Bemurder Triangle

There are some people, and some corporations, usually containing said people, who ought not to be in wormhole space. The entire cast of GT Network fits this bill.

We came across them via a Z647 off our static C2, and extracted a Retriever and a heron, plus pods. inspection of the Wormnav history for J163804 showed a consistent 1-2 ships per day being killed, which we ascribed correctly to these guys being complete idiots.  There was also, it would turn out, another reason on top of that. nevertheless, we rolled away and left a scan alt behind, who reported on a daily basis he was seeing Mackinaws mining, dying, and being replaced in the belts minutes later by Retrievers. Who would then also die.

J163804 is a J244 static C1, so it was a bit of a mission getting a good connection. All week it was 20++ jumps from our exits to the entry. Then, on Monday our exit was only 8 from the entry in kador lowsec, so off we went for what we intended to be a small pop-tent camping setup. We all brought a spare cloak, probe launcher (T2 core), probes, and a Mobile Depot. Because, fuck getting stuck.

So, we anchored our depots at a sorta-deep safespot, stripped off the warp-stab travel fits of our DPS boats, put on our cloaks, and got to camping. We had only an hour to wait, and we killed a Retriever. Then minutes later, a Hurricane.

Vengal Seyhan professes to hating on POS sieges, but when he found out the setup of their Caldari Large tower, namely 6 cruise batteries, 2 ECM's, 2 webs and 2 dissy's, and found out they weren't actually set to shoot, he dropped his Ishtar outside their POS andd began working on a disruptor. "What idiots." he chuckled. Then, 20 minutes later "We need more DPS to drop this dissy."

Somehow, this sentence mutated an operation camping for 1-2 days for Macks and Hulks, into a full-on siege inside of an hour. On a Monday, which is the worst possible time to start.

Suddenly, we were all reshipping for Oracles and sentry boats, and the POS owners signed in with the last disruptor deep in armour and 4 of the cruise batteries neutralised, so when they turned on the defences (finally) it couldn't even beat the passive recharge on my Talos.

We began a conversation, aiming to perhaps ransom. We knew they had hulks, two Ravens and at least (we reasoned) a Tengu to steal. 5% into the shield after an hour, it was looking like a long, long night, so the negotiations got going in earnest.

GT Network's CEO was signed out, so their representative at the time, Andrew anderson777, got down to business. We had him so demoralised with the fecklessness of his organisation he ejected all the ships from the corp SMA, which was a good array of haulers, Drakes, Ravens, a Hulk, 3 Retrievers, etc. All up, around 20 ships. We offered for him to become our Russian mining slave, paaying us tribute of one Raven per week, and we were haggling over whether this was in advance or arrears, when GT Network's CEO signed on.

It is never a good look, I think, when your CEO gets killed hauling strontium in to the wormhole mid-siege.

Eventually, after far too many hours, we reinforced the POS. it seems they had stront after all, but oonly enoough for 10 hours. This suited me fine, as it was 1:30 a.m. and the POS would come out at 11 a.m., and I don't have a job. So I went to bed comfortably, although with a bad premonition of rapefleets decloaking when we started on the tower.

As i said, there was a reason GT network was losing ships every day. Well, aside from being noobs and fools. It seems a collective of lowsec pirates had stumbled into the wormhole as far back as September (or earlier) and were camping the Russian miners for easy kills. It was a good wicket, and our siege was going to end it, so they set up to stop us. Their problem was they were impatient, lazy, and couldn't resist having a crack at us as we camped the hole. They claimed a Curse, and alerted us.

When I woke up, we got down to business, signing everyone's toons in (or, in my case, decloaking, depot up, and swap fit), hoofing stragglers to the entry.

I flushed out our pirate friends by warping the alt to the exit, and got convoed. They tried to set up a gank of an ROA ship using me as the bait, and a bomber to destroy the target Oracle when he doubletapped. I of course played along with a charade of cross-jumping and play fighting, and nearly ganked the bomber alt by "mistake".

the entry collapsed, and we raced the pirate guy to the exit; 8 jumps away, so we set up bubbles and cans and began jumping our fleet back and forth to effect a collapse. We left it crit, then waited to see what would show up from the inside and out. 20 cruisers rolled up in lowsec, and nothing inside, so we collapsed and re-rolled to 28 jumps away. We'd basically won; there was now no way opportunistic pirates would go 38 jumps just to see a hole slammed shut in their face. We ignored the smack and threats in Local, and got down to dealing with the tower, and destroying all the ships inside and podding out the owners.

The butcher's bill: Caldari large.

We then moved on to the Minmatar small. it turns out that the small had a full stront bay when this kicked off, and the Russians had stripped it all out to put in the Large. 40 hours for a small is 10 hours for a large. So the denousment was a strontless small and a few stragglers who signed in to a cloaky HICtor trap. Total carnage: 1.4 billion.

Then, I went to sleep. A hectic 24 hours in the Bemurder Triangle. And sorry Ishbaul and co. you'll have to find a new bunch of idiots to camp for 3-4 months.