Operation Smurf Puncher

Let me tell you a tale.

Darth Bex found his way into a C1 one day. He was looking for the company of men. It was a lonely old night and no one was in there. There was a True Sansha Large control tower, and a force field. Ordinarily not what man-seeking people with butt ugly avatars look for on a lonely Wednesday night.

However, Darth Bex noted that this POS had 6 ship maintenance arrays and 6 corporate hangar arrays, and its guns were in fact hybrids. It had six Dread Guristas Stasis Webifier Batteries, which were pretty damn neat pieces of kit. it had six scrams. They had left a glaring EM and Thermal hole in the shields due to lack of hardeners, and with off-spec guns the DPS was going to be anaemic at best.  Not even a sole neut. It was owned by some Russians, who seemed active enough.

It was FOKX Mining, who we knew also have a presence higher up the food chain in C4's

Laziness on my behalf and fuck all else going on in w-space inclined me to let Bex run this one, and so Operation Smurf Puncher was launched. The maths were done, such as they were, consisting of an instruction for Pulse Oracles, Guardians and Sentry Drone  ships (VNI's, Ishtars, Prophecies). The batphone was called, and an ISBoxing Goon answered with 7 Prophecies. We managed to field a couple of Ishtars, and 4 Oracles and 2 Guardians for the reinforce.

The RF assault itself took about 4 or 5 hours, delayed funnily enough by some fuckhead losing his Golem.

Normally, you pick an off TZ to assault a POS, to avoid POS gunners shitting in your weeties. This wasn't an option, and we did want to get a fight (good or not) so we ponied up and got into it. The Russians signed on and they tried busting our Guardians, then the Oracles, and finally concentrated on popping drones on the sentry fleet. So we eneded up running 8 reps on a Garde II for about 40 minutes, cycling it from 5% armour to 90% armour the whole time, with 2% hull left. It was quite a bizarre fight.

It went swimmingly enough, with the reinforce camp relatively low-key due to the Russians (actually, Serbians it turns out, which are like Diet Russians) keeping more or less to AU TZ hours. The guys, midway through defending the rape cage itself, got jumped by some Ishtars and lost a couple of ships.

I also missed a lot of the "action" due to IRL commitments which centred around beer (the Perth player gathering via Eve Down Under), more beer (a party later that night) and I even managed to miss the denoument due to another party for my neighbour's 60th (champagne this time).

The butcher's bill.

In the end, the Serbs elected to self destruct, big surprise. They SD'ed a Moros, Archon, Sin, Domi, Armageddon, Orca, 2 Legions, 2 Hulks, a shitload of haulers, a Cruor.

The estimated losses, including the tower and what dropped (2.3B, plus the Nighthawk and 480M in faction webs), were 17.5B in hulls and POS crap. Not too bad, really.  They logged out their Rorqual.

So we jacked up a trap POS. Bex decided to not do it properly, and put a tractor, SMA, CHA and fluffed putting enough guns on it. So Brawls Deep farmed the SMA, CHA and tractor.

Smurfs successfully punched.