Salutary lessons in the core probe

I have been responsible for picking newbros up, showing them a thing or two, patting them on the arse in a totally non-homo way (not that homo is bad, but I just keep my hand flat and non-grabby) and setting them loose into the world of EVE with no moral compass and an appreciation of metagaming, piloting and evilness.

I won't name names, but this EVE news article about the fall of R3PO-Z contains elements of the Sudden Buggery disapora, and I've been following the tale from before it was even a tale, as a member of the Disapora has been there on the ground floor. Yarrdy Yarr Yarr started in lowsec, terrorising Suddenly Spaceships and the Russians, out-flying, out-playing and out-chutzpahing their gutless risk-averse foes by reinforcing their moon goo empire in lowsec, and skirmishing the cap and supercap bullshit these alliances have presented to defend their assets.

Pre-phoebe, this kind of shit was an everyday occurrence. Some clown RF's your cadmium moon, you are PL, etc, you drop 60 triage Archons, with 60 Titans in backup, you rep the POS, stront it up, job done. Everyone goes home from the op inside of 5 minutes and sits n their jabber client, playing LOTOR, LOL or DOTA and waiting for something to hotdrop halfway across the map.

Phoebe's jump punishment has meant that, yeah, Suddenly Spaceships and similar entities can respond to one moon being bowled over. Two, three in a night? Every second night? Your jump fatigue will begin to rack up, you will begin to have to take gates in capitals. You begin to see your cap ship fleet fray and dissipate as people's fatigue balloons. Also, you can't really deal with the tactics used - assigned fighters on a 10MN AB Hyena, taking POS guns out. Can't do shit about that with 60 Archons or a Nyx.

This is the concept Galaxy Rangers took to R3PO-Z, to fight a predominantly carebear alliance consisting of 10,000 Rattlesnake-spinning instadocking streaks of shit-stained toilet paper hanging off the arse of the former BOT empire. They put a POS in an undisclosed location, hauled in via a wormhole, and hauled in enough Ishtars, ceptors, Dictors and the like, and began a terror campaign, roaming the dronelands for fools and cockbags too slow to dock. Every day, one of my guys who is with them, would spend 30-60 minutes probing for a wormhole.

A week or so ago, they bagged a Nyx kill. This happened because the Russians they were terrorising deployed two of them, and pulled a logoffski outside of a POS shield...and got probed down. The major force of bombers which killed it came from Triumvirate - again, via a wormhole.

They RFed R3PO-K and deployed the TCu as a joke. Made quite sure to let everyone know they had no real interest in taking a station, knew it was reputedly Deadzoned, though diplo efforts were expended in sounding out PL about how serious they were about maintaining the Deadzone. I talked with our guy and said they'd be unlikely to show up - Curse is a fucking long way from the Dronelands.

So...they persisted, they fought off 40 guys, including carriers and a Nyx, using their "Deathstar" POS, and POS gunning. 3 guys versus the horde.

Commentary surrounding this revolves around SOLAR, what they will do, will they get their shit out, will they fight alongside Galaxy Rangers, or is it now too far and too hard? People are claiming SOLAR has no hope of assisting, or defending the system 7 regions and 6 constellations away. What bullshit - this whole thing only happened because of wormholes, it was supplied via wormholes and, if SOLAR has one guy with probes and a Siggy account, and talks to the right person, they can be from their regon into R3PO-K inside of 10 jumps (wormholes included). They'll have docking rights already, clones sorted, ships ready to go.

It has been interesting watching nullsec waking up to wormholes post-Phoebe. Some of the smarter, more daring, ex-wormholer types like BL's Rolled Out, or Triumvirate's V0LTA are right onto it. Others are either ostrich-necking it, are too lazy, haven't sorted the IT and intelligence infrastructure out, or are still scurred little fuckbats cowering in their POS shields whenever a new sig spawns in Local. The former are roaming frig holes with ceptor gangs, the latter are victims. The former are subvertting and dodging the jump penalties via wormhole logistics, the latter are moving out to hisec in droves because it's now "all too hard".

Adapt or die, really. The Core Probe I is your friend. Use it or lose it.