Operation Hufflepuff

oOsen had spotted a strange thing a couple of weeks ago - some corp moving a whole bunch of carriers around their newly onlined POS in a C3 with U210. Capitals + smallish corp + wormhole = siege.

oOsen jams an alt in there on his second account, to monitor them and provide us a warp in, which promptly runs out of sub which he cannot immediately afford to re-sub (IRL issues) and we pencil it in, and I take the reins of planning (see eg; Siege Logistics), including coining a name for the operation, which is Hufflepuff.

BUGRY used to do this stuff on a fortnightly or monthly basis. We had perhaps too much success, towards the end, in attracting fights. It also takes a toll, even monthly, burning through POS shields or even POCOs to troll fights. But you need to provide some incentive to get people out of their POS and shoot them.

The target corporation was Theories of Advent Chaos - they had 21 toons in their alliance, had a passably active killboard, mostly in nullsec, and appeared to have bought the hole when they moved out of nullsec, possibly because they disagreed with gay marriage (everyone's getting gay married out there). We had been told there were at least 2 Chimera, 1 Archon, Rorqual and a Moros in the hole. They had the POCOs, and hadn't bashed them, so a trade was more or less confirmed. They had a large Minmatar tower wwith full-retard hardeners which we used the IGB POS tool to calculate at 280M EHP.

Using my years of experience at being a horrible troll, I set to work doing everything in my power to cause Theories of Advent Chaos to get their capitals out of the POS. The recipe began with adding a Medium Gallente Dampstar on a Friday. We waited - they signed in, and out. We never saw them at the POS.

When the Dampstar failed to elicit a response, I got my alt in a cap stable Omen to begin poking their POCOs. This failed.

The escalation phase consisted of putting a small warp bubble 100km off every POCO in line with their POS; one in every combat site in the system, one at the sun. One between the bait POS and the enemy POS. One bubble everywhere, basically. it was only 50M, a week's wworth of fuel for the bait tower was going to cost more than that.

This also failed.

Third phase escalation was to actually reinforce the POCOs, revealing the link between the alt corp and BUGRY and SWIFT. This was Saturday, we waited till they were about to sign on, and got down to business. They signed on, signed off, and no response. We hadn't even seen them at the POS.

So we were faced with a dilemma. There was no way in hell we were going to crack the Dullstar in a human time frame. Like, seriously fuck that shit. They were clearly not going to fight. We could stick around for the POCOs, but it wasn't guaranteed they would drop caps to defend what was, essentially, a 5 minute job for a dread to flip back in our off time. We were, it seemed, snookered by no-fighty lazy cowards. The decision was made to avoid more bad gameplay, and pull out. This was achieved in about 2 hours, though we did leave 36 small bubbles in their system.

However, Dex Stratos and I had not seen a single one of them on d-scan at their POS, even as they signed in or out which was weird. We hedged our bets and I left my alt in there in a cloaky hauler, on the milllion to one chance they had become trapped out and the XLSMA at the Dullstar miraculously could be shot in a month when the POS ran out of juice.

The CEO of Theories of Advent Chaos emailed us and said if we let him back in, we could buy the hole - POCO infrastructure and capitalss - off him.

If we let him back in. The key phrase. So we waited, and a week later, sure enough the POS defuelled and the pinata got whacked. Yes, that's us on the front page of zkillboard all week.

Sadly, coitus interuptus happened before we could board the caps or get them inside our own POS. gorgon Empire had found their way in to the hole from Nullsec and caught the slow antelopes on the POS. They jacked up their own POS, took the Chimeras, then seem to have realised they were rather out of their depth. Nulltards in a C3 with U210 with known caps in a gunless large tower, hours left on their entrance, with vutures circling? Decisions were made to get insurance.

So, in the end, Hufflepuff saw 12.8 billion ISK killed for a measley 600M lost, and a bit of extra waiting around.