp: Steel Fleet
Alliance: Important Internet Spaceship League
Faction: NONE
Ship: Thrasher
Weapon: 250mm Light Gallium I Cannon
Damage Done: 557

Destroyed items:

Hardwiring – Zainou ‘Gypsy’ KMB-50 (Cargo)

Sadly, the implant did not survive the ensuing kaboomski event.

Having a great time in Steel Fleet. Got in a little tussle last night in low sec while covering a corp cargo operation. Lost my first Claw. And we lost a Jaguar. But we killed a polycarb rigged Curse and a Cerberus and kept the bogies away from the cargo, so we’re calling it a win.

Was a little dismayed to learn that one of my new corpies has eighty interceptors in his hangar. I might be needing that shipment a little sooner than we thought.

Wish you were here –

Jim Bridger

You remember Greater Mars — that’s the POS that Ironfleet uses in w-space, courtesy of the lady I like to call The Empress (not her real name).

Well, Greater Mars has been kind of a bust ever since Apocrypha 1.1 came out. When they reduced the number of Gravimetric spawns to improve wormhole navigation, they seem to have tweaked some of the other spawn mechanics as well. Before that patch, we got a radar spawn about once a week, a couple of ladar spawns a week, and 1-2 Cosmic Anomalies a day. In the month (ish) since the expansion? Wormholes, a couple of ladar spawns, a couple of grav spawns. That’s it. Zero radar, zero mag, many fewer ladar, and astronomically fewer (but richer) grav spawns. Maybe two Cosmic Anomalies. Pretty much, nothing.

The upshot of all of this was that there wasn’t anything to do in there. Before 1.1, just clearing the guards for the grav sites took an hour or two a day, and made enough sleeper salvage to pay the POS fuel bill. Post 1.1, Dingo did some AFK gas mining, and that was it. I didn’t have ore mining gear in there, there were no sleepers to kill, and the POS was not paying for its upkeep.

So, I was thinking about having The Empress take it down. But, you know, we probably took a dozen hauler loads of stuff in there, and 15 or 20 ships of various kinds. Taking it down? A huge pain. It was easier to keep fueling the thing, and hope we’d just been getting a bad run of spawning luck. Perhaps the random number generator has just been hating us. It’s also the case that, by spending less time in there, it’s possible we missed some spawns that got found and run by visitors we never saw. So, I was waffling.

Then two days ago, the Empress logged in to find her POS in reinforced mode, with all her guns and facilities either incapacitated or offlined. WTF?

She had emails from Concord indicating that five pilots spent eight and a half hours burning everything down and putting the tower in reinforced mode. The good news: she’d stoked the (small Minmatar) tower with as much Strontium Clathrates as it would hold. We can only imagine (with pleasure) their frustrated groaning when they were presented with a reinforced timer with 41 hours on its clock.

At that point, we had a tricky decision to make. Can this tower be saved? For offensive modules, it only had three guns, a web, and a warp disruptor, all now incapacitated and in need of lengthy repair. With the tower in reinforced, the web and warp disruptor couldn’t be put back into service, and there isn’t enough power on a small tower to mount serious defensive armaments. Worse yet, the corporate hangar array was offline — which meant that none of the goods could be removed. There wasn’t anything too valuable…except Dingo’s gas, and quite a lot Sleeper salvage, and a fairly big pile of expensive T2 fittings. Too much to give away without a fight.

The ship maintenance array stays online in reinforced, apparently, and it contained many ships: a drake, some Caracals, Buzzard and Manticore, some Ospreys, some Thrashers and Rifters for Jim Bridger, half a dozen haulers, and at least a dozen miscellaneous frigates. These, at least, we could remove.

The Empress decided to evacuate what she could (the expensive ships) and then mount the best possible defense, with an eye toward removing the goods from the hangar array (if necessary, while under fire) after the tower came out of reinforced. She was hopeful that the aggressors wouldn’t be back — logistics in wormholes being what they are — but given their initial determination, not hopeful enough.

Complicating all of this was the fact that I, Marlenus, was in my Dodixie jump clone, because TEARS has a new war declaration against it that went active at the same time. So, I wasn’t free to vanish into Greater Mars to help with the defense, nor could I (well, I could have, but I didn’t want to) ask my TEARS peeps to help me mount a defense fleet.

So. The Empress. First thing she did was scan out the wormhole de jour. It was ugly — dropping into Minmatar space way the-Hek-and-gone out there, literally. (Coming from Jita it’s a dozen jumps past Hek.) Ah, well, that’s a logistics problem for another day. She ferried all the combat ships out to high sec and parked them.

Then, she jumped in an Osprey and started repping the guns. That took most of a day, but she got them all back in operation. She was starting on the web and the disruptor (although they can’t be turned back on due to no CPU from the reinforced tower) when the aggressors came back.

A word about the aggressors: They were a collection of pilots from the Rogue Windz Interprizes LLC [ROWIN], in the Blue Sun Trust alliance, led by their CEO, Icuwarrior. Pretty cool guys, mostly, although the Empress did get some drunken and belligerent mails from a Drake pilot, one Jlee, after Dingo Indere accidentally decloaked him at a planet. (Dingo was in his unarmed gas-mining Badger II and thought he was dead, but Jlee apparently thought it was a trap and warped away in alarm. Then Jlee started drunkmailing. It was pretty funny. Sample: “you know that pos well go down so you what to get all you can out so get what you what out and yes i know”.)

Anyway, when they came back and started shooting at The Empresses’ guns, she was apalled to see that the guns were not reliably shooting back. We’re still not sure why not — they’re supposed to shoot at anybody with a standing of 1.0 or lower. Once she set that number to 10, that problem went away. The guns started shooting. But that’s going to be hard on friends and allies who may stumble in from time to time.

And then the fun started. She got to “control” the guns — something she’d never done before. So, she began shooting at Icuwarrior (in his Navy Raven), one Vaderrr (in a Minnie battlecruiser) and their friend JleePlus in a Prophecy, who was apparently the go-fer who brought replacement ammo.

For guns, all she had was two small artillery batteries and one medium. That was enough to melt the Prophecy if it didn’t drop ammo and scoot — so that’s what it did.

The battlecruiser was a bit trickier. At first, six or eight salvos was enough to put the BC in deep armor and make it warp away for awhile. Eventually, though, Vaderrr figured out how to keep his transversal high enough to thwart the medium gun, and he could tank the smalls for quite awhile. He’d still warp away, but not often enough to prevent him from doing a lot of damage.

The Navy Raven was a tough nut. Although its tank couldn’t handle all three guns forever, it could handle them for a long long time. I’d say it had to warp out maybe three times, over twice that many hours — not counting other times it left briefly (for more torps?) when its tank was not in question.

Yes, I did say six hours. These three pilots warped in and out for six hours — and shot at the three guns when they were present — for six hours. Once the first gun went down, so did any hope of hurting them, but The Empress kept at it, catching Vaderrr several times when he got bored or lazy and forgot to orbit. But, eventually, all the POS guns were once again incapacitated.

The Empress, meanwhile, was learning to shoot POS guns. Icuwarrior started with some drones (and apparently resupplied them once) but those, The Empress figured out, can be instapopped by a lucky hit from small tower artillery. All it takes is ammo and patience and luck and time.

During this time, there were various exchanges and communiques. Early in the festivities, Jim Bridger flew out in a rifter and attempted to tackle the Navy Raven, thinking that if he could just hold it there while the guns chewed on it….

Jim is an enthusiastic young pilot, but his career has been mostly spent in high sec. He forgot about the humble smart-bomb. Popped and podded before he ever knew what hit him. Bummer.

On the bright side, that put him back near Jita. The Empress, meanwhile, looked at all the newly available power on her POS (what with all the CPU-using facilities being offline) and placed an order for six new guns and plenty of ammo. Which Jim, after buying a new clone, dutifully bought and ferried about thirty jumps to the station nearest the wormhole. (Jim is in TEARS. There’s a war on. This was hazardous, though ultimately uneventful, work.)

At some point during the six hours of gun-reshooting, Icuwarrior delivered a friendly (in tone) communique. He was complimentary about the defensive efforts, but stated “the second the tower comes out of reinforced there will be a heavy DPS Alliance fleet sitting here to finish the work. You can keep wasting time, ISK and effort trying to keep it alive but this tower is toast. Much better weps today BTW.”

We knew they’d had five pilots in system the day before. Three pilots spent six hours shooting three guns. Would they have bothered if they could get an Alliance fleet to do it the easy way? We were skeptical. Adding to the skepticism, at some point during the six hours, the wormhole expired and a new one spawned — this time, to a station deep in Khanid space, dozens of jumps from the wormhole ROWIN came in through. What alliance is going to send a battleship fleet dozens of jumps to burn down an empty tower in near-worthless w-space?

No, The Empress figured they were hoping to do the job themselves, or with a few additional pilots. (There were hints on scan that they had a few other people hanging around in the system, logging in and out, who would presumably hang around for another day. These included Jlee, the drunken Drake pilot, and possibly a couple others.) In conversation with Icuwarrior, he indicated that his organization had another wormhole system, of the same class as Greater Mars, that they considered “a gold mine” and defended with three large faction towers. Even adjusting for possible boasting, this offered a hint of the motive for the attack. But the promised heavy DPS fleet seemed unlikely, so she decided to defend against the visible threat, as best she might.

Eventually, Icuwarrior and Vaderrr logged off, their work done. Jlee and possibly other pilots were still in system (sometimes being seen warping in and cloaking) so The Empress knew she was under observation. (Just to drive home the point, Miss Plus sent Evemail: “I see you.”) But still, what could The Empress do? She’d been playing for about fourteen hours at that point, and she was tired and sleepy, but she had Jim Bridger’s boatload of new guns to play with. She ended up staying up about three hours past her usual bedtime, but she got six new guns anchored, and online and stocked with ammo. Then, she crashed.

After five hours of sleep, she woke up and got back in the Osprey. She had at that point two medium and four small guns — twice the armament that she started with. She was able to offline the ship maintenance array (after dumping a cloud of cheap frigates out of it) and get enough power to online the original medium gun (giving her three of them). No sooner had she gotten it online, then a new pilot (Asahi Halycon) uncloaked in a Dominix and started pounding torpedoes toward the guns.

The Empress took control of all three medium guns. In three salvos, the Dominix had to warp away.

And that was the pattern all the long day. The Empress ran around in her repping Osprey, repairing up the other four incapacitated modules; but it was slow work because, from time to time, Asahi and/or Vaderrr (now in a battleship also) would uncloak and attack. They now, however, always had to warp away before they could do any serious damage. Which The Empress took to be an endorsement of her new micro-deathstar configuration.

Finally, after a long and boring day, the reinforced clock started to tick its last. Every known member of ROWIN was logging in, except Icuwarrior the CEO. She assumed they were waiting for him.

The tower came out of reinforced. She was amazed to discover that you can’t online modules at that point — you have to wait until the shields regen from 25% to 50%, or until you can rep them up. She wasn’t in a position to do that. But, now, she could remove things from the Corporate Hangar Array.

Everything of value, it turns out, fit in Jim’s hauler, the one he brought the new guns in. So she loaded him up.

Icuwarrior logged in. There was a disturbance in the force. Three battleships plus at least one Drake, plus perhaps two or three other ships, type unknown. Could they do a rolling thunder attack, retreating in turn to self-repair? Spider tank? The Empress was concerned but confident, now that she had enough firepower to make battleships warp out. It might be ugly, but these boys would get a fight, even if they got their as-yet-unseen heavy DPS fleet.

The Empress bounced to the wormhole to check for a bubble. Clear. She gave Jim the order to run for it with the last of the loot. He warped to the bubble. She bounced back to the POS.

Jim arrived at the wormhole. At 6,000 meters and spinning, due to the odd wormhole approach/bounce physics.

Jump range is 5,000 meters. And guess what was waiting for Jim? Icuwarrior in his Navy Raven, and Miss Plus in another Drake. There were drones out.

Jim did all he could do in his butt-slow Minmatar industrial. He gave the command to approach the gate, he turned on his shield booster, and he began to spam the jump button. By now, he was taking fire and well into armor.

It’s possible there was praying. Jim says he was just cussing.

Then “Phase change is already in progress”. Yes! He was through, with nothing worse than a twenty-five-thousand ISK armor repair bill.

Icuwarrior said “nice work”, The Empress said “Thanks, that was the last load of sleeper loot” or words to that effect, and Icuwarrior said: “Relax and get some sleep.”

The Empress: “What? After all this, you’re not going to bring it?”

Icuwarrior: “We are outta here… our heavy DPS guys say it’s too far from their wormhole. We were hoping for a closer access point….”

And thus did two hard day’s defense work pay off. Too much nut for the local forces to crack, not enough value to justify bringing in the heavy hitters, if they ever existed. Wormhole design at its finest.

Further pleasantries were exchanged — the ROWIN guys gave Jim Bridger back his corpse out in high sec — and that was that. It was over, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Why did The Empress fight so hard for an unprofitable POS in low-quality w-space, one we were thinking of taking down anyway? Sheer cussedness, mostly. True, there was that one load of fairly expensive fitting gear and sleeper loot (including a bunch of that gas that Dingo harvested), but more important to her was (1) the opportunity to learn by experience a bunch of POS warfare mechanics, and (2) that peculiar EVE unwillingness to give the other guy the satisfaction of a victory. Unless they come back in force another day, The Empress has won. That was worth two long hard days of POS defense.

As of now, the tower is back above 50% and refilled with stront and fuel, the hangar arrays are offline, and the defensive modules are all online and working. We’ve got the world’s smallest deathstar — it’s cute, like a ninja hamster or something. But, half a billion ISK worth of ships and gear is now buried deep in Minmatar and Amarr space (to be recovered via tedious AFK hauling, some other day, after the war unless the Empress does it herself). My guess is that the Empress will leave the tower up for a couple weeks at least, but will probably tear it down eventually, to be replaced by a more robust medium tower placed deeper in w-space, next time.

Later, I was in a Buzzard, looking for targets for a larger gang. Found a wormhole that seemed to have transitory targets, so I scanned out the deeper wormhole they were traveling into. That was interesting.

In there, they had a Thanatos carrier that was piloted, had fighters out, and was sitting outside a well-defended POS. They also had at least five or six other active pilots. An Imicus nearly caught me when we both bounced to zero on the same planet (he was 3,500 meters away and didn’t decloak me) and by the time I decided to leave, they’d put an Onyx heavy interdictor on the exit wormhole. When I jumped through, they had a Hurricane waiting on the other side. None of this was sufficient to catch my Buzzard covert ops ship, but it was an impressive display of the “Unwelcome” mat.

There’s a certain Leroy Jenkins logic to the whole thing. He’s got 900k skill points, he flies a Badger II that costs what, 200k ISK? And he loads it up with modules that reduce his scannable signature down to the size of a frigate. A new clone costs him forty thousand ISK when he gets podded. And even at the current low prices, every gas cloud is worth millions of ISK, for close to zero effort.

He’s had great success, too; I think he’s cleared at least half a dozen Ladar sites without ever encountering hostile action.

Usually, though, he mines late at night, in the quiet hours before the server goes down. Today he tried it bright and early on a Friday morning, which is not quite so quiet. Thus, when I logged in, I had this in my corporate losses window:

2009.05.08 18:09:00

Victim: Dingo Indere
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Badger Mark II
System: J235321
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 2505

Involved parties:

Name: The Grum (laid the final blow)
Security: -1.3
Corp: Apocalypse Enterprises
Alliance: Chain of Chaos
Faction: NONE
Ship: Vagabond
Weapon: 220mm Vulcan AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 2505

Destroyed items:

Warded Gravimetric Backup Cluster I, Qty: 2
Gravimetric Positional ECCM Sensor System I, Qty: 3
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Fullerite-C50, Qty: 1500 (Cargo)
Core Scanner Probe I, Qty: 20 (Cargo)
‘Dactyl’ Type-E Asteroid Analyzer

Dropped items:

Warded Gravimetric Backup Cluster I
Deep Space Scanner Probe I, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Gravimetric Positional ECCM Sensor System I, Qty: 2
Expanded Probe Launcher I
Combat Scanner Probe I, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
Deep Space Scanner Probe I, Qty: 5

2009.05.08 18:10:00

Victim: Dingo Indere
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Capsule
System: J235321
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 320

Involved parties:

Name: The Grum (laid the final blow)
Security: -1.3
Corp: Apocalypse Enterprises
Alliance: Chain of Chaos
Faction: NONE
Ship: Vagabond
Weapon: Hobgoblin I
Damage Done: 320

He says it tickled a bit, getting podded; but was, overall, more fun than the week he spent as the designated target drone when The Empress Of Greater Mars was learning how to shoot her POS guns.

By now he’s probably right back out there in another Badger, harvesting 10 units of gas per minute and watching those foul Amarr slave-porn holoreels on his pod viewer.

During the day, today, I spent quite a lot of time probing down all the signatures in Greater Mars. In the process, I discovered that all the fresh grav sites had small Sleeper spawns waiting to be harvested; and I also determined that there were a number of new Cosmic Anomalies to stomp flat. So, I dug out the Drake and started with the easy stuff, stomping Sleeper frigates and the odd cruiser, while the Empress of Greater Mars cleaned up the loot and salvage in a tiny frigate of her own.

I think we’d killed five, maybe six, sets of Sleeper frigates and cruisers when it happened. I was clicking the directional scanner frequently; she was (supposedly) probing to watch for new ships in the system. Apparently, mistakes were made. Somebody got careless.

Surprise was total.

She saw it first — a Broadsword heavy interdictor skidding out of warp right on our heads. Bad news. She attempted to boogie.

My Drake, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere. There was a bubbly thing. I’m very vague on the technology used by heavy interdictors, but I’m pretty aware that once they grab you, you stay grabbed. On the third hand, by reputation they have fearsome tank but limited ganking power. My Drake, on the fourth hand, has a bit more gank than your average Drake; so I figured my only (weak) hope was to stay and slug it out. Maybe the pilot is underskilled, maybe by some miracle he’s flying alone, maybe I’ll get lucky. So I turned on my warp disruptor, launched my drones (Yay! I remembered my drone bay for once!) and attempted (without much optimism) to punch my way out of trouble.

The Empress, meanwhile, did not succeed in her first warp attempt, but she was making a klick a second in velocity; her second warp attempt worked, so she zoomed home to her fortress of solitude. With, she estimates, 6-8 million in Sleeper loot in her cargo hold. So, at least the ratting effort was not lost.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it wasn’t going very well for Our Hero. The big problem was, it wasn’t very likely that somebody would be roaming alone in w-space in a Broadsword. As soon as I got fully engaged with the Broadsword, an Ishtar heavy assault cruiser showed up and popped a full load of Guarde II sentry drones. My tank, which had been doing fine up until that point, was suddenly and painfully evaporating.

I decided to shift my full attentions to the Ishtar, and managed to chew a respectable hole through its armor; it all happened very fast, but I’d say I got into the bottom third. It was no good though; I was surrounded, pinned down, outnumbered, and outgunned:

2009.03.28 04:34:00

Victim: Marlenus
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Drake
System: J235321
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 37868

Involved parties:

Name: Haffrage (laid the final blow)
Security: 3.1
Corp: Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Ishtar
Weapon: Garde II
Damage Done: 17798

Name: Oneiric Missile / Unknown
Damage Done: 15059

Name: Troubadour
Security: -0.4
Corp: Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Broadsword
Weapon: Broadsword
Damage Done: 5011

Destroyed items:

Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 21 (Cargo)
Ballistic Control System II, Qty: 3
Damage Control II
Scourge Precision Heavy Missile, Qty: 500 (Cargo)
Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Sensor Booster II
Targeting Range (Cargo)
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Qty: 4
Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 20

Dropped items:

V-M15 Braced Multispectral Shield Matrix
Scourge Fury Heavy Missile, Qty: 500 (Cargo)
Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 313 (Cargo)
Viscoelastic EM Ward Salubrity I
Scan Resolution, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
J5 Prototype Warp Disruptor I
Targeting Range (Cargo)
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Qty: 3
Large C5-L Emergency Shield Overload I
Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 50
Large F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction

Worse yet, once my Drake popped, the heavy interdictor voodoo continued to work its magic, and my pod experienced some difficulties leaving the scene. There was a brief lull, which eventually (I’m slow) suggested to me that they might be offering to take a ransom; but by the time I figured out what comms channel they were using (local, as it happened, which is not something I tend to monitor in w-space) I just had time to type a “LOLno” before they blew me back to my clone vat in a hail of autocannon rounds.

2009.03.28 04:36:00

Victim: Marlenus
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Capsule
System: J235321
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 390

Involved parties:

Name: Troubadour (laid the final blow)
Security: -0.4
Corp: Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Broadsword
Weapon: 220mm Vulcan AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 253

Name: Haffrage
Security: 3.1
Corp: Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Ishtar
Weapon: Ishtar
Damage Done: 137

The ransom offer, in any case, was too high; they wanted 100 million, which is two or three times what the cheap metal in my head was worth. Nor would I have paid in any case; I resolved early in my EVE career never to pay a pirate, and I’ve not yet been tempted to abandon that principle.

And so I was podded, for the first time in more than nine months, and possibly (I say because I might have forgotten one or two that predate the corporate loss history screen) for only the third time in my EVE career. I seem to have the good luck (or bad) of being caught mostly by skilled professionals. Nine months ago, in Faction Warfare, it was Friedrick Psitalon of the Dead Parrot Shop [FOOM] who did the dirty deed; this time, it was Troubadour and Haffrage (with eight and a half years of combined EVE experience between them) of that notorious pirate crew with the coolest corporation name in the game, Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams.

If I’ve got to lose — and paranoid though I am, everybody has to lose sometime — I’m always delighted when it’s to somebody older, richer, and more famous (or infamous, that works too). The Sharks will do.

One fun final note. Remember the Empress of Greater Mars, cowering beneath the protection of her POS bubble with my loot? She tells me that a few short minutes later, Troubadour in the Broadsword dropped out of warp and just about collided with one of her POS guns. He wasted NO time in warping away again — but the guns fired once, so at least we can hope he got his teeth rattled and his paint job chipped, compliments of the Empress’s lovingly hand-polished Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulators.

I’d done fairly well, picked up some Tech II rig parts and some basic fittings, when local jumped by one, then two. I was enduring a little bit of client-side lag due to a poor internet connection, so the gatefire was delayed by a few heartbeats. I tried to warp as soon as I heard the gatefire, but somehow, I was too slow:

(notify) Warping to MKD-O8 IX
(notify) You are within a warp disruption zone. Get 20000.0 meters from Warp Disrupt Probe to warp.

Crap! What’s a Heretic? It must be an interdictor, to launch a bubble that fast, yes?

Panic time. Time, in fact, to signal the engine room for full military power, to turn on the shield booster, and, most importantly, to find something more-or-less in front of me to get aligned to.

There’s an asteroid belt. And that’s the sound of rockets hitting me, crap! Align, try to warp again.

(notify) Warping to MKD-O8 IX – Asteroid Belt 1
(notify) You are within a warp disruption zone. Get 20000.0 meters from Warp Disrupt Probe to warp.

Crap! More rockets, but they aren’t really my worry. Was that more gatefire? I’m not sure, but there’s another ship on my overview now. Warp, dammit!

Rumble rumble rumble whooooooshh! The sweetest sound I ever did hear.

I’m cloaked, I’m warping, I’m safe…

Er, did I say “safe”?

I’m in warp to an asteroid belt, the only thing in that direction. In a Prowler transport. Cloaked. Warping to … uh … uhm … am I warping to zero?

I’m about to die a miserable wretched asteroid-humping death, I can feel it.

Come out of warp, bounce right off some fat golden omber roids. Decloaked, of course. And, yup, there’s Barry Cuda in the Heretic. I’m trying to warp to a random planet, this time at a random distance. He’s RIGHT THERE, but when I mash my cloak button, I start to cloak. And then I’m in warp, and this time, I am safe, he’ll never find me now.

After my heart stopped pounding, I commented in local:

Marlenus > Well, that got my blood moving
BlackHelmetMan > Mine too
BlackHelmetMan > Are you filled with candy? :p
Marlenus > Sadly, no
Marlenus > Empty and looking for a score
BlackHelmetMan > oh :( We thought “yay faction loot”
Marlenus > LOL iwish
Marlenus > Have a look at my blog — ironfleet.com — for a view of the humble life of a salvager. ;-)
BlackHelmetMan > will do, its the least I can do after trying to kill you
Marlenus > I’m just glad you didn’t quite pull it off
Marlenus > Slippery, that’s my motto
BlackHelmetMan > if I didn’t get put outside 30km from you I would’ve had you :p
Marlenus > I cannot argue with your assessment
BlackHelmetMan > oh well, win some you lose som, GL

I’m assuming BlackHelmetMan was in the other ship that I never saw, presumably with the DPS for killing what his friend Barry catches.

Turns out, they were gentlemen of adventure (as tourists were called in a better age) just like me.

Was out today in the Bantam of Doom, looking for excitement.

It found me.

I saw that FTACI Retriever pilot, Kreatus Lucina (the one who was in on the drubbing FTACI gave Marlenus the other day). I thought, hey, an aggressive Retriever is just the sort of thing the Bantam of Doom was built for.

He wasn’t mining into a can, though, so I figured I’d have to be a little bit creative. So I started cleaning up his numerous belt rat wrecks, while ignoring two convo requests from him and also his complaints in local:

Kreatus Lucina > is there a reason your digging through my cans?
RizzLat > yes hes not very respectable
Rikus Cofee > who ?
RizzLat > jimmy bridger
RizzLat > lol
Kreatus Lucina > jim bridger you are about to be on my shit list
Kreatus Lucina > your on my shit list
RizzLat > he wont care man hes a tipper

Right about then I actually found a fairly decent high-meta loot item in one of his wrecks, which I linked into local:

Jim Bridger > ‘Hypnos’ Signal Distortion Amplifier I
Rikus Cofee > wooh
Jim Bridger > Worth more than my ship…
RizzLat > lol

Sadly, this did not inspire Kreatus to start shooting at me. Instead, Lach Danan, the bait Osprey pilot who got Marlenus, showed up in a Merlin. By reflex, I warped away; these are not the combats I was looking for.

In warp, however, I questioned the reflex. Bantam versus well-fitted Merlin is an instant face-melt for the Bantam, true. But, like, dude, it’s just a Bantam, who cares? And the other guy could always screw up, let’s give him the opportunity.

So I warped back.

Merlin already gone.

So I looted another FTACI can.

Merlin returns.

Predictable and very rapid face melt ensued, no FTACI screwups on display:

2009.02.01 18:04:00

Victim: Jim Bridger
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Bantam
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 669

Involved parties:

Name: Lach Danan (laid the final blow)
Security: 3.3
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Merlin
Weapon: Modal Light Neutron Particle Accelerator I
Damage Done: 669

Destroyed items:

Iron Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Hobgoblin I (Drone Bay)
Asymmetric Energy Succor I (Cargo)
Small Nosferatu I (Cargo)
Lead Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
250mm Light Artillery Cannon II
Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 36
‘Hypnos’ Signal Distortion Amplifier I (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 270 (Cargo)
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler I
Carbonized Lead S, Qty: 4835 (Cargo)
250mm Light Artillery Cannon II
Cold-Gas I Arcjet Thrusters
Gyrostabilizer II

He took me out with four or five very fast volleys with blasters and rockets, during which I had time for just two arty volleys of my own. They were solid barrages, but the Merlin is a much tougher little nut to crack than the Bantam.

Of course there was the usual post-combat game of rock-scissors-paper. I came back in a Thrasher destroyer, he came back in a Manticore stealth bomber. That’s an interesting game of pass-the-grenade when the bomber is in range of the Thrasher’s guns, but he wasn’t. I couldn’t lock him, so I was gone before the second volley of cruise missiles arrived. His repping buddy in the Scorpion was on scene anyway, so it was clear there wasn’t point in coming back. Match to FTACI.

There’s no way to sugar-coat this, last night I lost a Crane to a bait-fit Osprey “mining” cruiser:

2009.01.30 07:24:00

Victim: Marlenus
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Crane
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 23831

Involved parties:

Name: Lach Danan (laid the final blow)
Security: 3.3
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Osprey
Weapon: Bloodclaw Light Missile
Damage Done: 21814

Name: Kreatus Lucina
Security: 0.2
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Retriever
Weapon: Valkyrie I
Damage Done: 2017

Destroyed items:

Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 230 (Cargo)
Shield Boost Amplifier I
Thunderbolt Precision Heavy Missile, Qty: 186 (Cargo)
Medium Shield Extender I
Caldari Navy Thunderbolt Heavy Missile, Qty: 633 (Cargo)
Caldari Navy Havoc Heavy Missile, Qty: 499 (Cargo)
Warp Disruptor I
Ballistic Control System II
Heavy Missile Launcher II
Medium C5-L Emergency Shield Overload I
Guristas Havoc Heavy Missile, Qty: 299 (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Havoc Precision Heavy Missile, Qty: 258 (Cargo)
Havoc Fury Heavy Missile, Qty: 926 (Cargo)
Ballistic Control System II
Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile, Qty: 1000 (Cargo)

All due props to pilot Lach Danan of Firestorm Tactical Industries [FTACI]. I’m even more impressed by the FTACI Retriever pilot, Kreatus Lucina, who engaged with his three Tech 1 drones and stuck in there until he was deep in armor. His contribution, though slight in DPS, made the difference in the end.

It happened like this. I’d cleaned up some drifting ore belonging to another pilot, and while that was going down, Lach Danan made a plaintive request for someone to kill a belt rat, alleging that he’d forgotten his drones. Shall we just say that I found the claim suspicious; in my mind, it marked him as a pilot looking for a fight.

Some twenty minutes later, I returned to the belt with Lach Danan’s jet can on my mind.

Crucial mistake #1: I neglected to count how many mining lasers he was running. EVE Lesson: Overconfidence kills. I still don’t know if he was running one (for show) or a full set; but given how events transpired, I’m guessing he fit two at most.

Crucial mistake #2: I didn’t pay any mind to his corpmate Kreatus in the Retriever, who had been hauling home when full, making him irrelevant to my predatory-salvage calculations. EVE Lesson: Every hull in the game is dangerous.

After grabbing Lach Danan’s ore contribution, which was suspiciously modest…

Crucial mistake #3: I took bait. EVE Lesson (again): Overconfidence kills. A mining cruiser who’s been there for half an hour with no observed hauler (even if I didn’t have continuous eyes all that time) should have more than 1500 cubic meters of ore in his jetcan. I knew that, didn’t care. Should have.

… he was quick to lock me, warp scramble me, and web me. It’s kill or be killed, now.

And then he launched Tech 2 combat drones, which commenced to gnaw at my liver.

By the time I had started a lock on Lach Danan’s cruiser, it was already obvious he had more DPS than I could permanently tank, so I loaded the precision missiles and started locking one of his drones. Killing Tech II combat drones with heavy missiles is kinda like hunting rabbits with bottle rockets — you can get it done, but it’s not fast and it’s not efficient and it’s not pretty.

And I’m not going to have the time, especially because that Retriever pilot has joined the fight with his three drones. I can drive him away with just a few missiles, but do I have the time, or do I have to kill at least one of the deadly drones first?

I chose — and I’m still not clear on whether this was right, though I think it was after looking at the damage logs — to kill the drone I was shooting at first. That took a long time, and I was having to cycle my shield booster by then due to limited cap; the armor was dented.

Crucial Mistake #4: Failure to adapt. If you look at that killmail, you’ll see that my four mids were fitted with shield booster, shield boost amplifier, shield extender, and a warp disruptor. I’ve never fitted a cap boosting solution, as most combat hauler pilots do. If I got in trouble, I always just warped away, and I didn’t get into trouble often, so I preferred to save the cargo space for ore. However, now that the blockade runners don’t get two points of innate warp stabilization, the world has changed. Even a small cap injector would have let me win this fight.

So, after killing the first drone, I drove the Retriever pilot away with just a few shots that took him into deep armor. Retrievers are tissue paper.

That took away a bit of damage, and I went back to shooting at the next drone. By this point my armor has gaping holes in it, and I made my last mistake of the fight: I fat-fingered the missile reloading process, which ended up costing me almost twenty seconds, during which I got into structure.

Finally I killed drone #2. Now, at last, the damage is close to sustainable; if I’d still been in armor, I’d have had time to lock and kill one more drone, and I could have won (maybe; I never tested the Osprey’s tank, and he was certainly fitted with combat in mind.) But the twenty seconds I lost was the nail in my coffin, and I went pop.

Interestingly, the Retriever pilot had time to come back during this process, but I’m uncertain whether he had time to dock and repair and restock drones. However, he came back some 40-50 klicks away and never launched any more drones, so he was out of the fight.

But he was there. And I was in my pod, feeling chagrined.

A nice warm cup of REVENGE would sure taste nice about now. Let’s go see what’s in the hangar.

That Retriever on my mind, I jumped in one of my trusty Manticore stealth bombers. I haven’t really flown these since the missile balancing — some say nerf — but the word is, they aren’t so much fun anymore. Let’s test that theory; if I can’t one-volley a wounded Retriever, I’m going to send this thing back to the factory with a stiff note. But, I’ll bet I can.

Yes:

2009.01.30 07:29:00

Victim: Kreatus Lucina
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Retriever
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 2983

Involved parties:

Name: Marlenus (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.2
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Ship: Manticore
Weapon: Caldari Navy Wrath Cruise Missile
Damage Done: 2983

Destroyed items:

Massive Scordite, Qty: 12605 (Cargo)
Small Shield Extender I
Valkyrie I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)
Strip Miner I, Qty: 2
Hornet I (Drone Bay)

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 2

Ah, now I feel much better.

How about friend Lach Danan in the crunchy bait Osprey, would he like a taste of my Caldari Navy Wrath Cruise Missiles?

He would! He’s targeting and trying to close to drone range. Cruise missiles away!

I believe it was the second volley that took him into armor, possibly the third; in any case, he changed his mind and left.

At this point, I still had a Tech II wreck on the field requiring salvage, an Ironfleet jet can containing some ore, and a Retriever wreck that needed looting and salvaging. So I went home for the ship I like to call the Iron Crowbar, a Ferox battlecruiser fitted for cleanup work on a hot battlefield.

By the time I salvaged my Crane wreck and emptied my own jet can, Lach was back, in a Manticore of his own. But, he was inside my heavy missile range, and as we traded volleys, he was getting by far the worst of the exchange. So, he left again.

I looted the pair of Cargo Expander IIs from the Retriever wreck, and was starting to salvage it, when Kreatus Lucina returned in his own Ferox, at range. We began trading heavy missiles, but I had superior missile range, and it took him awhile (not long, was he using an MWD on that beast?) to close into his shorter missile range.

Accordingly, I was through his shields and well into his armor when his first, fairly puny, volley of missiles hit my shields. If he had kept that up, he was going to die; but he was still closing and I assume he also had some guns on there. Still, in a one-on-one fight — or even if Lach came back in the Manticore again — it would have been fun to find out.

And THAT’s when a neutral friend of theirs showed up in a Scorpion battleship and went flashy red to me, presumably because he was repping the enemy Ferox. I decided I’d had enough revenge, and docked up.

All in all, a fun run through the asteroid belts, though I’d like it better if I hadn’t lost my beloved Quantum Quagmirer. The boys from FTACI (and their alt or friend in the FTRAD Scorpion) fought well, eschewed all smacktalk, and clearly carried the day, even if I did get my licks in.