IT vs NC: H-W attacked

As you know if you watch any forums, the SC have finally made their move. They called an all-out coalition CTA and put everythig into our staging system in tribute, locking it down at downtime with 7-800 reds in an obvious attempt to PR- us (perseus has stated as much). Their plan apparently is to put everything into one system for 5 days, take the station and move on to the next; and today and tomorrow are a russian holiday, so their numbers are the highest they will ever be.

The trouble with this is that the enemy is based almost entirely out of russian and european time zones with minimal US coverage. Local peaked at about 1100 today, but started dropping fast around 2 PM PST (11 PM GMT) to around 300 reds. After a couple hours of spinning and waiting for the capitals they had on the station to mostly log off we broke out at 9 PM PST.

(note: when I first wrote this I actually used a future tense and predicted breaking out monday; happily, it didn't last that long)

Immediately after breaking out


Another view of the station

It was snipers vs snipers and we warped out, warped in, bubbled, killed bubblers, that sort of thing. The enemy used their capitals, warping carriers in to rep and so forth. Modules were very laggy for all sides and damage coming in was fairly light. Between this and people being able to warp out, logi were really useful - something of a new feeling for me.

Snipers on the station


Bubbles going down

After a couple hours the enemy logged off and we had system dominance. Word is they will be bringing a fight; if something goes down I'll post about it.

The blog pack: Some statistics

I was curious, so I went through CK's blog pack to grab some numbers (the evebloggers pack being far too large to attempt this). Naturally they're not 100% accurate, but it's not like anybody will repeat the process to prove me wrong.

Types of blog:
15 are general stuff with no real focus
13 are about 0.0
12 are about piracy and lowsec
6 are about highsec (including ninjas)
4 are about wormholes

Other stuff:
12 are in-character or fanfic

13 apologise on the front page for not posting enough
4 have a most recent post which says the author is going afk or quitting

1 averaged more than one post per day over the last month
6 is the median number of posts per month
3 had 0 posts in the last month

EDIT 1/2012: This post used to have the 'nobody cares' label, hence the comments~

IT vs NC: Station saved

X-7 Friday 00.01

RED PEN CTA!

First station about to fall in PB.

LOGISTICS, Battleships, dictors.
BOMBERWING present with FC! (shrapnel)

posted by SirMolle [EVOL] member

Over the last couple of days Ev0ke and Dead Terrorists have been making a push for a station in the far west of NC space, FIO in Fade. They reinforced the station once, and the end of the first reinforcement cycle coincided with the Stella Polaris sov issue so we let it go into armor reinforced while saving the stations in the north.

Today we formed up supercaps > carriers and jumped to FIO. The hostiles had battleships and bombers in system and the situation was a little tense; titans were assigned to doomsday enemy FCs and backup cynos were arranged, but even jumping into a hot grid with upward of 500 in system everybody loaded and enemy battleships were driven off. Although SC was present, according to forums their numbers were quite weak.

After jumping in

We started shooting a sovereignty blockade unit but the enemy reinforced the system's infrastructure hub and the SBU went invulnerable. This meant we had to wait for the station to come out of reinforced, at which point sov structures (all? some? does anybody actually understand sov?) would be vulnerable again.

When that happened we killed the SBU and repped the station. Somebody also dropped SBU in EC- before the fight started, and I think the supercarriers headed home early and took them out on the way.

SBU is going nowhere

IT vs NC: Saving BFFs from evil clowns

Later this evening they pinged jabber for supercarriers > caps and we went north to kill enemy TCU which were coming online. The situation with the stella polaris stations is that the sov dropped (they say the automatic bill payment failed to work) and White Noise flipped three out of four stations to their control and dropped TCU. The TCU take some time to come online, and once they do it would force us to go through all the stations' reinforced cycles to get them back. We needed to make the enemy TCU die and Stella Polaris' ones live in order to prevent a serious setback there.

We jumped into the destination system with 12 minutes left on the TCU anchoring. Blue subcapitals were on field and ten hostile supercarriers were hugging the shields of their pos. We put damage on the TCU and they put fighter bombers on us, which we smartbombed away. The TCU went down with less than 9 minutes left out of its' 8 hour timer.

The rest of the evening was spent killing the other TCU and flipping all the stations back to Stella Polaris ownership. At the time of writing I'm heading back to tribute, but a number of carriers and supercarriers are staying in Branch until the last Stella Polaris TCU come online about two hours from now.

Perseus has an account of the fight from the perspective of SC subcaps, which is pretty neat.

IT vs NC: General update

In the last few days the SC has purportedly formed into a single, large front and have been attacking tribute directly in m-o and e-o, even dropping sovereignty blockades. This has resulted in several large fights when we killed the SBU, although no enemy capitals have been deployed.

Today they hit e-o again and dropped SBU. I formed up with a reinforcement fleet of about 170 a while after the fighting started and we bridged into system and warped to a grid with abundant reds and a second blue fleet. Local was a little over 600 and we stayed on grid for maybe ten or fifteen minutes before the reds warped off and left system; then we cleared the SBU and headed home. It was just another subcap fight so I didn't get any screenshots worth posting.

Killboard

In other war news, according to forums the NC lost a CSAA. Not sure what was in it. Also, Stella Polaris lost all their sov to not paying bills or something. White Noise grabbed either 1 or 3 of their 4 stations, so taking that back while simultaneously fighting in tribute and playing with pos in pure blind will make our job a bit more difficult for the near future.

More carrier combat

Today I got to play pee-vee-pee with a pos repping carrier again. We went down to Pure Blind to rep some stuff and hostiles showed in slightly larger numbers. They were sniper fit and our battleships were close range, with fighters assigned for bonus damage.

We repped one pos without incident, hostiles entered system and we sat on the shields of the other with fighters assigned while waiting for it to exit reinforced, with our subcapitals in the safe pos. When the hostile fleet came on grid we would rep each other and pos guns while the subcaps warped to the enemy fleet at zero. Unfortunately we apparently forgot to bring dictors and weren't able to catch very many.

Blues landing on enemy snipers

The tower came out of reinforced and our subcap fleet stopped warping in for whatever reason. Hostiles primaried the tower and we put shield reps on it, racing damage vs reps.

Racing against damage to rep the tower


Using carrier reconfiguration mode to hotswap mods

After a few minutes they weren't making a lot of progress so they switched to close range ammo, warped on us at ten and tried to kill carriers and bump us inside the shields. I was swapping modules like mad, hardeners for flux coils and adding reppers. They had a thanatos into structure before we got enough reps on it; I was running all four that I brought with me.

Defensive burst!

EDIT: And when that didn't work they left and the pos was repped without further incident. Forgot to mention that part.

Oh frak, more supercapital kills

...and I can't even take credit for them.

To start off, PL killed another nyx. I wasn't even going to post about it, but then they kept killing expensive stuff.

In the southeast, "somebody" has apparently donated 10 billion isk worth of sovereignty blockade units to Brick Squad. I'm not sure whether this was contributory, but brick and PL killed an AAA-pet hel yesterday. AAA dropped 20 carriers to save it but it died anyway. Then they self-destructed the carriers.

Finally, a few NC took a road trip down south to killmail whore on an IT CSAA. IT has understandably declined to confirm/deny rumors that it was building a titan, but it dropped capital construction parts when it was killed so there was definitely a supercapital being built.

EDIT: Breaking news! ROL killed an NC wyvern. Apparently it jumped to a cyno beacon without a scout.