The Temporary Nuisance

Sieges are a weekend sport. it is very rude to ask anyone to siege a POS on a Monday morning, let alone a large POS when no one is on very much.

Nevertheless, after devoting a whole morning cleaning my house top to bottom, dishes, laundry the whole shooting match, I sign on to comms and see a small conclave of people in channel and hear the news; a large tower has been jacked up in our wormhole while everyone was asleep, the fellow unemployed bums in corp inform me.

It's a corp of nubs and alts...but still...

It's a shittily fit POS with 8 Medium laser batteries and 8 smalls, and apparently the settings were borked, so it doesn't shoot you. There's 4 ECM's and 4 more guns sitting unanchored in the POS. But...still...

You don't survive sieges which are for real by assuming every derpy dick-filled shit corp is not a front for a serious effort. You take no chances.

We aren't sure, but we suspect we were being trolled to some degree by a new member of one of the corporations in our loose coalition of like-minded corporations. There were some very interesting coincidences, a few too many, such as him signing on and off within moments of the interlopers, him having to "close down his other TS client"and the like. I've been knocking back a few apps this week because I feel I'm attracting a bit of attention of the wrong sort.

Anyway, we sorted that out, and whilst the rest of the guys were faffing about on forums and Facebook deciding what to do, I just dropped my Typhoon on the offending POS, signed in my siege alt for the first time in six months, and began RFing guns. Within a few hours, it had coalesced to a ten man fleet and resulted in incapped guns and an RFed shtick.

Apparently all it takes is a bit of initiative. I've got a lot of respect for the guys I fly with, but balls-outness and get-shit-doneishness is often lacking. Decision paralysis could have resulted in an escalating situation, but soon enough it was gaining momentum like a dung beetle collecting shit on a cliff face.

With RF'ed guns, the tower was going to come down. They'd been offered ultimatums, apparently, and been rejected. They couldn't unanchor it as soon as the hull on a gun got breached. The next step was to get the shield to 49% so they couldn't jack up more guns. Then, of course, test the stront.

Third step in this situation is risk mitigation. I evacced my railgu (c.f. expensive Eagle simulant), a couple of unneeded T2 cruisers, and a stash of BP's and minerals looted from the offline POS last week. I trimmed down a few other ships, too, because if this was just the toehold of an eviction, odds are you'll be podded out by a determined enemy so there's no point having 30 ships because reships aint happening in a rapecage.

In the end, the 95% certainty we had that the situation was under control was proven correct. The risks were mitigated, the temporary nuisance dealt with, and the killmails harvested.

Prime maximus corporation can ask any time for an empty wormhole. Guess they need to check d-scan.