A lot of my previous articles have focused on a variety of different super-capital losses by various entities and this is no different. Following on from an Avatar class titan being Snuffed Out nearly 24 hours earlier a Leviathan has since joined the roster of titans to grace New Eden’s killboards.
This post relates to the loss of the aforementioned Leviathan in the low-sec system of Mai which is part of the Domain region.
The titan was piloted by Zavella of the Mirage Engineering corporation who appear to be unaffiliated with most known entities. He clearly seems to be an alt of some kind as it only has one individual killmail that it can be found on:
Click for Killmail
This loss is clearly part of the “#REKKINGCREW’s” current streak of kills as they have also killed this Revenant and this Nyx within the last month.
Due to this RoCkEt X, the leader of the #REKKINGCREW and member of Pandemic Legion [-10.0], was approached regarding the circumstances of this event and kindly provided his report as shown.
A random dude (no names mentioned) convo’d one of our guys. He announced that he’d seen what we do on reddit and various other EVE related media sources and wanted to know if we were interested in a titan kill.
We agreed and invited the guy to #REKKINGCREW’s teamspeak for a chat. He explained that the guy selling the levi was someone who’d wronged him in the past and he wanted it dead. He gave us the name of the target and said that the guy was selling his leviathan, and might be interested in selling the character flying it too.
Image showing apparent sale thread:
Click for Link
The target was online, so we struck up a convo and made him an offer, which he accepted. The dude was reasonably chatty, and it transpires he was selling the titan because he’d lost his RL job that day and now needed to PLEX his accounts rather than paying with RL cash.
He said that for the price we were paying he’d be okay to move it one mid for us and asked us where we were going with it. By this time our research had turned up the name of the guy’s titan character and located it in Ayeroilen. The plan was simple, get him to jump towards us. After a few minutes we calculated an optimal jump route, telling the guy we were in Brave Collective and that the ship would be going to Catch.
So, why Catch? We needed him to move south. Phoebe’s 5LY jumprange changed the map, and created unavoidable bottleneck systems. And without adding another 5 cyno’s to the route, the only way through is to use Mai as a midpoint between Amarr lowsec towards Catch.
We sat in system and waited. His cyno alt showed up, but the system is usually camped by a group that likes to bump carriers off the station and kill them, so the target was skittish and wanted to put a tower in system, which he did. After about an hour, the tower’s forcefield came up, and his cyno reaper warped to a safespot.
He initiated his self destruct and waited until 5-10 seconds before his ship exploded to light the cyno. We were ready for it and the initial tackle/cyno was already in warp. As we landed on grid, the target cloaked – though being only 5km from him, we simply lit the Cyno and jumped everything in, knowing our incoming fleet would decloak him on landing.
Sure enough he got decloaked, we tackled him and then held him long enough for a dear friend of ours to get on the killmail, then finished him off. Much of the initial intel work on this kill was done by a relatively recent addition to our group – [HAX.] member Taraas Enko, whom we actually first came across as a target back in 2013. Since then, we’ve been on friendly terms and he has an excellent grasp of what we do. Now he has a good frag he can call his own, which he very much deserves!
Thanks,
Rock
One of the key aspects of the above report is the mid system used. Mai is one of those systems which is generally camped almost constantly as the station itself is a kick-out and results in the death of the majority of capitals who dock there. This system is used in a similar fashion to that of Arton, another Domain system which is regularly camped by Balder Con and Nihilists Social Club [NULL]. Stats wise Mai has had 153 carrier, 44 dreadnought, 3 super-carrier and 3 titan losses according to this page on zKillboard compared to Arton which has had 156 carrier, 37 dreadnought, 3 super-carrier and 2 titan losses according to this zKillboard page. This shows how both similar and deadly these systems are but it doesn’t stop a large number of the unaware or unprepared using it. Both systems have had a large number of reports written about them in a similar vein as this one in the past because of this.
The Leviathan killmail is shown below:
Click for Killmail
The main thing which is common in a lot of these super losses is simply that the owners have been careless with their use and not taken into account the talent and tenacity that capsuleers have in catching the unaware. I am sure it won’t be long until I will be writing up the next super-capital loss to grace the killboards of New Eden.
A video of the kill provided by Rocket to myself is embedded below. Thanks once again for Rocket who provided me with the intel and content for this post.
Following on from the comments by the Leviathan pilot, who’s main is Krios Elchamino, he contacted me in-game to provide his side of events as follows:
Well I don’t know where to start other then RIP Levi of [RNEST]. Ravens’ Nest was a low sec PVP corp me and Kaiia Gavlas Thessia started a couple years ago. Me and him always ran groups within video games and eve corps actually had a purpose to them rather then it just being a hearsay thing. We’d had many successful fleets along with trials and errors within the corps life span. You can view most of our pvp videos from this link. Which can show you some of our own good deeds in EVE Online. We purchased the titan just recently, about a month before the dreaded Pheobe patch release. Which none of us where thrilled about as we see CCP just trying to nerf and kill off everything we loved to do here at [RNEST]. After Pheobe the titan only really was a glorified gate but still really wasn’t able to provide us much due to its lack of jump range and fatigue status, but we made due. We had just seperated from Overload Everything [8URNT] and where on our own again in the Bleak Lands. Until about February when Kaiia Gavlas Thessia decided to unsub from the game due to the lack of content and direction CCP has decided to go with its patches. (Pretty much screwing their veteran player base for newbs that won’t stick with the game). You can see his whole good bye here. As far as the rest of the corp we disbanded. Most of us still stay in touch and some of us stuck together in other corps.
The titans future was pretty much mine to decide what to do with (and I did a hell of a job with that responsablity lol) I didn’t want it anymore because honestly it was useless. Now that I look at it, it was a fitting death. Ravens’ Nest has “decommissioned” several other capitals before including the thanatos at the beginning of this post. Both of these capitals were friendly fire as a joke and taken as a joke. All I have to say is GF and what happened happened. And i’m satisfied that its no longer my problem. And I wanna thank the group that killed it for putting it down honourably haha. Oh and I sold the fit sadly before I started to sell the titan. I figured I could sell it on the Jita market and get the ISK faster then when I sold the titan. Sorry for the cheap loss.
Cheers!
Thanks to Krios for providing the updated information.
[If you have any comments or intel you would like to provide please contact me at [email protected] or via an in-game mail]
