Incursion tears: Epic edition

So anyway. You've probably heard of the incursion interdiction, in which people are forming fleets to kill sansha motherships, forcing incursions to despawn instead of letting the incursion runners farm them for days. This - even before they started killing moms - has produced an endless ocean of tears on the forums, to rival even the ice interdiction. And these are the very best sort of tears, the ones produced by highsec 'elitists' with an entitlement complex. The sheer, sadistic joy of watching them curse the gods and shake their tiny fists in impotent rage is intoxicating.


On saturday the incursion griefers rolled out and shut down all the highsec incursions. Three more popped up overnight, and by euro prime the mom sites were available. The interdictors rolled out again, and this time I joined up in a shitfit tempest.

We formed at 2100, hit the first site, and BTL contested it and tried to suicide gank us with ECM and smartbombs. The fun was doubled!

We lost a guardian to the gank attempt, they lost their ships and somehow managed to pod their own fc. We finished the site, burned to the other two incursion sites and took them out too, cackling madly on comms all the while. It took 1 hour and 50 minutes to end all three of them, completely shutting down highsec incursion running.

May need to open in new tab

Now, serious business. Incursions are good because they get people to people work together. The incursion interdiction is also good because it is emergent, player generated content where people work together, as well as the most fun I've had in eve in years.

If you'd like to join in, here's how you do it:

Join:
Channel: Grief the bears
Teamspeak 3: 178.32.239.141

Fleets seem to roll around 2000

If you just want to harvest tears, watch the 'btl pub' and 'the ditanian fleet' channels, and the forums.

Topics in 0.0 ninja: Exploration in hostile sov space for the chronically risk-averse

EDIT 2012-12-15: With the Retribution AI, using bombers for ninja exploration is still possible but much more expensive. See this post for details.

Increasingly awesome title edition~

Alas, this is the end of the 0.0 ninja series unless I find something else to do there. That probably will not happen in the near future.


Introduction:

In terms of isk/hour, 0.0 exploration is pretty much the best money in the game. It is a fairly specialized profession, and not many people do it -- you need the right ships, the right skills... and you need space to do it in, or so many people think.

This guide will describe a method for doing limited 0.0 exploration with only cloaky ships. Using it you will be able to drive out to the edge of the galaxy, grab a billion isk of exploration loot, and drive back to jita, all in essentially perfect safety.

This guide is specific to guristas because they are what I'm familiar with, but the methodology should be adaptable to other factions (especially serpentis).


Method:

This method relies on dual boxing two cloaky ships, a tank and a damage dealer.

The tank is a nullified, cloaky tengu which scouts, scans, and tanks, set up similarly to my old 'worst tengu fit ever' exploration utility fit.

The damage dealer is a stealth bomber. These do excellent damage for their size, have a cov ops cloak, and can hit out to 60 km with t1 torpedoes.

It goes like this: The tengu goes first, since it is much more likely than the bomber to survive a gate camp. You take the ships out to 0.0, find safe systems, and scan down sites. Once an appropriate site has been located the tengu warps in first and pulls all the aggro, the bomber follows, and they get to work. Just watch local and d-scan for hostiles dropping probes.

How far you go into 0.0 is up to you. Any system that doesn't have something nasty on d-scan is usually fine, though in systems with heavy traffic or people in local it's more likely someone will try to scan you down. The further you go from empire and pipes, the less likely it is you'll be interrupted. Personally I'm quite fond of tenal.

I just do day drips, since I have to go return to highsec on a near-daily basis, but operating out of an NPC station where you can buy ammo would really streamline the process.

Doing a site
(may have to open in new tab)

Fitting:

Without further ado...



If your skills aren't awesome enough to be cap stable with that, you can totally switch out the boost amp for a cap recharger. It just means sometimes it will be necessary to orbit with the AB on to reduce incoming damage.

In the tengu's cargo you should carry about 6000 heavy missiles, then fill the rest with torpedoes to resupply the bomber. This should result in both ships running out around the same time.

If you don't feel like training astrometrics 5, you can switch the t2 probe launcher for a sisters probe launcher.

Also of note, I strongly disrecommend using any ship other than a tengu for this. Fast align time is key to a T3 surviving gate camps in 0.0, which means armor tanks (proteus, legion) won't work, and the loki has slower align time and a much worse tank. The tengu will definitely work for caldari and gallente damage types, and non-caldari rats are said to be much easier to tank so it may also be able to handle minmatar or even amarr; however, I haven't tested these.

EDIT: It is actually possible to get the loki align time down to just 0.1 second slower than the tengu, and for sanshas damage it has a better tank.



The second target painter is nice, but with cov ops 4 it isn't really necessary unless you're shooting cruiser hulls or elite frigates a lot. If you want to drop one for a salvager, analyzer, or MWD you can. Archaeology and salvaging sites are pretty worthless, in my experience, but salvaging dread guristas is sometimes worth a few million and an MWD would be really helpful if you do end up jumping into a gate camp (see evading gate camps in a cov ops ship).

EDIT: You can also fit a MWD by using a kmb-50 implant, which adds 3% CPU and costs 22 mil. Worth it.

The codebreaker is for ladar hacking sites (see H-PA Crash Crew), which are fast, easy, and can drop the nanite control skill book, which is worth about 250 mil. Except for drone regions, all or nearly all 0.0 regions have ladar hacking sites.

We use a manticore here because it receives a bonus to kinetic damage, which is best for guristas rats. You will want to match the bomber to the type of rats you're shooting.


Limitations:

This method severely limits the types of sites you can do. Sites which do AOE damage (e.g. guristas military complex) are completely out of the question. Sites which have multiple spawns, which may target the bomber, (most hacking and salvaging sites) will be very tricky. Sites where you have to kill large numbers of elite frigates or cruisers (e.g. guristas fortress) will run you out of torpedoes after only a few sites. Sites that the tengu can't tank (maze) will just plain kill you.

So what does this leave us?

Fascinatingly, with guristas this removes almost all the worthless sites, and fewer than half the high value ones. We are left with four easy, predictable, high value, and fairly common sites: DED 6/10, 7/10, and 8/10, plus LADAR hacking sites. We'll just have to see what sort of earnings these sites can provide for us.


Results:

So, does it work? Well, so far I have spent 19.4 hours doing exploration this way, and retrieved 2440 million isk worth of loot. This comes out to 125m/h.

(This figure does not include travel time to/from jita; or bounties, which I estimate totaled a hundred million or so)

Due to the highly variable nature of exploration income, 19 hours is not enough to take an accurate baseline. However, I have extremely extensive experience with guristas exploration, and my feeling is that this figure is pretty reasonable.

EDIT: After doing several more runs of this and tracking isk/hour in a general sort of way, and after the release of deadspace invulnerability fields, I think that figure might be somewhat low. Figure more than 125, but definitely less than 200.

Thoughts:

It's profitable, easy, and mostly safe. I feel confident that the long term isk per hour is higher than that of a pretty good highsec incursion fleet, and personally I find it much more enjoyable than incursions. Intermittent and randomized rewards mean it feels like less of a grind, standard rats don't switch targets so you don't have to be paying attention every second, and there are no fleetmates or FC to worry about. Plus, there's just something very relaxing about a quiet 0.0 system. Maybe I've spent too much time out there, but highsec and low are just too cramped for me to ever feel comfortable.

Also, excitement! Sometimes people try to kill you and stuff!

tl;dr more money, more fun, more interesting

Insightful commentary on the insurance changes

Since the ice interdiction started, highsec scrubs have been making a lot of noise about wanting suicide gankers not to receive insurance. And with crucible, they got their wish.

Since they're so fired up about it, one has to assume that they think it will change something. I'm not really sure where they would get that idea.

See this guy? I like him because he gets eve.

To celebrate the insurance changes, I bought a talos.

Killmail

The end.

How many stars in the sky?

Answer: About 3.3 million.

Ever since the new star field came out a year or so ago, I've been vaguely impressed at the number of stars that appear when you zoom the camera in. It has to be a repeating texture of some sort, of course, but it's still pretty impressive.

Today I decided to find out very approximately how many stars are in the sky box.

Step 1: Get a nice linear ship and an aesthetically pleasing patch of sky.

Step 2: With the camera aligned with the axis of the ship, zoom in.

Step 3: Put the cursor at one side of the screen. Right-click and drag the cursor to the other side of the screen. Zoom out. Using the ship as a reference, estimate how many degrees the camera has turned.

That looks like about 45 degrees to me.

Step 4: Find out how the width of the screen compares to the width of the arc covered when dragging the mouse across the screen.

This is accomplished by zooming in, placing the cursor at one edge of the screen, dragging the camera one screen-width and taking a screenshot. The distance in pixels from the cursor to the edge of the screen, divided by the monitor width in pixels, is the number of screen-widths in a 45 degree arc.

Screenshots don't save the cursor position, but I was able to use UI elements as landmark. The answer is about 160 pixels, so with a 1650x monitor there are 10.3 screen-widths in a 45 degree arc.

Step 5: Find the surface area of the sky sphere, measured in screen-widths.

10.3 screen-widths is 45 degrees. A circle is 360 decrees. (360/45)*10.3 gives us a circumference of 82.4 screen-widths.

Putting 'sphere circumference 82.4' into wolfram tells us that the surface area of the sphere is 2161.

(that's 2161 1650x1650 pixel squares)

So all we have to do is find out how many stars are in a 1650x1650 square. But that's a lot of stars, so instead we'll find out how many stars are in 1/10 that area.

Sqrt(1650^2/10)=521

So we take a zoomed-in screenshot, mark out a 521^2 pixel square, count the stars and multiply the answer by 2161*10.

That's 152 stars. 152*10*2161=3.3 million stars... within a fairly wide margin of error.

Almost like a real fleet

Minor update on incursion running. I've spent a few hours on it over the past two weeks, and the money is a little better than I had said -- 50m/h is the very low end of normal, while a good FC and fleet can make 100m plus LP.

I also got in on an HQ (40 man site) fleet. Unlike vanguard sites, which most fleets are for, HQ actually keep you awake. From a grunt's perspective it's almost like a real fleet, except there's no danger and targets are designated with tags instead of broadcasts. I have yet to see a ship die in an incursion.

Almost

EDIT: Blogspot is opening screenshots in the foreground and graying out the background, which resizes larger screenshots to ick on smaller monitors. Hm.

Incursions

So I read this post (if you're thinking of getting into incursions click the link, read the post and the guides it links).

I've heard that incursions are the best thing going in highsec, and had considered trying them. After reading that post and one of the guides, I decided to go for it. Fitted out a scimi -- logi are highly sough after in incursion fleets, and much cheaper than many of the DPS ships people fly.

I got into a fleet doing tier 2 incursion sites, which it turns out are not very difficult, and made 54m/h over 3.6 hours. So, easy money, and apparently much more profitable than missions. Unfortunately profit still scales linearly with time, which is something I've been trying to get away from with manufacturing, science and trade. Odds are I won't be doing these much in the long run.

If you decide to give incursions a try, I highly recommend getting at least a logi or tier 3 CR battleship before trying to get into a fleet. They can be somewhat selective.

Not one of the more difficult sites.

The ice must floe

So goons are ganking bots and people who are mining gallente ice (which produces oxygen isotopes), to fill the game with tears and fuck.

You can read the plan. There's been some discussion as to whether it's for real or not, and I was curious to know what was actually happening. So I checked.

The plan includes a list of target systems. Shortly after hearing about the project I checked a few systems and found no gankers, and about 10-20 miners in each ice belt. 12 hours after that, I went through the list and checked every (non-island) system. This is what I found:

• Ardallabier - 2 miners, down from ~15 earlier. Ganks ongoing.
• Brapelille - 12 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Jaschercis - 5 miners. These ones are trying to be tricky, using ECM drones, RR, and hulks instead of mackinaws. An alpha pest or maybe two smartbombers could kill them, but I hung out for a while and nobody took them out.
• Angymonne - 1 miner.
• Aydoteaux - 5 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Carirgnottin - 6... 5... 4 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Tolle - 1 miner.
• Ignebaener - A single miner, being bumped by a gank brutix while the brutix pilot mourned the lack of remaining targets.

Out of curiosity, I then re-visited the systems in reverse order

• Tolle - No miners.
• Carirgnottin - No miners.
• Aydoteaux - 3 miners, surrounded by exhumer and gank ship wrecks. I suspect they were replacing lost mackinaws from a stock in station. Obviously bots. Ganks ongoing.
• Angymonne - No miners.
• Jaschercis - 2 miners. No visible gank activity.
• Brapelille - 2 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Ardallabier - 1 miner, ganks ongoing.

Here's the goon killboard. The search tool shows 280 exhumer and mining barge kills in the last two days, which appear to have taken place almost exclusively in gallente highsec.

I'm gon' call it, highsec oxygen isotope production has been shut down hard. So what's going on with the market?

Well, as soon as the 'goonswarm shrugged' announcement was made, well before ganks started, speculation drove the price of isotopes up to about 3 times their previous price. At that point people started selling stock for hilarious profits, which caused the price to stabilize and even decrease. Some people who would have otherwise held their stock mistook this for a peak and also put their stock up for sale. Currently oxygen isotopes in jita are 1050 isk per unit, down from a peak of about 1300.

And what happens next? Two possibilities:

1. Goons stop killing miners, prices return to normal.
2. Goons keep ice production shut down, stocks are depleted and the price increases more. Possibly a lot more.

I'm betting on number 2 at the moment. It won't last forever, but things could be really interesting in the meantime.

Lastly, forums. There is a thread, and it is full of sperging goonhate, tears and some of the dumbest shit I've ever read. It's beautiful.

What I'm doing now

I mentioned a few weeks back that I've gone back to empire and am changing direction in my gameplay. I've been sort of putting off posting about it since I'm still working out how the whole mess is going to work, but I guess now is as good a time as any.

Short version, instead of being 0.0 elitepeeveepee, or indeed any pvp at all (for the forseeable future), I'm going to be doing science and industry.

LIKE A BOSS

Fortunately, I have some pride so I won't be sitting in jita and adjusting market orders by 0.01 isk. I'm awesome, you see, so I'm going to be building capital ships, mostly in lowsec, and I'm going to be doing it from BPOs.

Here's how it's going to work:

First, I now have a personal corp for building. When building capital ships it's helpful to have more than 11 manufacturing slots, so I will have two characters in this corporation. Capitals are a 2-stage process, manufacturing capital components first and then the ship when the components are done, so all the minerals and parts will be kept in a corp hangar, and jobs will be installed on behalf of the corp and delivered to the corp hangar, which makes manufacturing with multiple characters much easier. All the lowsec manufacturing and market orders will be accomplished by the two characters in this corporation, isk will be kept in the corporation wallet, etc. And nobody else will be allowed in.

A third character, in NPC corp to avoid any possible wardecs, will be used to move minerals from jita to the lowsec building system. Moving minerals will be accomplished thusly:

First, the ships to be built will be indentified. Using the power of spreadsheets the mineral requirements for those ships will be found, then the minerals purchased. The expensive minerals will be moved directly to lowsec via jump freighter(to avoid possible ganks), but first everything that doesn't fit in the JF will be moved via freighter to a highsec system adjacent to the lowsec building system. After the jump freighter moves the high-value minerals to the lowsec building system, it will then jump via gate to the system with the low value minerals and back to the building system until all the minerals have been moved. This saves a lot of jump fuel compared with jumping from jita to lowsec repeatedly, plus I can get in two loads of minerals for each cyno cycle.

Since the third charcter will not be in my corporation, it won't be able to help build in lowsec. Instead, the third character will build freighters (and probably orcas later on) in jita, using the freighter to move minerals to a station with shorter manufacturing wait times than the 4-4 station.


So uh, that's my project at the moment. I've been afk-working on this for a couple of weeks and it's only partially set up; the situation currently is that the third character is currently the CEO and sole member of the building corp, jita manufacturing won't even start for another 10 days and the two lowsec building characters are only partially trained. I have gotten some ships built, though, and sold two carriers at 20% profit. The jerk-head who told me I was wrong about the margins on carriers when I commented about them several months ago on somebody else's blog can suck it.


My goal with this is to at least be able to pay for plex on two accounts, and I'm confident it will do so once things are up and running. It would also be nice if I could turn a decent profit beyond that, which we'll see about. If things do work out, I've identified some other business opportunities which spare liquidity can be invested in. Plus I still want a titan.

EDIT: This is my second ever post using the 'industry' tag. The first was in december of 2009.

The method works!

So, convert a video to .bik and put it in the right folder with the right name and you can watch it in CQ. This raises all sorts of possibilities. You could use it to watch combat videos...


(click to embiggen)

...instructional videos... have CQ-only music...

ooooorrrrrrrrr you could use it to watch ponies.


(click)

(click)

(don't click)

CQ and incarna are now fully justified.

I was there

So CCP is starting a new media site thing and encouraging players to send things in.

Did anybody not immediately think of this?

DRF vs NC: Skirmishes

So far, the DRF have not made a serious push to take tribute. PL and possibly Tri (ncdot) have moved to venal, where naturally they are trying to take tech moons. The difference between now and january, is that now they can call on half the galaxy for support whenever we outnumber them.

There have been some fights, but nothing major.

Today we were trying to take down a hostile tower a blue system. It was cyno jammed, and we had capitals and supers in system and they didn't, but we were outnumbered about 3 to 1. They jumped in and our subcapitals, carriers, and supercapitals with the exception of nyxes fought them on the gate. Nyxes were stationed on the cyno jammer to rep it when the hostiles tried to take it down, and indeed one of their fleets broke off and engaged the jammer.

It dropped very slowly as our subcapitals were killed off, and as it got close to being incapped the FC ordered supercapitals to log off by stages, first a titan that he thought would be primaried when the hostiles came in, then the rest of the titans a few minutes later, then the supercarriers. In what I am convinced was half luck, half brilliance and half lag, for a total of 100% awesome and 50% not awesome but it worked out for us so that's okay, this plan actually worked, and when the jammer went down and the hostiles dropped 150 supercapitals on us, they got no supercap kills; though a wyvern had been lost to subcapitals earlier.

It would have been really spectacular if I didn't have a good idea how much luck was involved, but it was still pretty impressive.

EDIT: MM KB still broken, link removed.

General update, including DRF vs NC

War news first.

The DRF have taken the rest of vale and geminate, and the sitaution has stabilized. They reinforced a couple of stations in tribute but as far as I know didn't make a real attempt at taking them.

Hitting tribute brought DC into the war on our side. The DRF responded to this with denial of service attacks against NC communications infrastructure (jabber, etc.), proving once and for all that they are cheating scum.

The current situation is that nothing important is being reinforced. We haven't started a counterattack, and the enemy haven't made a serious push into tribute. Fighting is mostly over towers.


In general eve news, CCP have decided to nerf jump bridges by limiting them to 1 per system, meaning you have to use gates alternating with jump bridges. This makes them basically completely useless except as shortcuts; the only way to move safely is with a carrier or nullified T3. I already have them, but fucking over players who are poor, have low sp or don't multibox seems sort of stupid.

The real mystery to me is why they're dicking about with jump bridges instead of fixing technetium and supercarriers, which are actually broken.


As for me personally, I'm at sort of a crossroads where eve is concerned. I haven't been playing lately.

This is partly because I'm a super pilot, and super pilots are permanently on "standby" while anything important is going on. So I got out of the habit of even getting in subcapital fleets at the beginning of the war, and every fleet where I actually got to do something turned into superlag bullshit which made me instantly bittervet.

So, I haven't been playing. I'm also not sure I want to, which is made more interesting by the fact that my corp is closing at the end of the month due to director fatigue.

I'm going to try and get in fleets over the next few weeks to see if I even find it fun any more. If I do, I'll find another corp in razor or MM. If not, I'll probably just let my characters lapse into NPC corps. I'm working on setting up a capital shipyard, and some time to focus on that would be nice; if I move to another NC corp, I'll probably just take combat characters and my holding alt, and leave carebears out for now.


While I was writing this I actually got in a fleet and there was a fight. We lost and I'm not sure what we were fighting over, but it was sort of fun.

DRF vs NC: CSAA save

DRF reinforced a RAGE CSAA and it came out this morning. Fortunately rage hasn't been disbanded recently, so the system's strategic index was full up and there was a cyno jammer keeping the hostile super fleet out, while we could bring in capitals via jump bridges. The fighting started before downtime and I got in fleet immediately after.

Getting in system was fun. I came through the bridge 25 km from the pos shield just as about 170 hostiles landed next to me. Unfortunately the hostile FC wasn't a complete retard, and instead of trying to take down my nyx popped two carriers that were slowboating toward the shield first. They did shoot me for a while and I got down to about 10% shield (in an armor tank) before they switched targets. A third blue carrier was pulled back from structure as the rest of our caps moved outside the pos shield and got the spider tank going.

In total we lost the two carriers, and a bunch of battleships apparently mostly before downtime. After the third carrier was saved we pretty much owned everything we could tackle. Most of the fighting was on a stargate as we bubbled a hostile fleet that jumped in, and the final score looks to be about 3:2 in our favor plus we saved the CSAA.

There are another 2 CSAA in reinforced, which we would have to screw up to not save. A couple of our outposts are also in shield reinforced, coming out in euro/US time minutes from the CSAA. We might let the outposts go to armor RF to save the CSAA.

EDIT: It looks like I got on 66 kills today. Thank you, ECM burst!

An "oh shit" moment


But I got better

Killboard -- 34b killed for 20 lost

Superenemies

DRF vs NC: Another biggest supercap fight ever, part 1

This is getting annoyingly routine.

Today the o2o station came out of its' last reinforced timer during russian prime. If we can take the station and anchor a TCU we take the system.

We formed about 70 supers and got in system about 2.5 hours before the outpost came out. Local was about 1100, with reported 300 reds, when reds jumped in another 600+, including probably over 100 supercapitals. Around 3 hours before downtime we decided to engage, warped on grid and it was on.

The fight was on a hostile tower. Apparently they didn't blackscreen enough, and we lost an erebus to the doomsday volley. We kept with it, but they had more numbers than us and hostile titans could re-enter shield when they were primaried. Targets eventually did go down, oh-so-slowly, and the final tally was 7 blue titans lost for 4 red titans and 2 nyx killed. Part 2 is expected to happen after downtime.

At some point during the fight

Confirmed dead:

Blue:

bodynak erebus
countrywv erebus
daos leghki erebus
fuzion erebus
sammaster ragnarok
salvoxia ragnarok
lord deighton leviathan

Hostile:

miss shifty avatar
james kavourarias erebus
dimple knotwise erebus
melony814 erebus

drakul pensignton nyx
intensive nyx

killboard - isk ratio is broeken

EDIT:
(04:14:15 AM) rawr-shva-altrinsic: Dimple, James, Wallace2004, lipix were all there
(04:14:39 AM) 42-ukc-reza-najafi: sala said they got new ones
(04:14:43 AM) 42-ukc-reza-najafi: didnt get reimbursed

macro empire 4 ever!

Superfriends

Problem?

:trollface:

DRF vs NC: Early morning killmails

After slaughtering the DRF supers yesterday, we formed up this morning to kill the o2o ihub. Hostiles used their typical strategy of bringing triage carriers, but the tides have turned and today it was us that dropped supers on them. Thanks to ECM burst I got on about 55 killmails in 10 minutes, including krutoj in a triage carrier.

Enemy capitals as we arrived on grid

Killboard - 81 billion killed, 23 lost

After this was done we received information that the DRF had scheduled an evacuation op to lowsec. I'm not sure if they're giving up, or just getting out of the system because they can't hold it any more. In either case we killed the o2o ihub and now just need to take the station before we can get the systen back. It comes out of reinforced in late US time two days from now.

DRF vs NC: 20+ DRF supers down in o2o reverse uemon

Including at least 8 titans. But first, a general update.

After we lost all those supers in uemon hostiles were using their own super fleet with impunity while we could only use subcaps. As you might imagine, this resulted in not getting a lot done. There were a lot of fights, many of which we lost isk-wise because hostiles could use triage carriers.

Hostiles hold station systems o2o and and UG-, which have been reinforced constantly since the DRF took them over a month ago. The effort to retake them has been hindered by several factors -- enemy supers, the large number of timers involved in taking space under dominion, and some sort of downtime bug which messes with timers and makes op scheduling hard.

Anyway, after a full month of accomplishing fuck all word went out to superfriends that our glorious leaders had hatched a plan to get our supers back into the fight and get revenge for uemon. Razor subcapitals also moved up from sendaya to help with the planned purge (rzr supers were already in gem).

On tuesday we messed up a sov transfer in vale. DRF made a play for the system and failed.

Wednesday nothing happened. We got in 020 with about 80 supers and 800 other blues and put the ihub into armor reinforced. DRF went to ug- with 80 supers and reportedly support numbers similar to ours. We did the mexican standoff thing for a couple hours and they went home.

After redeyeing that op, this morning I slept through three alarms and missed the formup. I woke up to super fight messages on jabber and got in fleet. Lag was being peculiar, and despite loading grid, launching bombers and activating modules I couldn't lock anything. After a few relogs targets started working and I got on the last few supercarrier kills.

Apparently what happened is that they were tricked into thinking we were jumping out, jumped in trying to catch stragglers and ended up in the middle of our super fleet and surrounded by dictors. After losing a few titans without killing any of our supers they switched damage to dictors and tried to get out. We apparently didn't lose any supers at that time, though several did have to get off the field.

Word is that Raiden. ordered their supers to jump out before the russians did, which I think is a particularly delicious note. I sort of have it out for them, because they have quite a sizable ego without any deeds to back it up and because they have it out for the NC. Right after uemon their leader-or-whatever announced that they would destroy the NC through a war of attrition, and I'm eager to mock their terribleness whenever they get around to actually fighting.

Yaay the destroyer was the FC for this op. I think this brings him up to 15-ish titan and at least 20 supercarrier kills in the last 2-1/2 months.

EDIT: The killboard is showing 7 titan and 13 supercarrier kills, but two titans and one supercarrier are reported confirmed dead without generating killmails. This isn't too surprising since there were three killmails that were never generated after the uemon fight as well. I'm starting to suspect there's a bug with supercap killmails.

EDIT: One NC titan died well after the fight was finished. The pilot had been unable to relog earlier after multiple attempts and the titan refused to disappear from space. Fortunately it was vuk lau's alt and he didn't want that already being replaced titan anyway technetium technetium technetium.

MORE EDIT: The NC titan that died apparently respawned after downtime and was boarded by a red.

Supars

Killboard -- will take time to sync

Probably also dead:
Silus Yarmon (Avatar)
Captain Chomp (Erebus)
Spartanetz (Nyx)

Screenshot sunday: Traffic control

Click

Or at least a busy scene. I think this was from the kalevala campaign.

Titan and hel keeled in counter-hotdrop

Somebody poked jabber for carriers and supers tonight. We logged in, and we waited. And waited. And waited.

Then we jumped in and landed on a small hostile fleet on a blue jump bridge pos, consisting of some battleships, a ragnarok, a hel and three or four dreads. Not sure who they were; I don't recognize the alliance name, and they were marked neutral so they probably weren't part of the DRF forces. Anyway, apparently the story is that we baited them with an aeon, got bubbles up when they jumped in and then brought in our own fleet. The bait aeon says he never got below 99% armor. EDIT: But it looks like they killed a chimera.

P'pew

EDIT: Youtube

It's always heartwarming to see blue jump effects light up a grid like that. Interesting video there, taken by somebody's cap transfer alt. This is the first time I've embedded a youtube video in anything, but enough videos are made of fights I take part in that I might have to make it a habit.

Titan

Hel

Killboard