To Kill A Nyx

The call goes out to form up and get ready for action…..while not unusual to have an FC call for a fleet what makes this one interesting is that the FC is calling for a loki fleet.  Given how expensive these fleets are, if we lost one, they are not called all that often, so I figured there must be something big going on to justify this.  I head to the staging system and prepare to get into my loki and join the fleet.  I arrive and transfer my pod from my hound class stealth bomber to the loki and double check all the offensive and defensive systems.  The FC calls for a small fitting change and I refit the loki changing out one module for another and back into space I go heading for the titan that is preparing to bridge us to who knows where.

We have a nice little fleet formed up for this operation over 100 capsuleers have come to the fleet including, 27 logistics pilots.  It is the first time I have flown with the loki fleet but it seems to me that nearly 25% of the fleet being logistics pilots is a lot and probably overkill but no one asked me.  I arrive at the titan and the bridge is up and the fleet is heading into the system.  We arrive at some no name system in the next region and I still don’t know what the final target actually is or where we are going.

The FC orders the fleet to warp to a fleet member and prepare to jump through the wormhole…ah we are going to go and attack someone in a wormhole and crush them….this should be good.  They probably will not expect 100 loki’s with logistics support to come in out of no where and crush them.  It must be a really good target to have this many of us in and ready to go.

We go into the wh and end not in a wormhole system but actually in low sec within minmatar space.  I am now somewhat confused as to why we are here and what the target is going to be, we bridged out to a wh to go into low sec.  Still there is nothing in the system or nearby that I know of that would be of any threat to justify this large of an expensive fleet….I would shortly find out that there was something of value nearby.

We set our destination into the navigation computers for a system about 5 jumps away and begin to head to the target.  As we get nearby we encounter a number of neutral ships heading either in the same direction we are or away from us, because we are trying to move the FC gives orders to not engage anyone on the gates and proceed to the target system.

We are one jump out from the target system when we arrive at the jump in gate we find that the gates are having trouble keeping up with capsuleers attempting to jump into the system and the safeties have locked preventing us or anyone else from jumping in.  ((CCP had a hard cap on the system of 2000 or so I was told))

We sit on the gate attempting to get into the system but the gate controls will not respond and several other capsuleers arrive at the gate, some are neutral to us, some are friends.  No one is able to make the jump into the target system.  Several of our pilots request permission to engage hostiles on the gate while we wait for traffic control to clear the fleet and the FC gives the go ahead to open fire on anyone on the gate that we can get a lock on.  ((TiDi was at 10% in the whole area, making this a horrible process to see whom we could lock and actually fire on))

Neutral capsuleers who had been trying to get into the system or escape the system find themselves under the guns of over 100 loki’s, along with a friendly naga gang that had arrived.  Between us we are clearing the hostiles off the gate without any real trouble.  I feel somewhat bad for the neutral capsuleers having risked their ships and crews to come out into low sec and finding two fleets of ships with tight fleet compositions along with logistics support and intact command & control….all they can do is die under our fire.  With so many of our ships the gate guns guarding the area are no threat to us and we ignore their fire.

After what seems like hours we are finally able to jump into the target system and warp to a station.  As we land at the station we can see the target approximately 60 kilometers from us….a Nyx Class Super-Carrier.  This Nyx is under heavy fire from ships ranging from frigates to battleships, all attempting to kill it before it can escape from the system.  ((The pilot of the nyx had told everyone in advance that he wouldn’t attempt to flee and that he would be staying in the system.  CCP also allowed him to dock at the station and to do so in an incursion system so no heavy capital ships could be jumped in to finish him quickly))

We lock up the nyx and the fleet fires several salvos into the target, after a few moments the nyx is destroyed.  Knowing that he could not escape and with more and more hostiles arriving the nyx pilot initiated the self-destruct shortly before we arrived at the station.  ((he would later say that he did this because of PL’s logistics repping his nyx and preventing it from being destroyed))

Once the nyx is destroyed, there is a small pause in the battle that lasts for just a moment and everyone begins to turn on everyone else, it becomes a massive free fire zone between well over 1000 capsuleers.  The FC begins to call targets and we put stasis webifiers, sensor dampeners, and of course our artillery cannons onto the targets and they begin going down under our fire.

All of the organized fleets begin doing this and the number of unaligned capsuleers in the area begin to drop rapidly as their ships are destroyed, some are podded but for us we aren’t interested in the pods and simply shift to the next ship when the primary target goes down.  The FC decides that priority targets are the tech 2 or 3 ships first, followed by pirate or navy faction modified ships that are in our range.

As we are killing them the other fleets are targeting our logistics ships and we begin loosing them at a steady rate.  They report this to the FC but it doesn’t seem like they are making a very big deal about these losses and the FC acknowledges but doesn’t make any real change to the operation of the fleet.  As we continue to engage targets they continue to explode under our fire and the next status report the FC asks the logistics guys report that 10 of our logistics ships have died under enemy fire.  Nearly half the fleets logistics ships have been shot down, this isn’t good.  With so much of our logistics ships lost the FC orders everyone to hold fire and approach the station, we are going to dock and stand down for the time being.  Soon the enemy fleets will be turning on our loki’s and without so many of our logistics ships destroyed we may no longer have the ability to repair the damage.

The fleet ceases fire and we all approach the station and prepare to dock, while ships are still being attacked all around us, but as we get into docking range of the station we are all able to dock up and our ships are safe.  The fleet stands down for a few minutes while we continue to observe local and see what is going on in the area outside.  Our cloaked scouts continue to observe the area and report to the FC what is happening outside the station.

After a short period of time local begins dropping as capsuleers leave the system, either from being podded or jumping out on their way home.  Once the scout reports that the undock of the station is mostly clear of hostile craft we undock and head back out.  There are a few hostiles on the undock that try to engage the fleet, not sure why but not too many make the attempt.  When you have a few frigates and 100 loki’s undock their isn’t much you can do against that kind of firepower.

We set course back to the system that had our entry wormhole and prepare to return to our space.  The journey is without any real incident as most of the capsuleers have left the area and those that remain aren’t interested in trying to engage us.

As we head home I take stock of our success and check my own statistics, I have engaged and been part of the destruction of over 20 enemy ships in the last few hours.  Our alliance has destroyed over 40, these kills occurred in two different systems in three different locations.  On the gates, and at the stations were the combat was occurring.  Over all getting to the location of the nyx ended up being a running firefight for most capsuleers as people converged from all over.

Ranger Gama

Str8ngeBrew

OOC

In the end the 10^th anniversary event was a big success in my opinion.  Losses in the system show over 1000 ships destroyed in just a couple hours with over 2000 different toons on the nyx killmail.  Here is the video someone made of the fight. (Starts at about the 2:00 mark)

TiDi was at 10% for pretty much the whole time that I described the action above, which made our 12 second cycle time on our guns take two real life minutes to complete.  It was horrible but TiDi is so much better than the old black screen of death that used to occur with big fleet fights.  It didn’t really drop until the system population had been reduced to less than 1000.  At the peak I was told that 2000 people were in the system, we got in when it dropped to around 1800.

Been A Long Time

It has been a long time since I have posted anything. Been a little crazy for me. First I got laid off and was trying to find a new position but it didn't work out for me so I had to move over 1000 miles back home to stay with family while I look for a new position (I hope we all survive this one). Then (literally) the next morning after I get into town and get settled in we got word that my fathers mother had just died, so I was back on the road within 18 hours of arriving to drive another 1000+ miles to help my father and his brother and sister with everything. Of course we then get to drive back home after everything which adds another 1000+ miles, so in less then two weeks I drove over 4500 miles. Which I admit is nothing for a professional driver but for me that was more then I drive in a couple months and I did it in something like 13 days. Which is rough as hell on anyone, don't know how those long haul truckers do it. I get back and everything appears to be going well for a change (should have known) and about a week later my mother is diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer. Really universe WTF??? So now we are all having to help her deal with that and get her surgery scheduled and the radiation treatments she will need afterward. My father and I had planned on a trip to Moab Utah to go ATVing with my aunt and my mother insisted that we go and have fun. Well got on the first trail and I had no real idea what I was doing and got tossed/jumped off and hurt my back, like 20 min into our ride. Finished going around with everyone, like 6 or 7 more hours on the trails, and I pretty much couldn't move all that well the next day. Saw some good stuff, very pretty view at the end of the day of the green river from some place on the canyon rim. So spent the rest of the trip drugged up and doing nothing, which isn't so bad I guess, but still. Needless to say it has been an interesting couple months, but I am hoping that I can be on eve more now and have some more stories of fun and general eveness excitement.

Shameless plug:

They picked up my mothers breast cancer on a routine mammogram and the cancer is only 7 to 9 mm in diameter, which is pretty damn small. Their has been a lot of talk about a year ago with some groups saying that routine mammograms should only be performed yearly on those women who are in a high risk group, well my family has never had a single case of breast cancer until now. So my mother was in the lowest risk group you could imagine, and I am glad she told those guys to fuck off she would get them every year no matter what those dumb asses said. I whole heartily recommend to every guy that actually reads this to encourage your mother, sister, wife, girlfriend, whoever female you have in your life that matters to you, to go in and get these mammograms done every year. I can't imagine how bad this would have been if she had waited two years or more, which is what was recommended by these guys in their brilliant press conference last year, between hers. As it stands they have caught my mothers so early that she has every option available to her, it looks like she will not have to do any chemo, the surgery and radiation will be enough.

Getting off my soap box.

Ranger Gama

High Sec War Dec

I get a text massage while having dinner with some of my colleagues celebrating a birthday. It is from my industrial corps CEO telling me we have been wardec'ed by some corp neither of us have ever heard of. The next day the war goes live and nothing happens, the enemy doesn't make any real effort to engage my corpmates. While this isn't a surprise the opening few hours of a wardec are often occupied with recon of targets and checking to see what your opposition is flying, how they are operating, what systems they are in, and how these patterns have changed from before the wardec was sent.

The next day (Sunday) I log in to find out that the ceo of the wardecing corp is in our home system and has one of my guys camped in a station, another of my guys is outside cloaked watching and reporting on what is happening. I come in and so do three others, for a total of six of us online now. We get the fleet up and the audio comm system going, and I sketch out a plan of action. Pretty simple, cloak guy get closer we warp to him, scram, disrupt, web and BOOM...seems simple enough but virtually none of my guys has any pvp experience and while the warp in is in a reasonable position the pilot doesn't realize that the target is in instadock range of the station. So of course we arrive they dock.

We all dock and the waiting begins, the wartarget undocks and I give the order to undock after her but we aren't fast enough and she jumps away into a neighboring system. Given her main base of operations I guess which system she is headed to and we pursue. I am partly right, she is going in the direction I thought she would but to a slightly closer system.

My little fleet (still just the six of us) jumps several systems after her but we loose her and I order the fleet to hold up as we attempt to figure out what direction she has actually jumped away in. As I warp the fleet to a gate, she arrives at the one we were just at. 10 more seconds and we would have had her, but she is through the gate and we miss her. By the time we get back to the gate she has cleared the other system and we totally missed her.

I give the order for my guys to set up a gatecamp along the route she has used to reach our base figuring she might just come back to see what happened, she has doubled back on us once already, hence the missed gate earlier. We sit and wait, eventually we find out through some allies that she has docking in a nearby system and we move out to try and get her on the undock. I warn my guys about the instadocking and that we need to watch her, but I fail to tell them about sitting right outside and bumping her away from the station.

We arrive and she plays undock/redocking games with us some more, I get annoyed at this and we move out a few systems to set up a new gatecamp and wait for her. We have some allies feeding us intel that she is sitting at the station but still in instadock range just waiting for us. We sit on the gate and wait for her to become bold enough to come out and jump into our trap. After maybe 15 minutes I notice that an geddon has dropped out of warp at the gate we are on and it is the ceo of a known associate of theirs. Out camp is now totally blown and I give the order to recover the drones and jump back into the system, I fleet warp us to a new spot and jump back out of the system trying to loose her spy. We succeed in loosing them but mostly because I set my destination wrong and wasn't paying enough attention and jumped us in the wrong direction. By the time I get us back to the main target system our allies have informed me that she has docked up yet again. I give the order for the fleet to dock at the stations in the system we are in, spread out to prevent her from camping us all and to log out for dinner.

We all agree to come back on about 2 hours later and to try another fleet to see about killing her. So after I have dinner I log back in and she isn't online, none of the targets are. My guys tell me they were but left a short while ago, never having seen the target undock and presume that she is still in that same station waiting. I move some stuff out to the markets for sale and log out after another hour of all the targets being offline.

So net result for the whole weekend with this wardec....nothing at all. The ceo of this griefing corp has refused to engage us and decided to play docking games with us instead.

Now having done high sec wardecs before with Gama I know that this happens but I have never seen the people that started the wardec go to so much trouble to do nothing. The ceo ran intel on us for over 2 weeks, my fault I thought she wanted to join us but she was just running intel, I should have seen it but wasn't paying enough attention.

So I have learned some valuable lessens for doing stuff and got reminded again about the rush of pvp combat in eve and how much fun it is to know that a real human intelligence is trying to destroy your ship and the rush of knowing that you can destroy theirs. I have to give credit to my guys they did an excellent job given their lack of pvp experience and followed my orders even when I jumped us in the wrong direction, a mistake that I don't intend to make again.  I am sure that my mistakes cost us that kill for the night, but eve has always been a game of learning and thus we will all learn and get better.