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Defanging the Hydra

I have been quite busy over the last few days, so no entry.

We accepted a contract against Hydra Alliance a few days ago, and once again started the process of moving all our ships, modules and ammunition (I sometimes consider training up Amarr ships, the idea of not having to procure ammunition is very tempting, but then I have to train T2 lasers, meh). Fortunately, this time it wasn't so far from Nonni, or Torrinos for that matter, and without an Empire wardec to slow us down, we relocated reasonably quickly to Obe.

As I was at a loose end on Sunday, myself in a Vagabond and a few other KIA pilots (Mikhalio, McKinley and fertigo) decided to run up the pipe toward TVN-FM, where Hydra are based. Along the way, we narrowly missed a couple of ships, and TVN didn't prove to be fruitful either. We finally managed to bag a Retriever mining ship which had jumped into the outpost system of C-FP70. It was officially the first kill of the contract :-)

We didn't know what sort of response that would elicit, so as we were light on both numbers and firepower, we headed for home, calling in quickly to TVN again, and this time I got lucky and warped into a belt where a Drake was blithely ratting. As we were light on firepower, and I had no EMP ammo on me (moron, I won't make that mistake again), it took some time to kill him. There 24 neutral/ hostiles in local and no-one came to help him. It turns out he wasn't hardened against EM at all, just kinetic, the damage the Guristas favour. We decided to get out of there as 2 more Drakes now undocked.

The past couple of days was spent POS bashing, I joined in where I could, and we took down their cynosaural jammer field, enabling us to bring in the Titan. I had gone to sleep for the night when our Titan destroyed 25 Hydra/ Tau Ceti ships (I didn't realise TCF were friends with Hydra). They witnessed the power of this fully armed and operational Titan.

And so, last night. Once again, Hydra had repaired the cyno jammer, and we took our BSs to blow it up. When I joined the gang, they were hard at work on the jammer, the guns and the other fripperies a POS usually has. Most of their guns were taken out, then Hydra gunners started turning up. We had to be extra careful, and there were no losses. We then jumped out to Obe to restock on ammo, repair up any remaining armour damage, recharge shields etc. My Tempest's readout was all showing optimal.

We got word that Hydra, having seen us leave the system, had set up a camp on the Obe gate in P3. They were Battleship heavy, with support ships ranging from Inties to Hictors. We were going to jump in an engage- no Titan this time, just conventional weapons. I quickly ran system checks and confirmed with the crew that everything was AOK. This was going to be a big fight. We were gang-warped to the gate and jumped in.....

The fight lasted 11 minutes.

We held our cloaks, and took stock of the situation. I had filtered my overview to just show battleships, and my word there was a lot of them. I instructed the camera to look around, and I could see there were a lot of support ships on the gate with their drones out. I couldn't initially see the Battleship group... then there, I spotted them- above the gate and out some way. They were all about 40-90 km away. Our FC, Tjakka, ordered a regroup and our ships all broke their post-jump cloaks at the same time and headed toward him. This brought us all in range of each other's remote repairers.

Tjakka started calling targets, the first being Alrick Undying- bad luck for having a name starting with 'A' as we were going alphabetically this time. He was about 90km out. I had pre-loaded Tremor ammunition, with it's extra long range reach, and the ship shuddered slightly as my 1400s blasted the rounds out toward the target at tremendous speed. Then, shortly afterwards, he disappeared... I assume he had died, but I can't find any trace of him in the kill-logs, so I assume he warped off.

Then, the thing that all pilots dread happened. For no clear reason other than a lot of ships are in close proximity to each other (and by this I mean up to 500km), our electronics are interefered with, and there is significant delay in updating camera drone feeds, de/activating modules and even issuing commands to the ships engines. Not even the top scientists can attribute this phenomenon to anything, and we just have to live with it.

So, I started doing my best to target several ships at once, with the delay it meant I would have them pre-locked by the time they were called primary and by the time my weapons had deactivated. While I was distracted doing this, my ships shuddered under the hammer blows of six Wrath Cruise missiles. My mouth went dry, I figured I was primary... but the damage wasn't that great, and my overview confirmed only one ship, Edes Imp, was firing at me. Curious. He wasn't doing enough damage to worry me at that moment, and then he was called primary. If he was called Zzzebedee, then maybe he'd have become an issue, but there you go.

I noticed on the Watch List that Eddz was in trouble, he'd been primaried (as usual), so I locked him, and waited... and waited.. and then activated my remote reppers... and waited. Sigh. I could've prelocked him, but with these sorts of delays it could lead to friendly fire- kind of a fine line to tread. It looked like others had the same idea, and Eddz was keeping alive. I quickly told the camera drone to view Eddz's ship- it was on fire, and steam was venting out into space. However, streams of repairing nanobots flew toward him from our ships, and repper drones were buzzing around him, and his ship was being reconstructed faster than it was being destroyed.

During this time, blue flashes rent the blackness as one after another the Hydra ships were destroyed. Our support ships were being kept busy chasing down and killing their support ships. I launched my drones, but didn't tell them to engage any support as I had filtered them out in my overview. They would auto-attack anything that attacked me, so this was good enough for now.

McKinley in a Raven was the first of ours to go down, followed by Jack Drask's Scorpion (no doubt to remove his jamming abilities). CheeseMonkey in a Tempest, Misato in a Hound, then finally Elias West's Vaga all fell.

As their numbers dwindled, so did the incoming fire, and the battle reached a point where it was clear we'd win. They eventually withdrew what they could/ what was left, and we finished off any ships caught in the bubble. We held the field and the faster ships looted the wrecks..

(Click the pictures for a larger view)

Final tally was approximately 55 kills for 5 losses... not bad in anyone's book. Respect to Hydra for a good fight, and no smack whatsoever.

Good times, bad times

I woke up this morning in my berth in Torrinos. I found out that only a few hours previously, our Titan had seen it's first usage in combat. Due to "smacktalk holding up your jump", the cyno creator Broadsword had taken a little too much damage to survive the DD as well, and popped. Tjakka then got his pod out, got a Claymore from the now safespotted Titan, and came back to kill a Rifter who was cheekily taking loot.

After breakfast, got into my pod, and was placed in my Rapier. It was configured for scanning down ships, and therefore it's damage output wasn't as good as it could've been. Still, I had found recently I was enjoying scanning down ships in supposed safespots, and as KIA don't have many people who scan, I was helping the cause.

I broadcasted on the alliance channels if anyone was interested in joining a gang for a roam, but didn't get a reply- people were busy, and there weren't that many on. I jumped into EC-, holding my breath- I was reasonably safe, due to the Rapier's cloak, but bad luck or a mistake, and i'd lose it. The gate wasn't camped, just a lonely small bubble left by Goonswarm was on the gate. I moved, cloaking back up and watched some traffic flow to the gate. The bubble was poorly placed to catch any traffic, but I saw it was probably to catch traffic from the station in system, not the other gates.

Anyway, there was no-one on scan in EC- so I went next door to EWOK. Sure enough, I picked up an Omen immediately. There was only one pilot in local, Zirush. I weighed the odds of being able to take an Omen on my own, he was a young-ish character. I figured I'd try and probe him out to start off with, then decide. He was predictably safespotted, and I narrowed him down to about 8au away. I dropped a Fathom probe, which had a 10au radius and the 60 second timer ticked away as the probe scanned. It seemed like such a long time- my directional scanner showed he hadn't moved. With a click, the result flashed up on my HUD. The probe had pinpointed him to with 250km. I sighed, and entered warp. Not a bad result for a 10au probe I guess.

I exited warp, and sure enough, there he was, but 240km away, and seemed to be heading toward me. I accelerated toward him, still cloaked, and the distance closed slooowwly. I thought I'd call out again to the rest of the alliance, most of would be 2 jumps away in Torrinos. This time, got 3 people who were interested. They were en-route. By the time they arrived at EWOK gate in EC-, I was 170km away, and not closing any more as he'd changed direction. I warped out to change to a more accurate Snoop probe with a 5au range, when the guys in EWOK engaged a ship, and jumped through to chase it. This spooked my Omen, who left system.

The other guys went back into EC- and the Omen had returned. Again, I narrowed him down to what appeared to be another safe, again about 7au away. So, i changed back to the 10au probe and 60 seconds later... got a 50km accuracy hit. But also on a Thorax. I warped to the Omen, contacted the others to give them a heads up, and came out of warp....50km away was an Omen, and a Thorax. Both dead still and next to an anchored container. This was probably an ammo or loot cache. I smiled to myself, closing the distance. At 20km, I told the others to jump in- we had Jay Deah in a Hictor, so that was good.

I decloaked, put my Warp Disruptor on the Omen, and double Webifier on the Thorax- they would interfere with his engine, and slow him down- hopefully he would panic and not try to warp out yet. I fired at the Omen, and put drones on the Thorax to distract him. They both picked up speed, and then the other guys arrived. The end was inevitable, with the Omen's armour melting, and the ship disintegrating before the massive explosion of the reactors. The Thorax went shortly after.

We then went back and camped EC- for a while at Torrinos gate, and the only interesting fight we had was a Taranis interceptor who jumped through, decloaked, and made a run for it to get out of the bubble. Elias West gave chase in his Inty. Either the Taranis didn't try, or was scrambled, and in a flash, they were both 150+km off the gate. I remained cloaked and warped to Elias....but they were already 90k away again. Damn they were fast. Again, I waited till they were 150km away, and warped. This time, they had stopped going in a straight line, and were orbitting each other. I landed at 50km distant. Elias was calling that he was going into structure, so I decloaked and engaged my MWD. Locked the Taranis, and webbed him while scrambling him, and opened up with my artillery. A blue flash, and Elias blew up... a second before I got the final blow on the Taranis, and it blew into a million pieces.

Collected Elias's loot, dropped it off in Torrinos for him, and then we decided to fly up the pipe to RQ. We had quite a few more people in gang now. Nothing very exciting, but we followed a Raven into a dead end system- we did it in a hurry, so jumped in unscouted...and there was a Myrmidon, Malediction and another cruiser on the gate. They engaged, and I was primaried....I burned away from the gate as the others jumped through. The Myrm was doing oddly small damage to me, I wondered what he had fitted, but I warped away as I wasn't scrambled.

I heard the FC say "get away, everyone run", but I was already in warp back at this point, cloaked. I had opted to warp back at 10km.. which saved me as I landed in front of a 30ish strong gang of DeStInY Alliance. Ah. I was 3000m from the nearest ship when I panicked and thrust the ship straight down, saving my bacon. Another 500m... and I'd have been toast.

About 30 seconds later, an odd thing happened. Ships appeared to warp away from the gate, but in doing so, accelerated past me and decloaked me (I assume), even though they had started going into warp 20km away. Anyway, I decloaked, and they locked me before I could recloak. I MWD'd away, but the result was going to be messy. Shield warning buzzers went off in my ear as my shields melted, then my armour started going, but much more slowly. I told the crew to abandon ship, and waited for the coldness of vacuum to envelope my pod. I was killed, with only 5 or so of the ships in their fleet doing most of the damage.

We regrouped in a safe, and when the gate was clear, very shortly afterwards, we got out. Not sure why they didn't want to camp us in, but after some light smack in local from one of them, they showed us no further interest. Such a big fleet in a dead-end system- maybe something else was going on. Who knows.

Anyway, made our way back to Mantenault where I left the gang and went to purchase another ship from Orvolle.

KIA Titan is born

And thus, KIA's first Titan is born:

Leviathan- click for larger image

We are having a discussion about what to call it.... I think 'awesome' will do!

"now witness the power of this fully armed and operational battlestation"!

Tortuga R.I.P Dec 07- Apr 08

Tortuga is collapsing, like a house of cards made of feathers. Feathery cards. If you can imagine feathery cards. Hmm.

Midway through our Scalar contract, we heard that BoB had sieged H74, a system in Querious, and an important one for MC. They took it quite quickly, we were greeted on Sunday morning with the fact 1-N was under siege. This is MC's home, and a direct attack on this made the most sense for BoB. The cyno-jammer was taken out, and BoB's capitals moved on, starting the beginning of the end.

We all clone jumped back again to Period Basis, not sure how happy our employer was about this, and attempted to mount some sort of defence in conjunction with MC. We were told to move our ships into 1-N and await instructions. Which never really came.

Rumours were circulating that MC was fracturing from the inside, pro-BoB elements inside MC were at loggerheads with anti-BoB elements, and as such, there was a 'failure cascade'- a fitting use for that term I think.

KIA was told to get our assets the hell out of PB, but keep the defence ships we'd put there. So, Sunday was spent moving our stuff out. There appeared to be no organised resistance to speak of, BoB vastly outnumbered any forces we could put up. Although we (KIA) were all keeping in touch on comms, there appeared to be no cross-alliance gangs. We organised within our corps to get all our assets back to empire, which seemed to go very smoothly.

In a combat op on Sunday, BoB obtained a POS password that a few of our ships were in, warped in 2 Titans and DD'd the area. KIA only lost a few ships there, MC lost about 16, mainly battleships. It's not very sportsmanlike, but this is war I guess, and BoB has an axe to grind.

Speaking of Titans, it turns out KIA have a Titan being produced in a shipyard in L5D, and it's due to be complete in a day or two. As it turns out, the person who gave BoB the POS password was an MC guy who was having a Titan built (due to be complete a few days after ours). He was trying to get a deal where he gives the password over to BoB, in return for them letting his Titan complete. MC kicked him out, and aborted his Titan build! Harsh, but very fair. Was he stupid enough to think BoB would honour this? Talk about an easy PR victory for BoB, win-win for them.

I am a bit hazy on POS stuff, but I don't think BoB can now destroy the building Titan before it's done. I am sure they haven't overlooked this, and have probably just concentrated on 1-N. Of course, once it's built, it'll be more fun for them to try and kill it, so this chapter isn't over quite yet.

New contract v Scalar Alliance

After the eventful weekend, we were informed of the real reason we were back in Empire- a contract against a small Alliance called Scalar Alliance [OOC- read some back history on this conflict, here]. We had been hired to bring some muscle to the table.

The action was taking place in Pure Blind, a rather poor region of not much interest to anyone, which I concluded to myself, was why a small Alliance were being allowed to 'look after' the Region by Triumvirate, their neighbours. The latter could, let's face it, move in and move these guys out should they see fit. But current events had it that Tri were undergoing some leadership issues, and had removed a couple of more PvP orientated corps from their Alliance recently, so who knew what was going on.

Anyway. The upshot was that we were ordered to move our ships closer to one of the entrypoints into Pure Blind, Torrinos. The earlier hostilities with BoB and friends had ceased as we had dropped the WarDecs, and thus fighting in Empire wasn't likely to happen (other than suicide ganks.. and you don't tend to suicide gank combat ships). A friend of mine outside the corp, we'll call him "Bert", helped out with his T2 transport, a rather scary looking black Amarrian ship. Very imposing indeed. He wouldn't take any ISK, he just enjoyed hauling stuff around. He was going that way anyway on a trade run, and as my ships didn't take up too much space, it was no bother.

I flew my Tempest up myself, you can't realistically transport Battleships without involving Freighters and we weren't going far so there was no need for that. The journey was uneventful, but as the autopilot aligned the ship for warp in Oipo, my pod's heads up display flickered slightly, then came back. I quickly checked the ship's systems, and found that the capacitor was down to 33%. Weird. I checked the sytem size, and there was the answer- the gate to gate distance was almost 200au! I made a mid-point safespot, you never knew when they'd come in handy, and in a system this big, it was a nice place to hide.

Torrinos was a busy little system, over a hundred pod pilots there. I guess high sec systems that were also entrypoints to nullsec were quite rare, and the opportunities were there for all sorts of safe trade and commerce. Of course a lot of KIA were flitting about, doing the same as me, or just acquanting themselves with their new home for the next week (at least).

The op was starting a little later than normal to allow people to get ships in to place. Impatiently listening to comms chatter, I found myself quite looking forward to this. The first proper contract we'd had since the whole Tortuga move, and we were all looking forward to going back to our roots.

We formed up in our Battleships to smash a camp in EC-P8R but they'd obviously heard we were coming and had gone by the time we arrived. As our main objective for tonight wasn't a BS gang, we switched out to small, fast ships, and went back into EC. I was in my trusty Stiletto once more. I had to buy a T2 Warp Disruptor module for it, as they were almost half a million ISK cheaper in Torrinos than in Nonni, which amused me.

So, we jumped through and surprised an Exequror, Rapier and Armageddon. I was a little surprised to see the Exequror, it was a ship with a huge cargo hold and not often seen in PvP. I was more concerned with locking the Rapier before it cloaked- with a Sensor Booster, my lock time was very quick, and so I had him locked and his warp core distrupted in short order. I turned my mighty 250mm Artillery and missile launcher on him, and put myself into a distant orbit, awaiting the double webs. They never came. The Exequror had popped really quickly, the 'geddon was pointed and wasn't going anywhere, so the others had similarly turned their guns, drones and launchers on the Rapier. It wasn't built for damage, but stealth, and it's hull soon crumpled, buckled and tore apart with a bright flash.

The 'geddon pilot was vainly trying to reach the safety of the gate, but now he had our full attention. Shields blossoming with the impact of the incoming fire, then shimmering as they failed. I'd seen it a thousand times before, but it always captivated me. Armour holding briefly, a green haze of the gases vented by the armour repairers desperately trying, and failing, so stem the flood of damage. Steam and debris being ejected into space as the hull is breached in one, then five, then many places. The crew lifepods hurtling away from the doomed vessel. The inevitable silent blue flash as the reactor takes a hit and the ship is blown to pieces.

Just as we were collecting the loot, a hapless Comorant pilot, minicung, emerged out of warp off the gate- as we had a bubble up, he was nowhere within jump distance. He popped very quickly. His death log showed he had an interesting mix of railguns, lasers and a smartbomb fitted. I pondered briefly if he knew something I didn't. Maybe not.

I volunteered to be the scout up the pipe to RQH-MY. I had no idea why that was our destination, but didn't ask, as I didn't really need to know. The journey up was uneventful apart from when I was holding on an outgate waiting for the rest of the gang to jump into the system, a Crane Transport warped up and jumped through the gate. As I knew he had a built in warp core defence system, i knew my single Warp Disruptor wouldn't be enough to stop him. Although he had made the right choice of ship out here, he was lucky it was just me!

So, we get to RQH, and split between the Mantenault and MQ-NPY gates. I was on the Mantenault gate, an entrypoint back into lowsec Placid. We then were met by our employer, who talked to Eddz briefly. The whole exercise was a show of force, let the employer see what he's getting for his money. Scalar did put in a showing- an Eagle of their's warped in at 200km and locked me. With a finger poised over the jump button, I watched as his railgun rounds shot past me or plinked off my shield with no damage. I wasn't sitting still, or a large target, and I had my MWD off, so he gave up and warped off. He did, however, warp back at range and kill a friendly Kestrel belonging to our employers corp, but they are hardly expensive. He smacked us in the local channel (which I think really is lame, but that's just my opinion) about not protecting our employer, then ran away. Uh huh.

Called it a day after that, the WarDec against Scalar was live in just under 24 hours, so they won't be able to use empire, sentry guns or Concord to hide under. Just as we were disbanding, a Raptor belonging to "TheJackalKiller" jumped into us from Mantenault. He almost made it back to the gate, but we killed him quickly enough. He had no weapons fitted, so I assume was just transiting. His corp, "Soliders of Eve" (I had to double check Concord's registration database, as it seemed to have a spelling mistake in it, but that is the name they chose), was one of the corps causing troubles for our employer, so that was cool.

I found a nice quiet safespot in a nice quiet system and told my small crew to get some sleep. I followed suit.

Back to empire...

Been a busy couple of weeks, but nothing to write about. After the fights with IaC, we withdrew to Period Basis once more and started shoring up defences, concentrating on bringing ships into the region, equipped and spread out so we would have a flexible and fluid defence when BoB comes. And they will, there is no doubt, but now we are all just a single clone jump away. They probably think keeping us on tenterhooks is quite clever, but in reality, we aren't. We are prepared.

So, clone jump back to empire and wake up in my favourite clone in Frarn. Ah, Frarn, my spiritual home. A busy mission runner's system, one jump from the perma-busy Rens, and a nice place to make some spare ISK. Also a place to bump into curious characters, none of whom speak a language I know, warping their ships around at exactly the same time, to the same places, and mining all the time. Takes a discipline I don't seem to have! Rumour has it they have some kind of hive mind thing going on, but I'm no scientist. I'll leave that to the lab guys.

Anyway, I start to plan out how I'm going to move my ships up to the KIA HQ for the upcoming weekend of fighting, and realise I'll need to shuttle around a bit. Call up the market, and go to the well used market bookmark for shuttles, 9000 ISK, thankyou very much. Only... they aren't 9000 ISK any more. Their prices are fluctuating wildly, starting at 25k ISK, and going up to 250k+ ISK. OK, what the hell was going on!?

Being out in PB means we are cut off from the Empire going's on, and we have our own production and markets out there, so we don't have to be in touch with Empire markets. Seems that the owners of the Empire stations have decided that making shuttles is too much effort for too little gain, and have ceased production. We could all rely on shuttles being in every station, and they made for quick and easy transport (something about flying around in a pod seems very low rent to me), but now.... shuttles are on sale still, but all the entrepreuners have now increased shuttle sales. As I said, prices are fluctuating heavily, as the sellers are testing how much people are actually willing to pay for one. Too much, and people will buy a frigate instead. Take the Minmatar Slasher for example. Costs about 30k ISK, and is very very fast. Put an Inertia Stabiliser on it's single low slot, and you have a ship that can go to warp as fast as a shuttle, and (I think) warp faster than a shuttle, at 6au a second.

A knock on effect will be on Tritanium prices. Shuttles being 9000 ISK everywhere meant that they kept Trit prices low- you refine a shuttle, and you get something like 2300 Trit. So, if Trit rose too much, you'd just buy and refine a shuttle instead. How this will effect prices on everything that uses Trit in it's construction (and that's pretty much everything), remains to be seen.

Anyway, I digress. After the surprise, I bought a trusty Slasher and got on with my business of moving ships. I pondered briefly on buying a trusty Minmatar freighter, which I can actually fly, but... nah. Freighters are big fat targets these days, and I can't be doing with it!

So, fast forward to yesterday. I caught up with our 30+ gang in Inaro, and we headed down to Perimeter to see what we could find. I was in a Stiletto Interceptor- as I needed to catch the gang, I needed to be in something that I could rely on to gtfo of any 'situation'. Upon jumping into Perimeter, the lead elements said a BoB gang had just entered warp at our out gate, and were in warp to Urlen gate.. where I was. I was pretty confident I could catch one of them the other side, so I MWD'd back to the gate myself, just as the BoB gang arrive- about 8 or 9. I jump through, so do they. If they wanted to stay to fight, I'd be dead, but then the rest of the gang were right behind us.

They decloaked and took off, but I managed to get a point on an Astarte piloted by BarataS- by coincidence, so did another inty pilot who'd been right behind me. The Astarted locked me, and fired- he got one hit on me, then my transversal increased as I tightly orbitted him. I had activated my artillery and launcher, then the rest of the gang showed up and it was over for the Astarte.

Moving on down toward Chamemi, we jumped into Hishai from Geztic, and warped to the out gate, just to see a WT Typhoon Battleship enter warp back the way we came. I promptly flipped the ship around and back to Geztic gate. The 13.5au a second warp really made up for the headstart the 'phoon had, and I jumped through to Geztic right behind him. McKinley was waiting the other side in a Malediction- he'd obviously heard comms and waited. The 'phoon was doomed....or was he? The warp from the other gate back to Geztic was 90au, so the gang was arriving in dribs and drabs.... and unfortunately, the guys with webs were late in coming- so the 'phoon MWD'd back to the gate on half armour and jumped through to Hishai. I thought the slower guys on the other side would then had the pleasure of finishing him of.... but they never got that chance.

The 'phoon promptly warped off- the pilot had done a complete emergency shutdown. This sort of thing is frowned upon as it feeds extra warp power to the engines to get them out their current position- if they haven't aggressed anyone in that system- if they have, the power is diverted to weapons/ shield and armour systems, and thus if anyone is scrambling their warp drive, they are basically finished.

The downside is that it puts tremendous strain on the ship systems and isn't seen as an honourable thing for pod pilots to do- they black out as the ship feeds all available power to the warp core, and only minimal life support is left up.

However, his ship was now hanging in space somewhere, and we needed to find it within 15 minutes before it was disappear from scan as it completely shut down for a system reboot (which could take any amount of time, it was completely random). Regrettably, we didn't have a prober with us, and Eddz asked if anyone had probe skills.... I do, so I volunteered. I noticed we were next door to Agil, a nice trade hub in these parts, so quickly docked. I stayed in my pod while I accessed the market and quickly bought a used Cheetah Covert Ops ship- I got my pod transferred into it while buyinga Recon Probe Launcher, and probes. I was splashing my ISK around to ensure I got the engineers, mechanics and loaders full attention.

Sure enough, I was turned around and undocked in record time. Jumped into Hishai, warped to planet 9 where the rest of the gang were, and dropped a probe. The readout showed me I had to wait 42 seconds for the result. Time passed really slowly... and in that time I realised the gang were all awaiting my result... I hoped I was still competent at this, I hadn't probed anyone for a looooong time....

With a barely audbile 'ping', it announced a result. The Typhoon had been located, with 0m error, and was just over 1au away. I told the gang I was warping in, cloaked up and warped to within 10km of the hit. Sure enough, as I exited warp, I landed 10km from the silent, motionless Typhoon. I told the gang to warp to me, then moved out of the way so they didn't decloak me. It was over in seconds, the gang fell on the inert BS like a pack of hungry wolves, and it melted under the onslaught- systems were offline, no kind of tanking, no nothing. The pod popped out, as did the crew's escape capules, and warped off.... another 42 seconds later, located the pod and that went splat. He'd wake up in a clone vat somewhere wondering what happened as he wouldn't have known we were there due to everything being offline.

I stayed in the Cheetah for a while, but I wanted to join in the fighting as well as realising how valuable probing was. And so, in a lull in the action, I docked in Amarr, and purchased a Rapier. As well as being very useful in PvP, it could also scan, so I had the best of both worlds. And boy did I pay for that, as Rapiers are not cheap. Still, I could use most of the bits from the Cheetah, which I sold.

All in all, a satisfying evening's work!

Battle in 49-U

Sitting in the Concord station's concourse bar, the other KIA pilots and myself were all abuzz with what tonight's operation could be about. We had been told to bring our battleships, and every single pilot was ordered to attend. Long range guns were required, long range ammo. It was about damage, not tank.

I spent an hour recalibrating my weapons and working out a new fitting schema. After running up to Rens (they all know me by name now, I've had to buy so many ships from there recently), I got the techs to remove the 1200mm Artillery I had fitted and fitted the 1400mm monsters, along with the other new modules. I tested, calibrated, and it was good.

Tempest outside station
(click for large image)

We formed up a large fleet outside the station, then as we set off for 49-U, Eddz let us know that we'd be forming part of a Tortugan fleet (eg. MC, Daisho, Odyssey also) to bash IAC. Most of us breathed a sigh of relief as we'd privately suspected POS bashing, given the ship fitting orders.

Uneventful 25 jumps or so up, we were relayed information that the battle was in full swing, with large fleets engaging in toe to toe fighting. IRON alliance had reinforced IAC, so Tortuga had withdrawn, but re-engaged when they knew our 40+ BS were almost there.

In flight
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We were given the order to jump into 49-U. As ship after ship jumped through, the gate operators decided to be jobsworths, and call a traffic advisory. After an agonising 2 and a half minute wait, we were allowed to jump in. Well, something must've gone wrong with the gate or the ship, because for 10 minutes we were stuck in nullspace. I confirmed with the crew that everything appeared to be in the green, but we just were "nowhere". A cold feeling started to spread outwards from my stomach... I'd heard awful stories about pod pilots who'd just disappeared. No appearing at a clone station, no nothing... perma-death.

Fortunately, 49-U swam into existence, but the sensors were massively overloaded with information, and although I could see my ship being targetted by an Incursus, I couldn't lock him, activate modules or launch any drones. Sitting there impotently while a ship worth a 100th of what yours costs buzzes merrily around you is quite frustrating. Scotty, my engineer, managed to get the drones into space, and I finally got a lock on the Incursus. I futilely engaged my guns, but there's no way they would track. Finally my sensors updated, and the Incursus was running- seems my drone AI had saved the situation, and they had correctly responded to me being aggressed. I recalled them, then as nothing else seemed to be working properly, took the decision that most pod pilots hate to do. Full reset.

I informed the crew, then instructed the computer to full reset.

Life support was the only system not reset, and I could feel the ship's systems dying. The warp drives, thank Jove, correctly responded to a reset, and warped us off into a random vector. After 10 minutes, ship systems were back online, checks were run, and we warped back to the gate. This time, we appeared about 70km from the gate. The sight, now we were a little back from it was amazing.

The battle
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Finally, the ships targetting systems were working, and I could start targetting things, although with degraded perfomance. I think the other KIA pilots were having issues also, as the FC was calling targets that weren't even on the field any more, although at the time I thought it was my overview glitching still.

The rest of the battle was over quickly, the Tortugans held the field, but KIA had taken heavy losses- we'd jumped in at a bad time, and in the wrong place, and bore the brunt of it. Overall, I think the Tortugans won, MC and the others had inflicted heavy damages including a couple of capital ship kills.

After looting what we good, and destroying the rest (and god there was a lot if it), what was left of the KIA fleet withdrew- all 5 of us- myself, Eddz, EV1, Mr Kunta, and Niroku (maybe a couple more). As we were in BSs, we were sitting targets, and the inevitable happened about 6 jumps from home. Even with the best scouting in the world, we were too big a target to miss, and we got hit in F4R2- me and EV1 went down, and I couldn't get my pod out as it was in a disruption field. Goodbye F4, hello Sendaya! The clonebay tech was different this time, a bit more chatty, and pretended to be sympathetic to my tale of woe.

So, time for another trip to Rens. They will be pleased.