The following piece was orginally posted on reddit.
I love Saturdays. I can usually play most of the day. This morning was no different. I log in to find myself floating in space in the C6 I am trying to sell. Fortunately a corp member has an alt parked here so I am not forced to stay in. I go nomadic. I have a C6 static I take next door to see if I can find anything to shoot. There’s a Charon, Orca, and Itty V on Dscan. A quick check finds them at a POS unpiloted. I do my homework and decide if this small 11 man corp does log in I should have some easy shooting. I only have enough ammo to do just shy of 400k unresisted damage so I decide I will target the Orca. But there’s no activity. I scan the system. I hit 2 C5’s and a Lowsec besides my C6 I came in on. Lowsec was empty, C5 # 1 was boring, C5 # 2 was golden.
I bookmark my entrance and dscan to see a Revelation, Typhoon, and a Tengu. I easily find them at a POS which is fielded but no defenses. They are also online. At the start it was just two pilots swapping back and forth. Occasionally they would warp out for a minute but I couldn’t pinpoint where they were going before they would warp back. They also swapped ships several times revealing a second Revelation, an Archon, and a Broadsword. They mostly hung out in the Broadsword and Tengu after the first hour. I jumped back in the C6 neighbor, logged out, and went to lunch.
Wife is going shopping and taking both kids. Woot I can play more. Log back in. C6 Charon etc is still unpiloted. Hop back into the C5 and the same two guys are there and they have a couple new ships. But then they log off. I wait 5 minutes and begin to probe the system. There are a lot of sigs and my Hound is unbonused. Not to mention I am using basic launcher and probes. I get the C5 static, confirm my C6 entrance, and grab 2 data and 2 gas sites before they log back in. I still had 3 sigs left. They man a Revelation, this time a different one, and it and the Tengu warp off and close the C5 static. Crap, I can’t scan without announcing my presence and if they close the C6 I might as well give up. I’m in alliance chat and give the bookmarks to the lowsec and C6 holes. After about 20 minutes I get a friendly scanner in system. Now we can watch our entrance and the POS.
A couple other pilots log in and we see Anathema’s, Buzzards, Bustards, and an Orca. The Anathema goes out to lowsec via my C6 and lights a cyno. I’m told by fleet to let the Orca and Bustard in and out. The Tengu goes into what I assume was the new C5 for a long time but we didn’t have eyes there since we couldn’t scan it out. He eventually comes back. Then most of the pilots log. We now have over a dozen in our fleet staging just outside the lowsec. We bring in another scanner and a sabre. And we wait.
We wait. The Orca comes back. I have an easy shot at scramming it but I’m told to hold cloak. At this point we know they have 4 capitals in system and we want a bigger fish. A Revelation warps off the POS. I’m given the order to catch it on the hole. I see a hole flash. The Revelation never lands on grid. It was the fleet coming in cloaked. The Revelation was closing the C5 we never scanned. The Orca goes to the C6 and we let it out. And we wait.
I’m beginning to think we lost our opportunity.
Then the hole flashes. I see my buddy uncloak his Sabre and throw up his bubble. The Orca is on grid. A Typhoon is on grid. I uncloak and run for the Orca to add my scrams and start shooting. Then it happens a few seconds later. The hole flashed, the hole disappeared. A Chimera came through.
Battle ReportThey never stood a chance. I sat in that hole for 9 hours. We did 6.2 Billion ISK in damage. Bob accepted the majority of the sacrifice but as the scout I walked with as much as I could carry and made out quite well.
I like this mix of solo work with a cavalry at my back.
