In which pos repping is not boring

I went out with a pos repping carrier fleet today to somewhere in Pure Blind. We repped one tower uneventfully and started on another when an enemy subcapital fleet entered the system and we had to warp back to the pos which had been repped. We had a small medium-hull blue fleet in system and hostiles were in long-range battleships.

Command pinged jabber for numbers and goons formed up as well. Shortly thereafter we aligned back to the pos and warped, but were too late to save it.

As we landed we lit cyno, goon carriers jumped in and various friendly subcapital fleets entered the field. The hostile fleet initially bubbled the carriers but warped off after a few minutes. Later our FC had us align to a stargate and warp at zero. We landed on the enemy subcapital fleet, who had aggression, and the ones we couldn't lock down scattered.

The op also produced this frankly hilarious (if true, naturally, but you can't make this shit up) teamspeak snippet. NSFW of course.

Killing on the stargate

EDIT: You might note my hilariously terrible carrier fit here. I forgot to bring a combat fit :fail:

Teamspeak recordings: Killing Alazais

This is the first of a series of posts with teamspeak recordings. These will likely not be of interest to somebody who has been in a real fleet, but rather to people who are curious as to what goes on in a fleet fight. Teamspeak recordings are always NSFW, just so everybody's aware.

This recording is from this fight, in which we killed Alazais' triage carrier (everybody has seen the triage video right?) and some other expensive toys. Subsequent posts will mostly be capital fights, although I'm hoping to get a good one with an embarrassing loss at some point.

Download/Listen
MP3, 5:04, 7.4 MB

IT vs NC: The first month

After the first month of war we've reached a convenient summarizing point, so I'll give my impressions about what's happened so far.

Subcapitals: There has been a huge amount of fighting, and all sides have lost vast numbers of ships without actually accomplishing very much. Everybody's killboard shows their own side winning, so I'm going to call it about even.

Capitals: We're doing very well here, with 200-230 capital kills and 50-60 losses. 200 is a lot of caps, but IT alone is said to have brought upward of a thousand; it ain't over yet.

Supercapitals: Zero losses, 4 kills: ROL titan, 2 motherships (init and CO2 I believe) and an IT mothership and CSAA killed by PL this afternoon. Such small numbers of supercapital kills won't make an appreciable difference in a fight, but are interesting from a morale perspective.

Sovereignty: The 3 stations in Cloud Ring have been retaken by Ev0ke. Goons are saying that they left to go live with TCF (recall that TCF and goons were two of the three RedSwarm Federation members back in the day), which you can choose to believe or not. I can confirm that goons are active with both capitals and subcaps in Pure Blind.

Moons: Over the course of the last month we slowly lost around 30 high-end moons. Then over the last two days, with IT mostly busy elsewhere, we've killed 19 large towers and another 13ish are currently reinforced, which should account for all the high-ends. IT seem to be back though - we had to skip the last tower we were sieging today in x-7 because they formed up a larger cap fleet - so I'm hoping for a fight when the towers come out of reinforced tomorrow.

Forecast: The enemy are apparently going to try to increase interalliance cooperation and form actual coalition fleets. Assuming their go-getting attitude hasn't been blunted over the last month and PL stops being a significant distraction in Delve, this should make them more effective during part 2. So far we're doing much better than I or anybody else had expected, but it's not over yet.

Map: NC and aggressors

Another sov map edit, this time highlighting the NC and relevant enemy alliances.

Green: NC
Pink: SC

Sorry about the pink; I tried to avoid it, but contrast and readability are much better this way.

Cult of War and AAA are deploying north to attack us and have been colored accordingly. Pets who are defending IT space were colored along with IT because with PL attacking that area they are relevant to the larger war. Also, 'citizens' type alliances were colored along with their masters because presumably they support the war effort with rent or industrial activities.

I don't have a complete list of who rents from whom so a number of probable AAA and Atlas renters were left gray. The drone lands coalition were left gray as well because although they have been intermittently involved on the side of the enemy they haven't deployed in significant force.


Credit goes to the people who made the coalition map, of course.

In which IT loses more caps

I was actually hoping to get some sleep last night but siren song of jabber called me once more into the breach. A post-downtime fleet was fighting hostiles somewhere and they had brought capitals including at least one triage carrier, so we were forming up some of our own in hopes of getting some pew pew. The first thing that I thought was it must be a trap considering we had ganked their carriers with a hastily-formed capital group earlier, but that turned out to be not the case.

While the FC was arranging cynos and regaling us with tales of hostile supercapitals to be killed I hastily refit my naglfar with citadel cruise missiles -- something I neglected to do before killing the carriers earlier. Word on teamspeak at this point was that IT was also calling for capitals so it might turn into a real fight.

We lit cyno on a hot grid and dropped everything we had on them. In terms of world-crushing capital fleets numbers were rather small, with only about 100 in our fleet, but both sides kept jumping in more pilots -- on our side I saw 5 titans when I loaded grid and 10 a few minutes later.

After fifteen or twenty minutes it became apparently that we were utterly owning the hostiles and they went siege red and jumped out. Killboards are still syncing but as of now IT killboard is showing 45 capital losses to 5 kills, and somebody on forums reported 6 ROL carriers down as well, which aren't showing on IT killboard yet.

Going down like

Killboard link

After the battle we had something like 10 hostile towers coming out of reinforced over 60 minutes, and word on teamspeak is that IT will be spending tomorrow in delve as a bunch of their towers there are coming out of reinforced as well.

Ganking an IT carrier group

So I heard the lovely 'bing' of pidgin announcing a hey-guys-get-online and saw that it was for capitals. I logged in and found command types calling for supercaps > caps to gank an enemy carrier group in ROIR. We rolled out a few minutes later, landed on grid and started shooting. The hostiles were about 20 carriers, mostly IT and ROL, and with superior numbers the field was cleared in a matter of minutes. We killed a total of about 15 carriers, which isn't a bad day's work. Additionally I discovered that although goons may not have any stations left they are still active in the war, with a moderate subcapital and capital presence in this fight.

The fight
Killboard link

Ishtar vs guristas part 2: Shield tanking

In response to my earlier post about plexing ishtars I've received several comments about shield tanking fits and decided it was high time to do an amateurish comparison. On the surface shield-tanked ishtars have much better tanking numbers, but we also need to take into account the peculiarities of missile damage.

When missile damage is calculated, two important things beyond damage and resists are taken into account: Explosion velocity and explosion radius. The calculation is too complicated for me but fortunately EFT exists so we don't have to do the math. Generally, when missile explosion velocity is less than ship velocity, damage is reduced; and when missile explosion radius is larger than ship signature radius, damage is reduced. Or something like that.

The basic issue with passive shield tanks when used against missiles is that shield extenders and shield rigs increase the signature radius of the ship, which increases incoming damage. Additionally, an afterburner uses a mid slot which otherwise would be used to greatly increase shield recharge so one must pick between speed and a higher DPS tank. An armor tank, by comparison, tanks less raw DPS but the signature radius never goes above the base value and an afterburner does not affect the tanked DPS number.

To compare armor and shield tanks I used a ratting raven and ratting drake with the BCS removed to make damage graphs against a shield and an armor tanked ishtar. Armor and shield tanked ishtar have pretty similar resist numbers, so I called them even and set the resist option on the DPS graph to "not used" because that gives numbers which are easier to compare. It does not give realistic DPS values for incoming damage from rats, but should return a reasonable ratio of how much damage would come in from missiles when armor vs shield tanking.

The damage dealers

Ignoring the neut issue, let's compare tanks. Using 16% therm and 86% kinetic damage incoming, a shield tanked ishtar resists 1839 raw DPS while an armor tank does 1244. As the shield tank resists 47% more raw DPS, if it receives less than 47% more incoming damage from missiles it is better at tanking.

Shield and armor ishtar setups

Damage graphs:

Red: drake vs shield ishtar (105 DPS)
Green: drake vs armor ishtar (28 DPS)
Dark blue: raven vs shield ishtar (39 DPS)
Light blue: Raven vs armor ishtar (9 DPS)

Oops! The shield tank is receiving 3.75 times as much damage from heavy assault missiles and 4.3 times as much from torpedoes.

One way we could reduce damage input significantly is by adding an afterburner and using two shield hardeners:

Shield ishtar (version 2)

Damage graphs

This reduces incoming damage to 37 and 13 respectively, only 32% and 44% more than the armor ishtar receives; but keeping this build cap stable means raw tanked DPS is reduced to 1160 - lower than the armor tank - and depending on the afterburner means it, too is vulnerable to neuts.

In conclusion: Although a shield ishtar would work just fine in lower damage situations, the armor build is better at tanking.