Yesterday during a routine operation of cleaning hostile sovereignty blockades, infrastructure hubs and territorial claim units in the never-ending structure grind, NCdot hit a little bit of a snag in the otherwise smooth operation.
This little snag would turn a normal operation into something that could potentially have put NCdot super carriers at risk of destruction from hostile entities who would and gladly did take the opportunity to engage.
The cause of this hiccup didn’t start as anything major other than the fact that friendly fighter bombers failed to return to their super once exiting warp and landing on the next SBU. After waiting for a few minutes someone spoke up stating that it was likely the grid which was messed up so all supers began to approach the SBU instead of the normal procedure of aligning with the hopes that their drones would return.
As the supers began to approach the SBU and drones slowly begin to return a new member joined local, Mister Vee. He landed on grid right in the middle of the supers and as expected lit a cyno, even though it didn’t last long as he was quickly destroyed by smartbombs it allowed the hostile dictors and hictors to get into system and light a hard cyno for the remainder of the typhoon fleet to get on grid.
Before the hostile typhoons appeared the usual procedures took place and the FC, Poison Kevin, picked a align point and told all supers to fit smartbombs and neuts and begin to align to clear off the hostile hics/dics before the rest of the fleet could make it an issue. Unfortunately they couldn’t be cleared in time so as the hostile typhoons landed on grid the call was made to refit for passive tank and go to full rep fit. At this point the issue with the grid became more of an issue as the target picked by the typhoons, Da beast, was being bumped from the hostiles away from the others and the grid they was crossing. At this point the problem changed from being a nuisance to a problem as all supers were told to manually change alignment back to the SBU so we could continue to repair him and the call for aid went up to all allies to form foxcats to help clear the field of hostile typhoons.
Learning from past mistakes, here, on seeing the hostiles deploy a mobile cyno jammer to prevent any incoming support from providing direct aid the FC lit a cyno on his super before it could be stopped, allowing his backup to get in at 0. By this time in came a 80 man razor alliance Munnin fleet which was shortly followed by an additional Initiative typhoon fleet. Still unable to break the reps of the NCdot supers the CFC jumped in roughly 20 dreads and unfortunately for them the dreads were in close proximity to the supers to provide the most damage which meant, even with the hostiles primarying them, they soon fell to the combined firepower of all the fighter bombers being deployed. As they began losing dreads at a quick pace CFC decided to siege red and jump out the not bubbled dreads, with 13 still being destroyed. Once all dreads were cleared and initial NCdot cyno cycling to it’s death NCdot bridged in a support fleet of Navy Apocs, along with PL who quickly destroyed the CFC mobile cyno jammer allowing further reinforcements to enter field.
The local count in RNM-Y6 peaked at around 750 and with the supers relatively safe the task switched from a rescue operation to clearing the hostile fleet from field as quickly as possible. This again brought the issue of the grid back into the forefront as those pilots who came in and didn’t know of the situation quickly learnt of the problems and many Navy Apocs were killed due to being on the wrong grid compared to all the friendly logistics. All pilots were called to approach the cyno until the hostiles on grid were cleared and the align to sun was called putting them one by one into the path of the hostile fleet before another cyno could be lit allowing friendly triage to enter field in a correct location.
Whilst this was going on a 150 man ishtar fleet came to the aid along with a further 100 man fleet of foxcats by NCdot. As it became less and less likely that the CFC would be able to complete their quick gank they decided to extract and cut their losses so the fleet went back to its original objective of destroying the SBU on the AZ3F-N gate after bouncing to the station and back to re-enter the original grid with its lone occupant (the original super cyno) sitting there. Once complete and all the cynos had time to cycle down thanks to the lowered time dilation compared to the 10% during the engagement, the call was made to extract supers and the fleet began to head home with much GFs passed in local.
The NCdot FC Poison Kevin would like to make a special mention to:
Manfred Sideous of Pandemic Legion for helping with the main subcap fleet.
Colonel Kurtz of NCdot for FCing the second Apoc Fleet.
Mirko Spetz of The Kadeshi for FCing and bringing in the Nulli Ishtar fleet reinforcements.
The full battle report for the engagement can be found here for eve-kill and here for a fully adjusted team distribution.
The view from an apoc coming in with support fleet:
The view from a triage carrier (once they entered field):
The video from the view of a super carrier:
-Amymuffmuff
Note: Just want to make a special thankyou to Poison Kevin for FCing the engagement as well as confirming the details in the report and the CFC for bringing it.
