Two solar fleet titans, one nyx down in geminate

The story starts a month or so ago, when RAGE, ME, Rebellion Alliance and various others started a campaign to retake geminate. This proceeded quietly until about a week ago when solar fleet, their campaign against atlas more or less over, started fighting back.

Solar have a lot of supercapitals, but apparently not a lot of experience using them. Four of their supercarriers were caught and killed about a week ago. A fifth was killed a few days later.

Today I was out west in Mostly Harmless space, in a fight with ev0ke over some tower, when the TDE station in geminate came out of reinforced and a fight developed between the eastern NC alliances and solar fleet. We got word that solar fleet supercapitals were tackled and every capital pilot in the coalition rushed to get there. I podded myself back to tribute (burning a set of +4s, grumble) and started jumping toward the fight.

Waiting for capacitor recharge is painful in these situations. Our capitals and supercapitals were strung out across about 5 cyno beacons starting somewhere out west and leading to just out of titan jump range from the fight. The first wave of capitals jumped in well before I was in position, and things went bad; we didn't have enough people on the field and titans couldn't get in. We were ordered to stop jumping in and the capitals in TDE went siege red and tried to escape. Everybody jumped to a midpoint within titan range of TDE, one nyx escaping in 15% armor.

Our capitals and supers assembled at the midpoint for a few minutes and we jumped back in.

Primary was an erebus, and it melted. We switched to a leviathan; it went down slowly, but died after a few minutes. I unfortunately crashed while it was in high shield and didn't manage to get a screenshot. We tried to kill a second leviathan, but it was leaking armor when it managed to jump out from inside a bubble. Blame lag, I guess.

Erebus going down


The one that got away

With downtime minutes away our final target was a nyx. Things were very close, but when the server shuts down a highly populated system it doesn't drop everybody at once. I was one of the first to drop, and the last I saw the nyx was in structure. Half a minute later it was reported at 50% structure, then 10%, then "everything red" by the last person to be disconnected. Experienced players said the nyx would be killed by drones or by missiles already in flight, and they were right. The timestamp on the nyx kill is one minute after downtime.

Nyx dying

After downtime the hostiles didn't log in and the fight was over. We lost a total of 18 capitals, which I figure to be a pretty good trade.

EDIT: Removed non-useful killboard link.

Erebus

Leviathan

Nyx

Titan or nyx: The answer

I have now posted a more general comparison of supercarriers and titans.

"Nyx."

See you tomorrow!

Okay though, it's like this: Titans are expensive, it would take a long time to get in one and the NC is desparately short on supercarriers should we be attacked by a coalition of the russians and our various longtime enemies. Then I finally found a builder who can deliver a nyx in a reasonable timeframe and for a reasonable price. I had enough isk on hand for the hull and part of the fitting, so I spent a few days carebearing it up to get the rest. Now I'm just waiting on skills and the hull.

A fairly standard fit

Is expensive

On supercapital inflation

A post over at wotlankor got me thinking about supercap inflation. It's something everyone has noticed over the last few couple years but not an issue I have a particular position on. For one thing, I want a titan; for another, the NC has the largest capital fleet in the game so it doesn't affect me.

Supercapital inflation refers to the increasing prevalance of supercapitals in our internet spaceship game. Back in the day, major wars were started over the rumor that somebody was building a titan. Today it's not uncommon to see dozens of supercapitals on one grid.

So what caused this? Moon gold production hasn't changed. Mineral and T1 ship prices have been dead stable since the post-apocrypha deflation period. My theory is that while the amount of isk items cost has remained steady the actual value of isk has declined as the money supply increased. Isk floods into the game from rat bounties and mission rewards while it never leaves the economy in meaningful amounts. We can find evidence for this by going back 5 years to the famous GHSC heist, at which time 30 billion isk was valued at $16,500. Today 30 billion is worth almost exactly $1,650 and is chump change to any major alliance. My suspicion is that with the money supply increasing but mineral prices remaining stable, it becomes trivial for high earners - moon gold empires, T2 blueprint owners, savvy traders, manufacturers, even high-rolling carebears like myself - to accrue enough money for supercapitals.

Assuming that we want to fix supercapital inflation, one option would be to stabilize the amount of isk in the game. New, must-have NPC commodities could remove isk from the economy but would be against the eve philosophy of a player-run economy. Removal of rat bounties would stop isk from entering the game, but since most players depend on this for income the economy would collapse overnight.

Another option would be to change the price of supercapitals. A one-time increase in build cost would have the same problems as the current system, but - assuming I'm on the right track - if build cost became a dynamic value based on the current isk supply divided by the isk supply when the first titans were built, supercapital construction could be made permanently challenging even for large alliances.

It's a ridiculous idea of course; most likely supers will just become so common that people stop caring, like happened with capitals. But it would work to stop supercap inflation. It could even be applied to normal capitals, taking us back to a time when a few dozen capitals would be an important strategic resource.

Yawn

Low intensity warfare continues in pure blind. The focus seems to be mainly on technetium moons, with no serious threats to sov that I have been made aware of. Tri have apparently been grinding our towers steadily, prompting regular capital ops to clear them out. I always hope they'll get sloppy with their supers and I'll finally get to lock one, but they've been suitably cautious; so have we, bringing overwhelming numbers of capitals when possible and standing down when our numbers are small enough to be taken out by a dozen or so supercarriers. Overall I would describe the PB/CR conflict as boring and tedious, but at least grinding towers gives me killmails.

An annoying development over the past few months is that dreads rarely siege any more. I'm not sure precisely why capital fleets have more damage now, since moms can't hit towers and titans only do as much damage as 2-3 dreads, but these days tower kill ops rarely result in burning any strontium. On reinforce ops sometimes the FC will have us siege though, just so we can kill a few pos mods and get killmails as a reward for coming out.

See what I have to put up with

Screenshot Thursday: Nyx

Yes, it's my most favorite ship in the game. Yes, there will be more nyx pictures. This one is notable for being the first nyx I ever saw, as well as predating the supercarrier buff to a time when motherships were just big carriers.

Don't be these people

Don't fly shield tanks in an armor fleet. If there had been another pos gunner, or if we had had fewer than 15 guardians, these people would be dead and I would be happy.

Don't fly oneiros. Two in fleet and they're both in structure. This is normal. Train guardian, fly tackle, fly dps, just don't fly oneiros.

Exploration site guides: Guristas Fortress

Guristas fortress is one of the easiest and least valuable 0.0 guristas plex. It contains elite cruisers with significant ECM capabilities, but no particular obstacles or complications.

Running the site:

The first room is accessed through an acceleration gate and contains four groups of rats. The first will aggress on warpin, the rest by proximity.

Group 1:

Three elite frigates
Four battlecruisers

Group 2:

Four elite frigates
Three elite cruisers

Group 3:

5 cruisers and elite cruisers (randomized)
3 battleships

Group 4:

Three battlecruisers
Three battleships

As you kill the rats, three frigates will spawn. Once all the rats are dead, you may use the acceleration gate.


The second room contains two groups of enemies. The first will aggress on warpin, the second by proximity.

Group 1:

3 cruise missile batteries
3 stasis towers

Group 2:

1 cruiser
3 frigates
3 elite frigates, which may warp scramble
2 battlecruisers
3 elite cruisers
4 battleships

Destroying the cruiser may result in a faction spawn appearing. Killing the faction spawn may cause an escalation.

• NOTE: To the left of the station ruins are 4 cuboid structures named 'guristas bunker'. If there is no faction spawn, KILL THESE and there may still be an escalation.

Statistics:

Times run: 30
Chance of faction spawn: 50%
Chance of escalation: 33.33%
Average isk value of drops: 19 million