Operation Midway

One of my guys has an alt corp with which he runs a few sites every week and does PI. We moved him into a C3 Red Giant wormhole with D845 hisec static because he was getting bored with his old digs, and you know, content. In the process we evicted someone else's alt corp, and since this guy was fairly AFK and his main's corp was distracted by their C6 living, he came back to his POS far too late to arrest it's destruction and call the batphones. He was pragmatic; everything more or less was going to assplode, so either you self destruct everything or you cut a deal.

He cut a deal, which is to say the alt corp would get all the POCOs and two Archons. In return the guy would rep his POS and evac his shit. One Archon and the POCOs were handed over as security. We swore e-honour and three days later the other Archon was turned over. Everyone parted ways amicably.

The problem is now, given the impending Citadelisation of everything, the Archons are essentially surplus to needs on a long timeframe. So options are SD for cash or Viking burial. Being decent Bob-fearing wormholers, we know that SD only encourages the evil Loot Fairy to steal everything, so they must be subjected to Viking Burial. The only question was how to achieve this.

I contacted The Maythorn because I knew they were always DTF. Their FC and I have worked together according to the W-Bro Code before. Last time was the Pulsar disaster, where Maythorn and various blow-ins from the Wormhole PVP Channel batphone blobbed and a good fight turned into rather a bit of a rout. Pulsars, eh?

So as a means of amends, we organised a viking Burial. I was expecting 10 guys on our side and 20+ on The Maythorn's side.

We had 2 triage Archons, 2 Armageddon, a Damp Domi, Megathron, 3 Tempests, a Scorpion and some BCs. Our US corp, Straegic industries, suddenly got active and turned up with Apoc, Scorp, Brutix, etc.  Soon enough our 10 men turned into 20, at which point I cut off the fleet advert and left it at that. Stragglers got left out.

When we started to get more members, I suggested their FC just batphone and aim for 30-ish members. He duly tried. However, what rocked up on grid was a Bhaalgorn, 4 Armageddons, 4 Thoraxes, Flabber, VNI, 3 Guardians, Curse.


Needless to say, there was no carriers lost.

When I realised they were outnumbered, I told people with alts to get them off field; this stripped out a Tempest and a Harbinger and an Omen Navy. I also made the decision to not prime the Guardians or their FC. When you haven't fought caps before and you are learning the ropes, it's often good to have a long fight versus getting your butt wiped inside 2 minutes.

The Maythorn certainly had plenty of neuting power, with 6 neuting ships on field. Their FC also had the right idea, calling for the BS to bump the Archons apart. However, as no plan survives contact with the enemy, this proved too difficult to achieve, although one Geddon got a good bump on Elahna and shunted him 11km off his buddy, fucking their ability to refit.

However, what we noticed most of all was that the enemy fleet spread their neuts too far and too early. While it was a good idea to neut the shit out of the Scorpions (and they stayed dry till the last few minutes), the fact my Tempests got drained multiple times is a problem. Arguably, with 6 neut boats on the field their fleet could have nearly alpha neuted a carrier and let their lower DPS start to weigh in.

We had plenty of DPS, on paper. the performance of the Tempests was nothing short of abysmal. I did 20-30% less than the Dominix, which was showing 340 DPS with Bouncer I's. This was a combination of factors - few things were 2.5km from me, so falloff scuppered my DPS heavily, and secondly, even against webbed and painted ships the paper 790 DPS of the 800mm autocannons was more like 150 due to the gun resolution. Yet again there's oh so little to recommend a Minmatar battleship as opposed to spending 100M ISK more and buying a goddamn Gila. That said, the smartbombs cleared the drones off the field rather handily; by the end of the fight there were only 15 abandoned drones.

So, at the end of the day, what this shows is there was definitely a lot of pew pew on offer, but lethargy and lassitude seems to have scuppered The Maythorn recently. If they'd turned up with 10-15 more cruisers, or indeed if they'd opted for Brutixes instead of Thoraxes, and controlled and focused their neuting properly instead of wasting neuts on Tempests (capless guns, boys) then they could have done a lot better.

Good fight. More work required on this Viking Burial, though.