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..
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