Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Never Trust A Woman....

Yet another salvo of missiles and beams slam into the drakes shields, the warning alarms scream that my ship has been locked up and under attack.  I check the tactical readout and smile to myself, those poor guristas pirates are doing their best but their best isn’t good enough to really threaten my drake.  Even with the number of battleship and cruisers they have engaging me.  More continue to warp in to try and support their fellows and while you can’t ignore their dedication to each other they are totally out matched and yet they continue to try.

While yet more pirates arrive to engage me and my corpmate one of the directors of the corp gets on our comm frequency and asks what we are doing and if we could help some other corp mates move some stuff to the new staging system in tenal.  They have two orca’s that need to be moved and they need scouts and combat ships to watch the route and protect the ships during the move.

Well we decide that helping our corpmates get their stuff moved and staged into the new region is more important than killing the pirates who have no real chance to do anything against us.  As such we elect to go and help get these ships into position.  We both fire a couple more salvos of missiles or projectiles and watch a couple more pirate ships explode before we warp away, leaving the pirates to tend to their damaged ships and rescue their friends.

They have enough scouts so we arrive with our combat fit battlecruisers to provide close in escort coverage.  At this point they have already been going for a while and several others have joined the escort rising the number of scout and combat ships to nearly a dozen, not to bad for just two orca’s.  This includes the webbing ships to help them align between the gates.

By the time we arrive with the fleet they are basically done but we are asked to stay to help escort some freighters to the new home region as well.  We are a little concerned about how slow they are and if we have enough people in the area to be able to scout and web and protect them.  The call goes out corp wide to get more scouts webbing ships and combat craft into position for this operation.  One of our principle fleet commanders offers his webbing Loki if anyone can fly it as he is in his rapier at the time.  I tell him that I can fly it and he sends me a contract for it while I head over to get it.

It is fitted slightly differently than I usually have them but the important part is that it has two webs that we can use to help the freighters align for their warp faster.  I have never done this before and it takes me a couple attempts to get the hang of it with them but soon I have them going into warp within 10 seconds of emerging from the artificial wormholes generated from the stargates.

The question goes out to the original director who asked us for help how much stuff there is to move and she replies that there is a lot and it will take several trips for us even with the number of freighters we have involved.  I don’t have an exact count but seems like we have about 10 different pilots involved in this operation.  I didn’t really notice that the director didn’t actually answer the question so the fleet commander asks her again exactly how much stuff do we have to move, her answer causes everyone on comms to groan.  18 million m3 of stuff.  We get to it and have it mostly moved to the next system we are using for the relay to keep our combat power concentrated when one of the other directors’ mentions that we have some more stuff to move that was in a different corp office and needs to be shipped as well.  We ask how much and again we all groan.  14 million m3 more.  A total of 32 million m3 of stuff to move and get into the new region.  OMG

Well we all get down to work and get it all moved, takes the fleet something like 3 hours to move it to the secondary base.  We had it scheduled to move in three stages.  After 3 hours of working on it many of the fleet have been active for 12 to 15 hours and their crews are getting tired and mistakes are being made, so the order to stand down for the night is given.  We have the stuff in our new region but not in the final target system.

So what began as a simple escort mission for two orca’s projected to take 15 to 20 minutes ended up taking 3 hours and we didn’t even finish the operation.  On the bright side we have moved a considerable amount of ships, modules, rigs, drones and ammunition into our new region so that it is available for use.

Moral of the story:  Never trust a woman when she says she has “a little bit of stuff to move”

Ranger Gama

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