Worst Timing Ever

I logged onto Eve this morning because I’m done with work for over a week, and I can’t think of a better way to spend my time, other than maybe taking care of that giant pile of laundry in my bedroom. I find the home system quiet. Our grav site is gone, so the mining fun is over for now. I’ll have to remind Oz to put his fancy mining lasers back on the Hulk. I had to downgrade due to my lack of industrial skills.

I head out to our C4 connection because it’s the only thing of any interest at the moment. The system is empty with a fleet of Orcas floating in the only active tower. I decide collapsing the wormhole might be a good idea since no one seems to be home and hole is out of d-scan range of the tower. I run through all my calculations and get to work grabbing the Apocalypse (aka fatty) out of the hangar. The first three passes go off without a hitch but the fourth wasn’t so lucky.

Just as I entered warp one of the known pilots from the system logs on. Hmm, well maybe they’ll fiddle with a ship fit or something before looking for trouble. No, no they don’t do that. As my battleship emerges from the wormhole an Onyx is sitting on the other side waiting. Well fuck. Here we go. I jump back through to the home system side and begin aligning towards safety.

Not surprisingly a large bubble appears around the wormhole and I punch the afterburner to at least give myself a chance at escaping. My turrets can’t hit the orbiting Oynx even with a web on it. I’m generally surprised, I have an afterburner on, am webbing him, he’s only going 97m/s or so. I should be able to out run him. Except for whatever reason the Apocalypse decided not to align towards my tower. That’s cool. Why would I want to be moving?

So now finally my ship starts pulling away and the lasers are finding their mark on the slowed Oynx. In fact it looks like I might actually have a shot at getting out of this mess. Oh wait a Falcon. Ok yeah this isn’t going to happen. Just as I was approaching the edge of the bubble the Falcon adds his warp scrambling insurance to the fray. I’m a dead duck and all I can hope for is to some how zig zag my pod out of the bubble. But that doesn’t seem to happen either. I lose the ship and the pod plus a healthy dose of implants. At least they had a good sense of humor about it.

Oh well, maybe next time the stupid will stay at the tower and I can manage to align my ship properly to get out of a situation like that again. Until then, laundry :c

Oracles, Hurricanes, and Stealth Bombers…Oh My!

Cheese and rice what a trip this day has been. I’m going to skip a lot of the usual build up to the action and just dive right in for the most part.

Our C3 neighbors are still connected to our HQ system and Snow and Oz are inside harassing them as is customary. I was fleeted immediately upon logging into the game and brought my Oracle into the system to offer what help I could. The locals have a Loki sitting peacefully in their force-field and we’ve seen a Buzzard zip around once or twice. Much to our amusement the Buzzard attempted to scan our location with a single combat probe. I had parked my Oracle on a hi-sec wormhole connection that Oz had already bubbled up.

About this time we had two Hurricanes and a Falcon jump into the system via the hi-sec wormhole. As soon as the Hurricanes uncloaked I opened fire. The first Hurricane’s shields evaporated in a single volley from my large tachyons. The Falcon immediately cloaked and the two battlecruisers burned their way out of the bubbles and warped off to a safespot, but not without taking a good bit of damage.

Snow probed down one of the safespots the Hurricanes were hiding in, but they weren’t sitting still much. I think they were on edge for some reason. Just as we were about to ambush them at their not-so-safespot, they returned to the hi-sec wormhole. Oz was there this time in his Harbinger to provide some close action support and a webifier. The tachyons began spitting out damage again, although I had been on the move and was slightly out of optimal range. The cloaked Falcon had kept me on my toes and now I was out of position. Oz did what he could and the Oracle blazed away but the Hurricanes managed to get back to the hole safely.

We began to wait again, we still had a Falcon in system, not to mention the local corp who seemed content to sit in the POS’s shields the whole time. As time wore on I got the feeling the Hurricane pilots were on their way back to help their Falcon buddy get out unscathed. No one listened to me though. I was right in the end, although I do wish the timing had been a little different. I had warped around the system for some reason, I can’t remember what it was now. I warped back to resume my vigil over the hi-sec hole but managed to get myself sucked into the bubbles my own corp had placed putting me within 10km of the hole.

Then the wormhole flared. A Maelstrom and a Typhoon instantly decloak and start locking me. I never even got a chance to see the turrets fire. The Oracle disappeared in a brilliant blue blossom and my pod warped for a nearby celestial. The Oracle is a great ship able to do a lot of damage at range while remaining agile and cheap. But it is the epitome of a glass cannon, and arriving at the wormhole just as the enemy corp returned through it was a really unlucky turn of events.

Anyway after retrieving their Falcon, the corp we had been battling moved off. Apparently that was enough discouragement to keep them from exploring the system any further. So we moved on to our next objective. Destroying the local POS. The lone POS in the system had little to no defenses setup and the corp has been itching to get back into worm space for a while. So we began to hatch a scheme to evict the residents from their system. We didn’t want to risk any large ships and so we decided to use a somewhat, unorthodox POS bashing approach.

We all got in frigates.

Confusion was on the menu for today’s local corp. A group of two stealth bombers and one Tristan decloaked at their POS and began attacking their warp scrambling battery. With only cruise missiles as a defense, our tiny fast ships were untouchable for the most part. As long as they didn’t bring out any ships to defend their assets, we were going to slowly grind through them. All without risking more than 50 million isk in the process. We had almost brought the warp scrambler down when a small fleet of ships finally arrived and ruined our fun. But oh what fun we had!

After a quick break I returned and flew to Amarr to fit out a new Purify-i-core stealth bomber that I desperately wanted to try out. I insured the ship, since I wasn’t terribly confident in how it was going to perform and headed off to lo-sec. Right off the bat I find a Retriever mining away in a belt by himself. I’m surprised considering the large number of pilots in local, but the bloodlust and curiosity is high, so I engage anyway. Suddenly a fleet of CONCORD ships arrive. Odd, I’ve never seen CONCORD in lo-sec befo…BOOM!

My ship explodes, and I realize that I, in fact, was not in lo-sec but rather one jump away from lo-sec. Man is that embarrassing. I did get almost half way through the miner’s armor before being ganked by the fun police, so at least the damage output seems promising. I head back to Amarr and refit. This time I do make it to lo-sec and I manage to find a Hoarder sitting, apparently afk, at a planet using my directional scanner. I engage the ship and start to bust through it’s armor in no time. The pilot comes to and starts to burn away. I was a little slow on the uptake and managed to drop my disruptor when he got out of range. Man this is not my day.

All in all an exciting time. The new stealth bomber fit has a lot of potential, but it will take a little more time in the pod before I’m proficient at using it. The future looks bright though. As I’m writing this reports are coming in about further eviction operations and potential moves back to worm space. I must say it feels good to be the attacker in a battle for once.