Operation Fondled Cumquat

Associates of mine had identified a POS in J104704, a vanilla Class 5 with E175 static to C4, wherein a dozen ships belonging to Wingspan Delivery Services were floating. The corporation was Church of Emacs, and after a bit of digging, I recognised a name of a known Wingspan associate, newbus.

Do I want a way in? Sure. Alts are deployed, and as the Goons would say, I start the process of hurfing (viz. agitating to gee up numbers for a boring structure grind).

Like any gentleman, I prefer to grind structures on a Friday night AU TZ so that the structure comes out roughly US prime time Saturday night (AU Sunday morning). This is a gentlemanly time for everyone involved and ensures that if there's to be a fight, it will be as big, brassy and clanging as it can be. Usually it's not.

This time though we didn't even get the stick to RF before the fight turned up. I had managed to get my Naglfar in from Thakala where it was essentially stranded since the jump changes. Luckily (in a TF Effect manifestation) a wormhole in Ussad presented itself and I cynoed it in and brought it in to help neutralise the guns. Being a C4 static wormhole it could be a few days till it got out, so I left the Ussad connection open and crit, and kept a C5 connection open but crit.

Either way, when you drop a dread on a POS and go into siege, you are balls deep and it either lives or dies. That might seem a bit obvious, as it's really a binary choice excepting surrendering the dread to your attackers or something, but you know what i mean. I figured #YOLO. The fucking thing got bought when i lived in a C5 with Rules of Acquisition and the skills got trained when I quit playing for 6 months from depression (Cap Projectiles 5, Dread 5) and it has never been used since. This was, really, a good way of getting it out of Thakala and off to market.

Of course, we got dropped on by Spectrefleet who were batphoned by the locals and brought in via Ussad.

"Well, looks like today's the day I lose my dread!" I declared when the wormhole blew up and ~20 enemies jumped in, clobbering our cloaky Proteus scout (RIP a ship which has claimed 23B in victims) and a VNI who'd been transiting in. They then warped in to POS piecemeal.

We had 2 x Rattlesnakes, a sniping Barghest orbiting at 190km, Drake, VNI, Ishtar, Rapier, 2 Basilisks and 2 bombers. Plus the Nag.

Spectrefleet and the defenders had: Machariel, Cerberus, Ishtar, Arazu, Curse, Rapier, Heretic, Sabre, Coercer, 10 bombers and 3 Asteros, Archon, Moros and Revelation. The caps were in the POS and had to warp out to a ping. Dictor bubbles didn't help that, really.

So the obvious thing to do, besides shit your pants when this all blows up on grid?
#1 kill the interdictors
#2 kill the neuts
#3 kill the tackle
#4 kill the DPS
#5 ?
#6 moonwalk your Nag out of there

What really happened? I call for the heretic to be blapped, which duly happens. The Sabre dips in and out of the POS shield and proves more difficult. I call for bombers to blap bombers. I then lock the cruisers, Machariel, whatever stays in range and on field and then call for it to be webbed and die.

The Machariel gets sent off after 10 seconds, in hull. Guess he didn't have enough transversal. Rapier dies instantly, nixing the enemy FC. Champion effort, landing at 22km at the edge of a bubble and not moving for long enough to be blapped. Ishtar is sent packing, likewise, thanks to the Barghest. The Curse is called webbed, and gets blapped, which eliminates any real threat to the Nag. Arazu is dispatched, courtesy of Rattlesnake. Coercer gets sniped. Then half the bombers get raped.

This half of the battle report, the fight at the POS, only Bex lost his Drake, which was the first drake he ever bought way back when. RIP dear Drake, your time had come. You will not be missed, you nerfed to irrelevance piece of shit.

Once the dust settled I moonwalked the Nag out the C5 connection, collapsing it, and we extracted the fleet via the C4 to lowsec, and considered the content had been created.

Analysis?

Well, i shall treasure that RiotRick killmail always. In his own estimation he's God's gift t hotdropping, EVE, everything EVE related with hotdrops, etc. but landing in a bubble at perfect optimals from a tracking dread and not moving for the 25 seconds it took to lock him? Best FC ever.

Secondly, i don't think any of them had a tanking module. I think they believe that getting dropped on a capital is easy money because often it's a hotdrop onto a cap in lowsec with no support fleet where you aren't expected. Bubbles, sniping Barghests, Rattlers at 60km and logi on field put paid to that.

They had no logi.They were droping onto a heavy, logi-assisted high-DPS fleet piecemeal, with no logi. The Machariel, Ishtar and Cerb couldn't stay on field long enough to even get a shot off. Our Rattlers were just picking bombers off at will, at range, with sentries. They were dying so fast that the nonexistant FC calls to focus damps (which died with the Arazu) were meaningless. They couldn't even kill out bombers, though they did try. Our logi had their shit down pat - it is actually Sudden Buggery's strongest skill set I think. We have some top shit logi.

Finally, the Nag found it's way to NPC Curse, via backwoods trails and gate-to-gate half the journey, with Nereus loads of extra fuel and cloaky cyno ceptors. The Apparatus of Kwalish did, in fact, moonwalk out of there.