Fun and Fungibility

Sudden Buggery and, indeed, Prolapse. haven't been shoehorned into many structure grinds yet. This is because no one seems to think i'm serious about the corp "no siege" tithe of 100M ISK a month to stop me planning these oh so exciting ops.

Nevertheless, one unintended consequence of Lycosa Syndicate moving out of their C4 RG (named Solitude, apparently, because that's not confusing) was them leaving their POCOs behind. I would have found someone's one man shitty alt corp and transferred them in there but everyone does things differently, the upshot of this being that a few days ago we got pings from the POCOs being attacked by Jager Bombed. The only person allegedly who may or may not have an alt is on holidays in Canada, so there was no way in and we shrugged and wrote them off.

Then, a few days ago, we found our way through a frigate hole into a C5, another C4, another C4 and into a C3 and killed a Venture. On the way back I scuttled off from the second C4 into a K162 to Dangerous, and found "Solitude", though I didn't realise it until i had d-scanned a pair of ishtars bashing a POCO, and as the AF gang did a u-turn, I realised it was Lycosa's POCO. Total bullshit happenstance.

So, we warped in, murdered both Ishtars (after me burning 68km in my Astero to collect point on the second) and began diplomatic initiatives as I seeded some alts in the hole and prepared the Ultra omega Skwerl Top-Secret Trashcat Doctrine and set a time to begin the siege.

On the diplo front I deployed our, and I'm just being brutally honest here, least skilled negotiator to handle the demands. One billion ISK for 8 POCOs and the system. Leonoran Haddrak is renowned for not being a nuanced, subtle and patient guy when discussing the delicacies of demanding payment to transfer POCOs in a wormhole which, reasonably enough, the Jager Bombed guys could assume we had no real interest in, and presumed incorrectly, could not defend.

The problem for them was, I had Trashcats burnng a hole in my pocket for 5 months, the alliance needed to go through the discipline of fleeting up, forming up and exchanging titty pics in comms and, diplomatically, I wasn't about to let a 7 man corp dictate to a 130+ man alliance whether or not they should pay ISK.

Basically, if I were them, I'd have paid or paid in kind (like, that Vargur we saw logoffski out of POS). A megabrick is a bit over the odds for 8 POCOs, but these guys took about 5 hours per POCO to achieve an RF with their paltry couple of Ishtars. They'd already dunked 700M in Ishtars, so they were behind on the equation. Their POS was shittily defended, with 8 cruise missiles, 3 ECM's, 3 dissys, a web, a neut and some assorted crappy guns and low resists. They could have made the billion back by running the 11 combat anoms in their hole, saved a shitload of grief in having a totally incapped POS (now either abandonable, or dozens of hours of dangerous fun AFK repping 60M armour hp), let alone another 35+ hours of grinding our POCOs which, if seven toons went mining, they would make a billion ISK. Totally idiotic not to take a deal like that.

Their refusal gave me hope that this wasn't just plain stubborn pride and idiocy at work. Maybe they had friends, and we could fight said friends, after an investment of a few hours yiffing structures? There was 7 of them, and were once briefly part of Task Force Proteus but i can tell a third-class numbers-maker-upper from a full member and i knew they were hopelessly outmatched. I was hoping TFP would be batphoned, it would have been a nice fight, but after seeing these guys drop the ball on hole control, that was unlikely.

So, TL;DR version is we came in, Trashcats worked flawlessly, and we incapped the POS guns and Leon got himself blocked by the CEO so Iyokus Patrouette had to play Good Diplo in counterpoint to Leon's Bad Diplo, and we came to a deal with the enemy POS in 36% shield. 1040M ISK and we would transfer the damn POCOs. So we called a cease fire and off we went just as Querschlaeger came into the chain and it was Tengus, Proteuses and shit vs luxo-bash bombers and assorted F1AFK boats - a fight we just avoided because of 6 hours of extreme fun equals joy overload. Perfect timing.

This illustrates that, firstly, total bullshit luck. Second, don't misapprehend your  position and abilities. Take pride out and do the maths, and for fuck's sakes, include the opportunity cost of you being a prideful dunderhead versus just paying and getting back to peaceful ratting. I'd pay a billion just to avoid having a half dozen probing alts of Prolapse. lurking your Vargur.