You’re probably looking at the image above and thinking “how did I end up in a situation like this?” Titans and supers get thrown around like nobody’s business these days, but it’s hardly common for a small gang to ignite a 40b ISK brawl just like that. To really understand the insanity that was our Saturday evening, though, we’re going to go through it bit by bit AAR style. More of an After Day Report I suppose this time.
STAGE 1: Lowsec Gate to Foxholers
I have to admit that I didn’t start off the evening in the best mood. I just wanted to play some WoW Classic (Warlock BTW) and eat fried chicken takeaway. Of course since things never go to plan as CEO, I had already started receiving personal pings that there was a Brutix & more to kill. Said person apparently did not want to ping themselves but hey whatever; I’ll crash a lowsec gatecamp any day.
From what it seemed, the people that we wanted to kill do this all the time (as evident by this curious fellow in local chat screaming about it). I’m not sure if it was the logi on standby, the fast-locking Praxis/Gnosis, or the fact that they reset and repaired after every single 3m ISK kill, but these guys looked like they wouldn’t even fight a kitten let alone Foxes.
Fortunately for us, we had some hauling to do. Through the generosity of good old Lukas Nemec, we now had some (actually expensive) DST bait. The plan was a simple ‘bait the gatecamp’ then bring the hammer so I won’t bore you with the details. I will say, however, that we tanked easily and smashed up a lowsec camp twice in a row. Turns out that remote repping Drekavacs really tend to help your Occator not die. You can check out a combined BR here.
Thanks to the hilarity that is 750m KG mass wormholes I personally let myself get rolled out here. Our second attack was entirely through a crit hole which couldn’t have supported more than three battlecruisers. I then used this time to order the aforementioned fried chicken and make friends with the locals while my foxes concocted their next plan.
STAGE 2: It’s Free Real Estate
Within only minutes of placing the order of fried chicken for Teddy Gbyc and I, there was more action to be had. Our token Russian, comrade Alexey Mamontov, had found us a lovely little Astrahus coming out of final timer at 21:00. “Marvellous” said I, and tasked the Foxes with finding me a new entrance to our chain.
Skipping forward by about two hours, three chicken fillets, and some chips, we started forming for what looked to be a relatively routine structure bash. Our only major concern was the potential for P A R A B E L L U M to turn up and push our collective face in. With bombers on grid in the target red giant six jumps down-chain and Parabellum between us, it was definitely something to be worried about. Regardless, I picked our trusty RR Dreks up once again and headed down to face our fears.
We were apparently wrong to worry because the maximum form of the Russians this time of night looked to be one Leshak. To make himself easier to kill, he delightfully warped to a frig hole to die instead of going home. Thanks Mr Leshak, you can watch your death in this video (sadly no comms). Other than the mysterious Manticore who flew into my Sabre we didn’t hear any more from them for the rest of the night.
The rest of the bash went about as well as you can expect and you can watch the whole thing if you like. Don’t know who would want to do that to themselves, though. The most interesting highlight of our bash was a trio of Hecates who are yet to learn that we fly with jump drives. We do this a lot.
Total loot from the Astra was way more than you’d expect to find in a random C3. The structure itself was unremarkable, but after swatting away the TDSIN loot flies we got away with something in the region of ten billion ISK. That’s nothing for many groups, but since we don’t really tend to earn ISK as a corp this is a fortune in what will eventually become fuel blocks and SRP. These numbers were bolstered even more when a gang of cloaky bullshit tried to stop us going home with 1.2b ISK Proteus’s. Of course they cloaked and ran away as they always do. They (or their friends?) ended up rolling out a Praxis afterwards which we gleefully scanned down and popped.
The bigger bounty from all this in my opinion is the massive collection of corpses that we now own. The citadel owners were even nice enough to provide a handy dandy Mastodon to scoop them with. Not that it really helped since there we OVER 1,500 OF THE FUCKERS. Since I’ve discovered that multiple corpses can be jettisoned at once you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to use them like squid ink. Our Mar5hy’s will blot out the sun.
STAGE 3: We Can Tank Supers
After much jubilation and my final glass of Prosecco it was nearing time for bed for us EU folks. To round the evening out my corp member Xaoxinn wanted to roll the null and poke around a bit. You might remember him from such tales as ‘Outfoxing a Jump Freighter‘; he’s a great hunter and, with help from Vaeltek delivered once again with a platter of Rorquals and Procurers. I’d already had my fried chicken but felt like it was worth going in with bombers at least. Our first bombing run was actually unsuccessful due to their large tanks.
Fortunately for us, nullsec spodbrains are very smart people and stayed still a second bombing run which was a little bit more effective. They were actually so smart that they delivered us a free unfit Skiff to kill, too. Note the name Robert Seawolf here friends. He’s an important character in our story and he has already lost a few ships.
To understand what happened next you need to know that we fly microjumping, microwarping, remote repping, self-linking, nano Drekavacs. It’s an entirely T2 fit for 280m ISK a pop and they’re hella fun. Our plan was to generate content by sitting on the Encounter Surveillance System and waiting for the fun to arrive. After five minutes of combat probes, carriers, and T3s warping around our wish was granted as a lonely Phobos slid onto grid to tackle our seven Drekavacs. Of course a cyno went up just before my inhibitor and the games began.
First up comes a Nyx and a Thanatos; the latter of which is piloted by our good friend Robert Seawolf. This seemed pretty tankable and we stayed on grid for a few seconds until the second Nyx appeared. Deciding this was probably too much I jumped us out to reset and rep each other up on the wormhole. Before long, however, we were aligned and warping back in to try our luck with 7 battlecruisers against some supers.
As you can tell from the title, this went surprisingly well with our Dreks managing to just barely hold on against way too much DPS. Our general tactic here was to prop away from fighters while zapping Dromis and Sirens and putting ECM drones on damage fighters. Once ‘tackle’ was cleared enough we’d fly back in and tank while trying to crack a target. This worked for the Phobos and we must have cost them a fortune in T2 fighters but all good things must end. After a full ten minutes of tanking 2 supers and 1, then 2, then 3 carriers, they dropped the hammer. In this case that was a total fielding of Thanny x4, Nyx x2, Nidhoggur, Revelation x2, and a Naglfar to fight seven T2 fit battlecruisers.
Needless to say, we jumped the fuck out of there and by golly we almost all escaped, leaving behind just comrade Alexey and my poor cyno inhib. At this point we all thought it was over. We warped home to chat about the event and actually go to bed. This was, of course, cut short by shouts of “There’s a Goon Arazu! I think something is going to happen!” from someone on comms.
Why yes, it turned out that something was about to go down. Goons delivered a dreadbomb directly onto the Nyxes that had previously been trying to chew on our Dreks. Pandemic Horde responded with about what you’d expect and down came the second, much bigger hammer.
You can check out the BR and gallery below, but by the time everything had landed on grid, NC/PL/Horde had 23 titans, 22 supers, 4 dreads, 9 carriers 4 FAXes, and some change. In contrast, the Goon side consisted of a 16-man dreadbomb plus Stuka fleet. Neither of these fleets would have been here if it weren’t for us causing trouble around the ESS so I’m pretty happy about that. Horde and friends were the clear victors in this engagement and held grid easily with their titan fleet. We tried our hardest to cause some trouble with bombers but it was mostly a case of watching and chanting “holy shit holy shit what did we cause”. Didn’t stop me from bombing myself, though…
So what was that I said about Robert Seawolf before? Turns out that he messaged me and wanted some advice. He was originally very salty at us for fighting him and wanted us gone so he could mine. Right now he just wants to know how we did it though.
He was really very curious so I told him about our fit and how we tanked him. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of remote repping though unfortunately.
Robert Seawolf > each one of those an tank 2 carriers and 1 supper?
[We’re remote rep]
Robert Seawolf > which means? drones on fighters? how possible fighters much faster no?
I almost feel bad for the guy. This is what happens when a nullseccer gets infected with spodbrain. They rush into carriers and supers and have no idea what some basic concepts of EVE are… I suppose he won’t be around long though since apparently our antics have pushed him away from EVE Online.
Robert Seawolf > will be quiting eve after this
Another victim of the nullsec blob machine 🙁
Final Battle Report
tl;dr: Killed some lowsec bullshit, killed some wormhole bullshit, caused a ton of nullsec bullshit
Awesome read. Thanks for posting. Love that boosh onto the Hecates. MJD’s are one of the most fun modules in the games.
My first contact with Drecavaks, I remember it well. Our FC decided to go with Feroxes it went and as I had expected, we got wrecked. ^^ But it’s funny when you see yourself on YouTube on Lussy Lou’s channel. 😀
Nice blog post! I found it from Talking in Stations podcast. It’s helpful for a beginner (me) to learn how to play, and how to fit my ship for different tasks.
Jesus, what a fun read! Dropping a fleet of caps on a couple of Drekavacs, now that must be the most null thing I’ve ever heard.