Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Triage Green

The ping goes out that we need carriers specifically triage carriers for an op in the coming few minutes.  Having only just gotten cleared by the coalition to fly carriers I decide that I need more experience in them and what the hell might as well go.

The call is for shield or shield transfer boot carriers.  I decide to go with a shield transfer boot carrier for the op and get into my Nid and wait for the orders to undock.

Not much is happening as cyno's are moved into position and scouts report on the area to make sure that we are not getting ready to jump into an ambush.

We get the order to undock and stop our motion outside the station to prepare for jump.  If you have never seen a capital fleet undocking it is a sight to behold when over 100 carriers all undock as one and prepare to go.

The FC tells us that we are ready and to jump to the cyno in the target system and we all jump.  Space seems to tremble as our drives activate and punch holes in the space time continuum to allow us to jump so many light years in a fraction of a second.

As we land he gives us the order to stop our ships and get our cap chains going to make sure that power is being shared among the boot carriers as best as possible.  The triage carriers don't bother with it given that as soon as we activate our triage module we will have so much interference that cap transfer modules no long function.  We also loose control of any deployed drones we have out and we can no longer receive remote repair assistance.

This is enough to make any pilot nervois about actually activating a triage module while hostiles in the area, even with the T2 version that I have equiped it means I am volunerable for 5 minutes.  While it does boost our ability to help repair others and our own repair capacity the fact that we can't receive any reps while in triage makes us worried.

We target the first starbase and the order is given to go triage green and rep the tower.  The 10 or so triage carriers all acknowledge and we send out the command to start the cycle.  Now we are relying on the other members of our fleet to protect us while we rep up the tower.

With a medium tower as the rep target and so many other carriers who are just using a shield transfer without going into triage we are able to rep the tower in less than 3 minutes and must now wait for the cycle to finish.

The FC tells us "Triage Red" on comms within 1 minute of starting the cycle as he is monitoring the tower and can see how fast its shields are going up.  We all still have 2 to 3 minutes when the shields are above the 50% line to allow for it to have the strontium replaced.

As the triage cycle ends we all align to the next moon and are warped to the next tower.  Where we repeat the whole process again.

As we finish repping the second tower the FC orders us to go triage red and we prepare to jump away.

The return cyno's are in position in our staging system and we are ready to head out.  Given how vulnerable our triage carriers are the FC orders all the triage carriers to jump away while the boot carriers cover us from any surprise attack.

Once all the triage carriers are away and docked up the boot carriers jump away as well.  Total time for our op to repair the towers and get back to our staging system, about 15 minutes.

I wish all our ops would be that easy and simple, especially when I am flying triage and don't have as much firepower on board my ship.

Ranger Gama

TPOG