Sixteen carriers down. Sixty billion isk destroyed. The culmination of great scouting, planning and teamwork.
Here’s how it went down. Thank you to Narwhals Ate My Duck for the following Battle Report.
It was one of those evenings, where everyone was yearning for some pew pew, when we decided to take a look outside one of our connections to nullsec.
It happened to be a system called MOSA-I in The Spire. The first thing our fleet noticed was the surprisingly great number of carriers on D-Scan. A quick spread of our Interceptors made it clear – they were ratting. Each capital was sitting in it’s own site and after a few seconds we had two Archons and a Thanatos tackled. Considering the Archon’s defensive abilities, we decided to go for the lone Thanatos and removed our tackles from the other carriers. Soon after engaging, both Archons warped to the Thanatos and made it impossible for our small fleet to break their tank. We had to bail, but we would not forget what just happened. Upon checking Dotlan and zKillboard afterwards we noticed two things: 1) The ratters in this area were particularly fond of using carriers and 2) they were willing to commit them to pvp for the sake of keeping each other alive.
A plan to investigate further was set in motion. The following day we brought a probing alt into the region and had him warp through some npc-kill heavy systems and observe the local’s behaviour. There we noticed a third thing: Some of them didn’t seem to care about a neutral in local (or even a decloaked one in the same site). They might have just been afk but we decided to take this as a sign they were feeling pretty confident in their ability to just dogpile carriers as defense.
Pride comes before a fall.
We got a few more probing alts out there to have the ability to get a route to The Spire whenever we’d need one. And Chitsa Jason quickly decided to put a date on it: June 7th before downtime we would hit.
After lots of convos and comms-hopping by Chitsa we gathered a bunch of guys from different wormhole corps and alliances on our teamspeak and explained our plan. As luck would have it Bob (the God of Wormholes) gave his blessing by granting us a random connection to a system three jumps out of MOSA-I the night before. Screenshots of our current wormhole-chain from high to null and assorted bookmarks were spread around and everyone met in our home C6. While there was a bit of chaos sorting all this out, an incoming connection appeared and Dropbears Anonymous of Brave Collective made their entrance. A few minutes and one convo later we had some more guys in our fleet. Roles of tackle, logistics, fc and cynoships were assigned and we all set up at the null exit.
Light tackle and sabres under command of Chitsa jumped out and burned towards the destination. A victim was quickly found, and as soon as the tackle was secured, the main fleet followed. Shortly after our entire force landed on top of the tackled carrier. D-scan indicated 2 additional carriers incoming. Sabres and Heavy Interdictors bubbled the field and Mobile Cyno Inhibitors were onlined. Some more Archons landed and one started triaging. We focused on that one but we didn’t seem to be able to break his tank. That made us worry a bit and several people suggested trying to batphone additional groups. As we were trying to turn the table by bringing in a Naglfar we noticed that the system was in fact cyno-jammed. Being under increasing pressure of not being able to break the carriers tank we tried to contact several entities to come aid us. Suddenly a cyno was lit somewhere in system – apparently they cycled the jammer to bring in more capitals. What might have been our demise under different conditions proved to be the best that could happen. We jumped in our dreadnaught. The additional carriers landed on grid piece by piece and we shredded through the enemy with incredible speed. Literally every minute another carrier was dying and the batphones already in motion were called off (thanks for answering though guys). When there were only two hostile capitals left on field one of our scouts reported 3 Archons floating outside a POS shield just a few AU away. So we split our fleet and went to kill those guys too. Since they were close to the Force field, we bumped them off, and were rewarded with another three carrier killmails and a dead Astarte which was boosting from outside the shield.
When the dust finally settled only three Northern Associates. characters remained in system, one of them being an avatar pilot, sitting inside the POS a mere 40km off the Archon wrecks. There was disappointment noted on the fact that he never even tried to do anything besides just sitting there. Everyone would have loved to type the magical words “Titan tackled!”.
After that we made our way back home without any further incidents and everyone shook hands and went on their merry way.
Big shoutout to our frenemies:
Exit Strategy.. [EXIT]
Dropbears Anonymous [BAERS]
Laurentson INC [L1NC]
Ixtab. [IX]
Sleeper Social Club [SSC]
Video care of Narwhals Ate My Duck
Video care of DropBears Anonymous
Narwhals Ate My Duck are a wormhole PvP alliance currently living in a Class 6 Magnetar. After been closed down for sometime, the legend returns. Welcome back.
