Eve
By RESPAWN
We don’t talk enough about EVE around here. I think it’s because we’re generally too busy having fun in EVE Online to think about writing about EVE Online after we’re done playing. That, and I think most of us tend to play right up to the point that we realize we need to get some sleep if we want to be an actual functioning human being the next day. Bearing all that in mind, we (EVE Leadership) felt that EdgeGamers on the whole might like to hear about one of our latest exploits. Or maybe we just want to brag. Or maybe a little bit of both. Either way, the following is an account of our latest success in the world of spreadsheets and spaceships. It’s a long read, but we hope that it will give the non-EVE player a good idea of what life in New Eden is like.
Operation JIAPBD
Our latest operation got its start a few weeks ago when eGO decided to leave our current alliance in EVE. It’s not that we harbored any ill will towards our former alliance mates -- quite the opposite, in fact. They were a good group of people, but since our alliance left the lawless confines of null sec space, we found that eGO was once again moving in a different direction from the rest of our current alliance. After much discussion, we decided to pull out of the alliance and go on about doing what we want to do and not what the alliance wants to do.
Not wanting to rest on our laurels, eGO leadership immediately began talking with some old friends in Sudden Buggery. We’ve flown with these guys several times before and were even in an alliance with them at one point. Since both corps are very experienced in wormhole operations, it was decided to start seeking out a wormhole system that we could lay siege to. Both corps immediately dispatched pilots who began scanning down wormholes, looking for a tasty target wormhole system to which we could lay siege.
For those who don’t play EVE, wormhole systems were chosen for this operation because they offer a couple of unique advantages. The biggest advantage being that Concord - EVE’s police force - does not patrol wormhole systems. What this means is that, once you’ve scanned down a wormhole and jumped through into the wormhole system, you can quite literally shoot anybody at any time with zero repercussions. Wormholes are one of the best ways to find legal player versus player (PVP) without having to issue a formal, Concord sanctioned, declaration of war. If you’re a PVP’er in EVE and are looking for a way to satiate your appetite for blood, wormhole systems can be a source of many, many hours of violent fun. The downside to wormholes is that they can only be discovered using special equipment, they will periodically shift positions, and they typically have a limit to the size of a ship that can fit through them and how many times a ship that size can fit through one before it collapses and reopens elsewhere.
Eventually, eGO and Buggery settled on one system in particular. One of the members of Buggery managed to find a Class 1 wormhole system with a static high sec exit that was just ripe for the picking. For the uninitiated, Class 1 wormhole systems, or C1s for short, provide the easiest level of wormhole Player versus Environment (PVE) opportunities. Additionally, wormholes leading to a C1 generally have some severe limitations to the size of ships allowed in and out, and how many times those ships can move in and out. We wouldn’t be able to take our battleships out for this siege. We’d have to downgrade, as the biggest ship size we’d be able to get into this hole is a battle cruiser sized ship.
So, what made this C1 so juicy to begin with? For starters, this system has two player owned starbase, or POS’s for short. A POS is a player owned and fueled structure to which various individual modules can be attached to serve a wide variety of functions. Functions can include manufacturing, research, and our favorite - ship and ship module/item storage. When sieging a POS, those ships and modules are what you are really looking for since they are the easiest to transport and sell for profit. Rough estimates put the value of each POS at 2 - 3 billion ISK. To put that into perspective, many players will play for years without seeing that kind of money in their personal wallets. A fully fit battleship might run you 200 - 250 million ISK. In other words, 3 billion ISK is a lot of ISK.
To further sweeten the deal, neither POS was too heavily defended. They didn’t have very large guns, nor were there a lot of the guns that they did have on their POS. We’d have to bring battle cruisers, but we were pretty sure we could manage the incoming damage from the POS guns. Lastly, as best we could tell, the system was inhabited by a non-PVP corp. This meant we would probably see little resistance in the form of ship to ship combat. Sure, we’d see some, but our two corps are made up mostly of cocky PVP players who were fairly confident we’d be able to crush any carebear resistance into the ground -- if they showed up to defend at all.
The decision was made to go with this hole, and it was game on. eGO and Sudden Buggery were going to siege that hole, and pillage it for all that it was worth!
Day 1: Friday, May 20th. Let the siege begin.
On Friday evening eGO and Sudden Buggery began to gather their forces. The class 1 system’s current entrance location was broadcast out to all pilots, and the order was given to rendezvous in that system. Roll out time was 9:00 PM sharp. By 9:00 our two corporations had managed to put together a combined fleet of over 30 ships. This might not sound that much, but 500 man alliances struggle to put together a 30 pilot fleet. Our two corps combined rank less than 200 members. Operation JIAPBD was underway.
Led by Sudden Buggery CEO Trinkets Friend, one by one we jumped through the wormhole into the target system. Special thanks goes to eGO member, GoldenPSP. As he was flying the lone ship smaller than a Battle cruiser size, he stayed on the entrance wormhole to watch for any enemies coming in or going out of the system, and to lead in any stragglers from our fleet that missed the 9:00 form up. In all honesty, we were hoping that some of the enemies would jump into the target system. A fleet of 30 battle cruisers packs a heck of a punch. Additionally, several of us were flying Command Ship class ships. Command Ships are based on Battle cruiser class ships, but can generally both absorb more damage than a standard Battle cruiser, and deal more damage than a standard battle cruiser. Lastly, we had a pair of Logistics ships flying with us. Logistics ships can be compared to healers in other MMO’s. Their sole role in a fight is to repair the shields and armor of the other ships in the fleet, allowing the ships to tank much more incoming damage than they normally would. All things being equal, we pretty sure our fleet would be able to annihilate any resistance that we would encounter, and we would have a lot of fun doing it. After forming up on the other side of the wormhole, the fleet of doom warped en mass to the first Player Owned Structure that we were going to siege in this wormhole system. Our first priority was to neutralize the POS’s defenses, starting with the warp disruptors. Warp disruptor modules will lock on to a ship and scramble its warp systems so that a pilot cannot warp his ship out of harm if he’s taking too much damage. The POS’s guns will pound on a ship, and the disruptors are there to try to make sure said ship can’t get out of the range of the guns. The period before you can take out the warp disruptors is a tense moment during a POS siege. Every pilot knows that, should the logistics ships not be able to repair his ships defenses fast enough, there’s a chance that they won’t be able to get their ship out before it goes down. However, with a fleet our size, we were able to make short work of the warp disruptors. Ten or so minutes after beginning our attack, the warp disruptors were incapacitated, and we began to work on the POS’s guns.
One by one, our fleet began to neutralize the POS’s guns. With each gun that’s eliminated, our confidence in this operation grew. Our fleet operated as a well-oiled machine of destruction, methodically incapacitating each gun until an hour or so later there were none left to shoot at us. Once the guns were neutralized, the greatest threat to our fleet that night was gone. Now it was time to get to the real business of taking out the Control Tower itself, the nerve center of the POS that provides the power and defensive shield to all of the other modules that make up the entire Player Owned Structure.
Shooting a POS is a lot like beating on a pi?ata. A very large, very sturdy pi?ata. Once you manage to take the control tower out, there’s no more defensive shield around the internal modules where ships and items are stores. Once you can shoot at those, that’s when the candy pops out. Candy in the form of ships and other items that can often be worth quite a bit of ISK. In all honesty, though, shooting at a control tower, can take a long time and it can get to be a little bit boring. Especially when you’re shooting at the largest size of control towers in the game, as this one was. Large control towers have a lot of shield, armor, and structure that you have to whack away at before you can get to the candy inside, and it can take hours before a fleet manages to finally break through those defenses. This is the real reason that several of us brought Command Ships to the party. Command Ships, while the same physical size as a Battle cruiser, deal the same amount of damage as a Battleship. The more DPS we can put on a POS, the sooner it will go down.
While the main fleet settled down for the long haul of shooting the POS, reloading our guns, and shooting some more, a few members of Sudden Buggery began working on the logistics of shooting a POS. First, several cans of ammo were dropped at a safe spot in system for resupply. In a POS siege, it’s inevitable that some people will begin to run out of ammo; so having a resupply post is key to a prolonged siege. Next, two large warp disruption bubbles were deployed on either side of the control tower in an effort to cover as much of the POS as possible with a warp disruption field. Any ship inside these bubbles cannot warp off, and until these bubbles go up, anybody in the target corporation would be able to warp directly to the POS, behind the shields that our munitions cannot penetrate. They could then begin to empty the storage arrays into their cargo hold, and warp directly out of the POS again without our fleet ever being able to touch them. We have declared everything in that POS to be ours, and we want to make sure all of it stays there.
Lastly, we deployed our own small control tower at a nearby moon to the first tower our fleet was sieging. This control tower would provide a sort of safe haven for us where our pilots would be able to log off for the night without danger of their ships getting attacked while they are asleep. Sure, the enemy could attack our POS while we sleep, but it’s a pointless exercise since there’s not much of value inside, and our POS wouldn’t come out of reinforcement until much later than theirs. The concept of POS reinforcement should probably be explained to the non-EVE player. Reinforcement is a game mechanic that allows a corporation a last ditch chance to mount a counter-attack against an unfriendly siege. A POS owner loads up their control tower with a special type of fuel. Once a control tower is pummeled down to 25% shields left, the tower will enter reinforced mode. When a control tower is reinforced, it begins to burn this special fuel. While in reinforced, the control tower cannot be shot, and yet, you cannot unload ships and items from it during this period as well. It is simply meant to make sure that an attacking fleet doesn’t completely overwhelm an unsuspecting POS owner. How long the tower will remain in reinforced depends solely on how much of this special fuel is loaded.
And so, with the logistics completed, our 30 man fleet settled in for the long haul and fleet communications were relaxed. Shoot, reload, shoot again. Shoot, browse the web, reload, shoot again. If there’s one thing to be said about a POS siege, it’s that it provides fleet members ample opportunity to shoot the breeze and catch up on any web surfing that they’d been meaning to do. As was mentioned before, shooting a POS can bring on the onset of boredom. Shoot, grab a snack, reload, shoot again. Standard operating procedure for eGO fleets generally includes posting links to many funny pictures. Shoot, use the bathroom, reload, shoot again. Really, as the siege proceeds, we all begin to look for alternative methods of keeping ourselves entertained. One can only watch so many missiles fly at a POS before he has to find something else to keep his mind entertained. Shoot, reload, shoot again.
All in all, the initial siege proceeded with, but one incident. At some point during the siege, we notice a couple of pilots talking in local chat. They claim that they are neutrals just there to watch the fireworks, so chances are good that they are observing us from cloaked ships. We jokingly tell them to join in on the fun, and we kind of hope that they do. We’ve got 30 bored pilots itching to train their guns on something that will explode sooner rather than later, and to our surprise a lone frigate comes out of warp 100km away from the POS, well out of the range of our guns. But, to our even further surprise, he begins to burn towards our siege fleet. What is this guy doing? Once he gets into range of the warp disruptors on our own ships, several of the faster ships break off from the fleet to tackle him. We activate our warp disruptors, and he’s not going anywhere. After making sure that all of our pilots equipped with warp disruptors on their ships get a lock on the frigate, we open fire on him. It’s only a frigate kill, but it feels good to shoot something other than the control tower, even if it’s for but a brief moment. We let his escape pod go, and drop a “good fight” in the local chat, even though it wasn’t. It never hurts to be gracious in victory. In all, 18 pilots got in on the kill the kill:
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3093. It’s a little overkill for a frigate. Actually, it’s a lot overkill for a frigate, but it was a nice diversion from the POS siege.
Back to the POS. The initial siege of every POS siege leads up to one singular anticipatory moment. As you begin to approach that magic 25% shield point that marks the start of reinforcement, suppositions begin to run rampant. Do they have any reinforcement fuel loaded? If so, how much? Are we past the 25% mark yet? Yes? No? Ideally, the POS owners are either stupid or noobs and have not loaded up any reinforcement fuel into their control tower. Sadly, luck was not with us on this night. As the control tower reached 25% shields left, we saw the reinforcement timer pop up on our screens. Their reinforced fuel was maxed out, and we now have to wait 1 day, 17 hours to come back and pop this pi?ata. By this time, it was nearly 2:00 AM central time. We had been at it for nearly five hours, and most of us needed to get some shuteye. We warp the war machine to our own POS in the system, so that we may all safely log off for the night. But we’re not done yet.
Day 2: Saturday, May 21st. We’re not invincible.
Let the waiting begin. If you’ll remember, there are two POS's in this wormhole system, and we want to pillage this system for all that it’s worth. While the enemy won’t be able to remove assets from the first POS that we sieged, we haven’t touched the second POS, and there’s a good chance they may start to try to evacuate assets from POS #2 out to the safety of high security space where we can’t legally shoot them. Ideally, the fleet would begin sieging the second structure this morning, but in the mornings, the numbers of available pilots for both corporations is low. Our members do have real lives, and along with real life comes chores and responsibilities during the daytime. In order to prevent the evacuation of assets, we proceed about setting up a blockade on the wormhole that leads to high security space.
First, we begin to cripple the wormhole by moving several ships in and out of the wormhole several times in succession. Since the wormhole can only take a limited amount of mass moving in and out before it collapses and reforms elsewhere, we want to limit that amount of mass even further by moving our own ships in and out. The fewer ships that can pass through into high security space, the less the chance of the enemy completing a mass evacuation of assets. Next, we deploy warp disruption bubbles some distance away from the wormhole leading to high security space. These, so called, drag bubbles should drag any evacuating ships out of warp before they land on the wormhole and have a chance to jump out. The hope is that we can destroy the evacuating ships before they can reach the safety of the wormhole. Once the traps are set up, we position our ships on the wormhole where we can shoot down any evacuating ships, and we once again play the waiting game.
At some point during the blockade, an EVE player named Spiderpig96 joins eGO’s open chat channel and asks for eGO’s diplomat. I checked his profile and while I didn’t recognize his alliance, I did notice that we have designated friendly relations with said alliance. As I was the only eGO leader online at the moment, I opened a private chat with Spiderpig96 to see what he wanted. What he wanted was for us to call off the siege of this wormhole system. It turns out that the corporation we are sieging is friends of his alliance. More than friends, actually. Spiderpig96 informed us that his alliance along with the corporation we are sieging are members of a 500 man wormhole coalition and that said coalition is prepared to come to the defense of the wormhole we are sieging. Things just got interesting. It’s worth noting that the eGO corporation is run as a quasi democracy with all of the leaders having a say in major decisions. It’s also worth noting that, in EVE, when somebody says they have a 500 man alliance/corp/coalition, you can generally only expect a very small fraction of that number to show up and fight. I let him know that I would relay this information on to the rest of eGO leadership for our decision, but that for a payment of a large sum of ISK, I would call off the siege immediately. Unsurprisingly, he declined to issue payment, and we bid each other ado. One of Sudden Buggery’s members put it best when said that something like the wormhole coalition was bound to happen eventually. With so many smaller corps living in lawless wormhole systems, it was only natural that some of them would begin to band together under a mutual defense pact. Secretly though, I was hoping this coalition would come out to fight. I personally hadn’t been involved in a large fleet battle since eGO left the unsecured confines of null sec the previous month and was itching for a larger scale engagement.
The rest of the day, the blockade proceeded without any incident. No ships entered or left the wormhole from the target corporation. No coalition defense fleet formed up to push us out of the hole. Our small blockade fleet spent most of the day alone and wondering if the target corporation was ever going to come out to fight.
The blockade fleet did, however, score a couple of easy kills on some ships in a few other wormhole systems that we discovered during the day. One of these was particularly sweet for eGO:
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3095. Several months prior eGO discovered a wormhole with a very lightly defended small POS that had a carrier parked inside. This POS belonged to gunzbngbng’s corp, and he talked epic amounts of smack while we shot at this POS to see if it would go into reinforced. Sadly, the POS did go into reinforcement, so our fleet left the system, but gunzbngbng did earn himself a spot on our “kill with impunity” list. When we found him salvaging loot in a wormhole system 10 jumps away from the target system, there was no question of whether or not we’d kill him. It was a matter of how fast could we get there.
As day turned into night, and the number of logged in pilots grew for both eGO and Sudden Buggery, our corporations began to form up to siege the second POS. Both corps were still riding high on the confidence from the previous night’s activities. Our appetites had been whetted, and we were salivating at the chance to take down the second player owned structure in this C1. We were only able to put together twentyish pilots on this night, but that should still be enough to siege the second POS. Especially so when you considered that a quarter of the fleet was flying the stronger command ships and the two logistics ships once again bolstered the entire fleet. It would take longer to siege this POS than the night before, but we had the numbers and we had the support, so we were confident that we would make it happen. What could go wrong?
Once again we were lead into battle by Sudden Buggery’s Trinkets Friend in his logistics ship. It was time to get down to business. Trinkets Friend initiated the fleet warp to take us to the second POS. Each of us activated our ships’ defensive modules. We checked our ammunition loads. It was game time. As the fleet came out of warp on top of the first warp disruptor, Trinkets Friend’s logistics ship was the first to be targeted by the POS guns. All of the POS’s guns. Suddenly, we had an “oh crap” moment. Generally a POS’s offensive modules -- the guns, warp disruptors, and target jammers -- split their targets. This provides an advantage to the attacking force in that several ships can soak up the total of the damage being dealt. In this case, however, the full force of the POS, both disruptors and guns, was focused on one ship. They were focused on one of the most important ships to this operation and also one of the ships with a weaker tank.
Our second logistics pilot immediately sprang into action and applied the full force of his remote shield repairers to Trinkets Friend’s logistics ship. The combat ships kept pummeling the first warp disruptor in the hopes that we could take it out and that the POS’s guns would eventually switch targets to the better tanked ships in the fleet. We had to save him. Without both logistics ships on the field, there was no way we would be able to continue sieging this second POS. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. The incoming DPS was overwhelming the remote shield repairers being applied by the second logistics ship, and the warp disruptors were preventing Trinkets Friend’s ship from warping off. As his ship went down, Trinkets Friend ordered the fleet to warp to safety. As soon as his ship went down, the POS’s offensive modules would begin to switch to other targets and we didn’t want anybody else getting caught by a warp disruptor and losing their ship.
Every pilot in the fleet immediately initiated his own emergency warp protocol, each of us picking something in space to warp to, and madly spamming the warp button to get out. It was panic mode as each of us tried to save our own ships. Sadly, one of us wasn’t quick enough. eGO’s Lightningcount was dual boxing and flying the stronger, but also more expensive command ships on both of his characters. While he was able to get one character out, he wasn’t quick enough on the warp button with the other character. Just as his ship was beginning to enter warp, one of the warp disruptors was able to catch him and scramble his warp systems. In a last ditch effort to save his ship, Lightningcount began to try to burn out of the range of the warp disruptors in the hopes that his ship would hold up long enough to get out of range and warp off. Alas, the incoming DPS was too much, and he too lost a ship. The total cost of his loss was just shy of a quarter of a billion ISK:
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3096
Dejected and demoralized by our losses, we warped back to the safety of our own POS to lick our wounds. We warped to the second POS riding high on the wave of confidence from the previous night’s activities, but that wave of confidence just sent us violently crashing into the enemy’s POS. In a post mortem game of “how did that just happen?”, we came up with one highly plausible theory. Our best guess was that, since the logistics ships are smaller than the battle cruiser size ships the rest of us were flying, Trinkets Friend managed to align and warp to the POS just a fraction of a second faster than the rest of the fleet. He came out of warp just a tiny bit ahead of us, but that tiny bit was enough for the POS’s offensive modules to achieve a lock and begin pounding his ship. And with no other ships to lock on to in that small second or two he was there alone, the POS guns focused on him and only him instead of spreading their fire around the fleet.
After some discussion, we decided to cut our losses and ignore the second POS. We had lost the will fight for the night -- lost the will to spend another night sieging POS #2. It was decided to reconvene on the morrow to finish off the first POS in the system. Just as we were logging off, however, Spiderpig96’s CEO asked to talk with us. GardengoveVW, Wintz from Sudden Buggery, and myself all joined this new player in a private chat. The transcript of the conversation was quite hilarious, but not fit for eGO consumption, so it won’t be posted here. The gist of the conversation was that his alliance would be removing their friendly status with us, making us fair game if they found us in a wormhole. Fine by us. The more targets, the better. Additionally, he reiterated that his alliance was part of a 500 man coalition prepared to defend this wormhole. The exact wording of our response isn’t important, suffice it to say that we simply told him: bring it. Maybe we’ll get a good fight after all, but we all doubted it. Typically in EVE, the more posturing you see from somebody, the less likely they will be to show up and fight.
Day 3: Sunday, May 22. Time to finish what we started.
Approximately an hour before the first POS is due to come out of reinforcement, eGO and Sudden Buggery pilots begin to log on. It’s time to finish the job. There’s just one slight hitch. We’ve got a cloaked covert ops ship keeping eyes on the wormhole to high security space, and ships have started coming in. A lot of ships. To paraphrase one of Sudden Buggery’s members, “If I’d been a betting man, I would have just lost.” The Wormhole Coalition’s cavalry has finally arrived, and they’ve assembled quite a force. Intel puts their fleet at approximately 30 ships, of mixed types. They’ve got battle cruisers, stealth bombers (cloaky ships able to deal battleship levels of DPS), faction cruisers (smaller cruiser sized ships, able to deal battle cruiser levels of DPS), at least one recon ship (a cruiser able to use multiple target jammers on ships, preventing them from locking on to enemy ships) and one Tech 3 cruiser (very expensive and skill intensive cruiser sized ships able to deal battleship level DPS and field a battleship sized tank).
eGO and Sudden Buggery immediately issue a call to action to our corps. We need every pilot currently logged in to join fleet and ship up and we need it to happen right now. We need bodies in ships if we want to drive off this force. We start trying to contact friends in other corporations too, but with no success. In the end, we’re only able to field a 22 man fleet to their 30 man fleet. And we’ve got one more problem, to boot. Our fleet is split, with half of our fleet already in the siege wormhole system and half of our fleet in high security space. The bulk of WHC’s fleet is already in the wormhole system, erecting a warp disruption bubble on the wormhole leading to high security space and setting up camp. If we’re going to have a chance at winning this fight, we need it to happen on that wormhole where the warp bubble will level the playing field for both sides. If the fight takes place elsewhere in the system, our pilots in high security space will have spend time burning out of the bubble before they can warp to the fight. On the wormhole, in the warp disruption bubble is the only place that we can immediately commit our entire fleet. We do, however, have one ace up our sleeves. We know who their fleet commander is and he will be the first to go down. Sudden Buggery’s Wintz has taken the fleet commander role for this fight. He instructs the high sec fleet to hold one system out of the system the wormhole is currently located in. And then we wait for the right moment to strike. After a few minutes, we notice several members of their fleet jumping out wormhole back into high security space. We don’t know if they’re going to refit their ships or take a bio break, but we do know that it’s now or never. It’s game time!
Wintz instructs the fleet in high security to jump into the system where the wormhole is located, warp to the wormhole, and jump through the hole the target wormhole system. He then initiates warp on the fleet located in the target system and warps us to the wormhole leading out to high security space. The warp disruption bubble drags us out of warp approximately 10km from the hole leading to high sec space. Defying convention, we immediately burn into the bubble towards the high sec wormhole. We want to fight right on top of the hole so that we can jump out into high security space to save our ships if necessary.
Wintz called their FC galactus87 as the primary target, and we open fire. The rest of our fleet arrives and opens fire as well. His ship doesn’t stand a chance against the combined onslaught of our assault and he immediately loses his ship. He has no choice but to jump his defenseless escape pod back to high security space to save himself. We’ve effectively cut off he head of the dragon and left them confused, without a fleet commander. Next we focus fire on that Tech 3 cruiser. We need to get it off the field ASAP. He jumps out to high security space and is off the field. Next we focus fire on the recon ship that’s jamming our pilots. We won’t be able to bring the full brunt of the hammer down until he’s off the field. We make quick work of him and focus fire on another one of the faction cruisers, driving it off the field. That takes care of all of the expensive ships on the field. Now it’s time to mop up the rest of their fleet.
One by one, Wintz calls the targets and we open fire, either destroying their ships or forcing them to jump through the wormhole to high security space. The well-oiled machine of destruction is in full effect. Meanwhile, their fleet has targeted Trinkets Friend. He overheats all of his defensive modules running them past their maximum capacity, tanking the damage from their fleet for as long as he can. Additionally, some of our ships have had to jump back out as well to save their ships, but we’ve had no losses so far. Finally, Trinkets Friend can take no more damage and jumps out to high sec to save his own ship. His jump, however, finally puts the wormhole over its mass. The wormhole collapses and a new one opens elsewhere in this wormhole system to lead to a new high security system.
There are maybe five or six WHC ships still left in the wormhole system, and they are facing the bulk of our fleet, which has not had to jump out. At this point, the bubble that WHC erected to trap our fleet on the wormhole has come back to haunt them. They are stuck inside of it, unable to warp away to safety, and we begin to pick off the remaining ships, also taking out a few of their escape pods which are unable to warp away to safety. At the end of the battle, our 22 man fleet has managed to take out half of their fleet with zero losses on our side:
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=kill_related&kll_id=3105. In my 2+ years of playing EVE, it was one of the most thorough victories I’d been involved in. We mopped the floor with the WHC’s defense fleet, and we are once again filled with confidence.
The day wasn’t over yet, though. We still had a POS to finish destroying. We scanned down the new wormhole to high security space and relay the location to those members of our fleet who were trapped in high sec when the last wormhole collapsed and as they made their way to us, we began sending ships in and out of the new wormhole to once again cripple the amount of mass that can pass through it, should Wormhole Coalition try to attack us another time. As a bonus, the only way to get to the new high security system is by proceeding through a series of low security systems. This would cut down the chances of WHC sending another “rescue fleet” to attack us.
Once our forces were reunited, the fleet got to work finishing the job we’d started on Friday night. That POS was going down, and the contents would be ours! Furthermore, intel eventually indicated that WHC was not going to be sending another fleet to attack us, so there was little chance of us seeing any more resistance. We did see one member of the target corp exit and leave the target POS in a stealth bomber, and were prepared for a bombing run by him, but I guess he thought better of it as he never did attempt an attack. Eventually, after another couple of hours of shoot-reload-shoot, the control tower had been whittled down to its last little bit of hit points left. We all began to ungroup our weapons so that, instead of firing all of them in a volley, they would fire one at a time in succession. It became a competition to see who would be awarded the final blow on the control tower! In the end, it was Leppg from Sudden Buggery who got the lucky final blow that sent the tower up in flames:
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3121. Bragging rights were his that day.
With the control tower down, shield protecting the rest of the POS modules was no longer in place. It was finally time to hit the various storage structures and watch the candy fall. In turn, the various storage arrays were destroyed, exploding in a cavalcade of ships and storage containers containing ship modules and commodities to be sold on the market. Some of the more expensive POS modules were also scooped up and transported back to our own POS for later sale in high security space along with the rest of the loot. We then concentrated on destroying the POS’s offensive modules that had been shooting at us just a couple of days before. They weren’t worth much and looked better as kills on eGO and Sudden Buggery’s killboards than a few million ISK in our wallets. Lastly, we had to make a decision about what to do with an Orca that popped out of the ship hangar. The Orca is a large Industrial Command Ship -- a utility ship that is too large to fit through the wormhole leading to high security space, so we wouldn’t be able to take it with us. It was a shame too, since Orcas are selling for about half a billion ISK right now. In the end it was decided that we would all take pot shots at the orca to get on the killmail, and then fly it to the second POS and let their POS destroy their own Orca. Adding insult to injury, we wanted let the enemy corporation destroy their own half a billion ISK ship.
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3170. The insurance money from the exploding Orca was given to Lightningcount to help repay for the loss of his command ship from the night before.
We still had one more order of business to attend to before we called it quits. Now that we had all of this loot, we needed to get it out to high security space where we could sell it. Except, the current high security wormhole was still located in that high sec island surrounded by low security space. The last thing we wanted was for pirates in low security space to destroy our slow cargo ships with all of the loot, so we began a controlled collapse of the wormhole. Once again, we moved ships in and out so that we could exceed the wormhole’s limited mass and get a new one that was (hopefully) not in a high sec island.
The wormhole collapsed and a new one opened. Once again, the new high security system was located on a high sec island. Only this time, the low security space surrounding the island was one of the most volatile and pirate infested sectors of low sec in EVE. Again we began a controlled collapse of the wormhole to try to get a better high security exit. Only, we encountered one problem this time. As we got to the end of the wormhole’s limit, if our calculations were correct, there was only enough mass left for one more pass out. This meant that whoever jumped out, would be stuck traveling through this volatile area of space in order to get home. Aneruen won the gut check award that night by volunteering to be the man that collapsed the hole and traveling solo through the pirate infested systems to get back home. Two shots of whiskey and several tense jumps later, he made it back home without losing his ship.
The new wormhole to high sec let us out in a very favorable area of space, just five systems away from the largest trade hub in EVE. We began shuttling all of the loot out to high sec, took down our own control tower in the target system, and that was that. Operation JIAPBD was declared a raging success. The final value of all of the loot was around 1.5 billion ISK to be split evenly amongst the two corporations. Additionally, according to the campaign report on our killboard, we netted over 70 kills in ships and POS modules, totaling about 2.4 billion ISK:
http://kb.taberprame.com/?a=cc_detail&ctr_id=6. Not bad for a weekend’s worth of work.
Lastly, we had a heck of a lot of fun doing it!
If you’d like to give EVE a try and join in on some of the fun, feel free to PM any of the members of the EVE division for a free 21 day trial. We’ll do our best to make sure your trial period is as smooth and as fun as possible.
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