Marauding Russians

I am happy to batphone when I need more warm bodies to take a fight - not to blob the shit out of sme poor shmuck. I am also happy to respond to batphones in the same way. However, there's always a risk you will be given bad information, by bad people, and get into a bad situation.

Sometimes, though, you do feel a little like the fall guy.

To my mind, the least courtesy you can show when people turn up to help defend your wormhole from marauding Russians (literally 5 Marauders) is to put in a decent and put your own ships on the line.

What we had last night was the second night of batphones from Balcora Gatekeepers alliance (basically, Astral Inferno and scrubby friends of theirs) being extorted/evicted from their C4 Pulsar by Dura Lexx. Dura Lexx had a smallish fleet (10-14) centred around a core of 5-6 very blinged Marauders. They had RFed a medium POS, and the timer came out quite late in our timezone, and early RUs Hour timezone - so a good time for Russians, not so good for US-AU people.

Nevertheless, we formed a fleet around LSE Svipuls, bosting Tengu and 4 Scimitars. The theory was, based on intel recieved from Balcora, and the previous night's fight, they would drop the Marauders, which had ASB's. A Marauder in bastion is a closed system - beyond Nos energy, no tank comes in and you have what yu've got, which is obviously a lot. But it's a finite pool of cap boosters, at a finite rate of tanking, for a finite pool of hitpoints. So you just burn through it, and hence, the key is essentially to remain alive long enough.

So we rolled 10 Svipuls, 4 Scimi's, a Worm, 2 Curses. Balcora agreed to drop some DPS and logi n field too and had 10 guys in fleet, and promises of a Bastion bomber wing coming in the Q003 they had opened into Bastion space.

The problem wasn't that Dura Lexx had a surprise log-in group of Osprey and Basilisk (again, irrelevant to a bastioned marauder), it was that our supposed allies in this fight didn't drop nto grid wih anything serious. Like, one bomber, ne cane and one Falcon - because ECM works n marauders so well.

I got the distinct impression that they were fuckheads, and/or this was an elaborate trap (after all the Russians were rolling RLML Tengus, suspiciously), or we were just supposed to deal with their problems without them getting their hands dirty.

Regardless, I didn't see a concerted input from Balcora. If they had put ten DPS ships on field - decent ones, with decent tank, not paper thin useless bombers and ECM bats which just die like flies to Marauders - the Vargur would have died, and if you can crack the Vargur you can easily crack the Golems. Instead, we lost a few Svipuls, a Curse, and our logi.

I tell you this, dear readers, because two things are clear: Balcora Gatekeepers cannot be trusted to pull their weight, and Balcora Gatekeepers cannot defend themselves. Do with those facts what you will.