I must be getting old or something because it is becoming
increasingly difficult to stay up late. I sat down at my computer around
midnight last night in a half-stupor, fully intending to log everything off and
shut it down. Time for bed. Long past time for bed.
As my sleeping screen awakened, I noticed Teamspeak bloated
with people, and a ping on Jabber that had been sent merely minutes before. Something
big was about to go down. And it was midnight. *Sighs* Time for pvp.
“What do you need.”
“Machs and guards, Susan. But we could really use more
guards…”
I decided on hopping in a Mach. If I fell asleep half way
through the fight it would be a lot less detrimental to my fleet if I was in
DPS, rather than a guardian. Falling asleep in a guardian is bad. Very, very
bad.
My Mach was still damaged from the last fight we had with
Goons 24 hours earlier. That fight had been both insanely fun and a bit
stressful. High TiDi. Massive numbers against us. Everyone had to pay attention—applying
dps and ewar and anti-ewar to the appropriate targets.
I’ll be honest. Sometimes I just want to set there and click
F1, and see killmails roll in. But, unfortunately when you’re a little pirate
alliance (or group of pirate alliances) going up against the ‘evil Imporium of
doom and rage and gnashing of teeth’ (or whatever they’re called these days)
you don’t have that luxury. Most of the time, our ‘line member’ DPS ships are
managing multiple targets and roles at once, applying damage, applying E-War,
and feeding our logistic buddies some much needed anti-ewar support.
I guess you could say that low-sec pirates are like the
cowboys of pvp. In addition to firing our guns we also have to ride horses, and
keep our cowboy hats from blowing off in the wind.
Apparently, our alliance leaderhip’s directives (and
cracking of whips over our heads) to ‘not be bad’ has paid off. The fight ended
like
this. 57 Billion ISK in damages, to 11 billion of our own. And that doesn’t
include the multitude of skillpoints lost by the hostile CFC fleet while losing
all those Tengus—probably another good 8 Bil or so, in terms of plex prices.
Needless to say, we probably made them mad. We had poked the
hive in that fight, and had riled up a large swarm of very angry bees. And so,
I was interested to see what would happen in this new engagement that was
brewing –even if it was now half past midnight and I was quickly turning into a
pumpkin. (I apparently complain about late fights and ‘turning into a pumpkin’
a lot to my corpmates. Someone affectionately gave me a ‘pumpkin’ title in-game…lol)
“One fleet is bringing Tengus….”
“They have an entire squad of 20+ Crucifiers…”
“Looks like may have at least 30 supers on standby.”
As intel rolled in as to what we were about to go up
against, my heart sank. This did not sound promising, and I was afraid that we
would be standing down. We’ll go up against some pretty heavy odds stacked
against us but there is a limit to when boldness turns into suicide and our FCs
pull the plug. And I knew our current FC very, very well having flown with him
for many years, and I heard an edge in his voice that told me things were
beginning to get tight as to our probabilities of surviving.
However, I was also hearing whispers, and intel of another
sort throughout various channels. And it quickly became evident to me that we
were forming Voltron.
Voltron
For those interested in the nuances of politics in EVE,
Voltron is a term used by low-sec pilots to describe the stars aligning in the
political back channels of the pirate kingdom. ‘Voltron’ happens when the
various pirate groups (amongst other low-sec inhabitants) suddenly (and briefly)
come together to fight a common foe.
It doesn’t happen very often, and generally only occurs when
there is an invading force of some kind that is considered to be ‘outsiders’ in
the minds of the various involved entities. In all my time in Snuff, I can only
remember it happened one or two other times. And with the current war between
BBC and Shadow Cartel, it has been many, many months since there has even been a
hint of the possibility or need.
Not being up on my nerd-speak, I asked a corpy why people
called it ‘Voltron.’
“It has to do with cat robots, Susan.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty epic…”
“Cat robots that form together to make a bigger cat robot…”
I stared confused and snickered a little at that explanation
in corp chat. Null-sec pilots give themselves super fancy coalition names like ‘The
Imperium.”
We are super epic cat robots. FEAR US.
And of course, it was approaching 1 AM. And EVERYTHING is
funnier at 1 AM. So, as I undocked to make way to our titan, I was giggling
like a little drunken fiend.
“Refit arties. We’re going to try to alpha some stuff off
the fight during the beginning of the fight.”
I scrambled to refit in space, our Nestor helpfully idling
in space nearby.
“Tell Exodus they will need to clear those Crucifiers. Those
are priority.”
Exodus. For all your super old school elite pirate
hunter needs. I’ve been in a few fleets where we asked a couple of them to come
along and have heard them hunt their prey first hand.
They are scary dudes. I wouldn’t wanted to be on the
receiving end of their talents.
“One fleet they’re bringing has over a hundred tengus…”
“Right.” Our FC responded.
I looked at our fleet. We were sitting at over 100 pilots,
but if you took away all the scouts and the off grid boosters....
“To hell with it. Light the cyno.”
“Bridge is up. Bridge. Bridge. Bridge.”
“Warp to the pos, www’s in fleet.”
This was a pos rescue mission. So, the pos we were landing
on was friendly and we all cruised into the shields.
“Everyone move out of shields, and then anchor up. Out of
shields, now.”
“Go ahead and triage. We’ll risk it..”
“Easy for you to say…” one of shield triage pilots muttered
lightly on coms.
As I popped out of the shield I quickly went through the
check list. Anchor on DPS anchor, check. Lock assigned logistics bro and feed
remote sensor boosts, check. Verify guns are stacked correctly to current FC
specifications, check. Brackets are turned off, check. Secondary anchor is
watchlisted, check. Drop sentries to prepare for firewall, check.
“Hostiles incoming. Hostiles incoming.”
I gulped as my overview flooded with red flashing hostiles.
They landed a solid 200K+ from us, and there were hundreds of them.
I smiled as I saw a local notification from Exodus grabbing
points on some of their small stuff.
“Go Exodus go.” Someone muttered.
“Wooohooo, go gettum boys.”
“Here they come.” The bulk of their fleet was burning toward
us.
And then it began.
I got hit hard with TDs from multiple crucifiers, and an ECM
burst wiped out all my locked targets.
“Get support back on Logistics!”
I began prioritizing relocks on my logi bro, and made sure
he was getting fed sensor boosts before turning to my dps target.
“Guardians are jammed.”
“Guardian down, guardian down.”
I refit to projected ECCM on one of my mids, and relocked my logi bro,
having been ECM bursted again.
It was touch and go for a while. We were losing guardians,
and our fleet was being pounded with ECM bursts. It seemed like every time a
coordinated artillery fire was called, I lost lock.
“POS bug! I can’t lock anything!” someone called.
“I can’t lock anything either …what the %$&^%?!
And thus started our second major problem of the evening.
There seems to be a weird bug in EVE where occasionally it will not let you
lock targets because it thinks you are inside the shields of a starbase, even
though you are very obviously a generous distance from any shields.
“Logi can’t lock!”
“Burn us further away, burn us away.”
After trying a few things it was determined that we would
need to stay a much bigger distance from the shields to avoid the bug. Not the
best idea, but there’s no fighting the game ‘mechanics.’
Finally, I noticed the TDs dropped from my ship.
“Logistics is stabilizing.”
“How many we have left?”
“At least three guardians down.”
“What’s the status on those crucifiers?”
“Looks like Exodus has forced them off field.”
“Good, good.”
We continued popping Tengus. Sometimes, our volleys were
coordinated enough and they evaporated. Sometimes, their logistics caught them
and we were too staggered. And every couple minutes, locks would drop as more
ECM bursts arrived.
TiDi was in the orange, so it was a bit painful. But, things
were slowly moving in our direction and it was looking like we would probably
be winning this. It would be a slow, tedious win. But we would hold the field
and save our POS.
It was far past 1AM and heading closer to 2AM when everything
changed. The fight had been going on well over an hour. There were ebbs and flows as Goon e-war came back, and was forced off again. And a constant cycle of getting ECM bursted, relocking, ECM burst, relocking. We knew they had a trump card, but up until then they didn’t seem
willing to use it.
“They are mobilizing their supers! Also, a large capital
fleet incoming!”
“How many carriers do they have?” our FC barked.
“Scanning…”
“Supers landing, supers landing!”
“At least forty carriers also landing.”
“Forty?!”
Game over. They were trumping out.
“Everyone back inside the shields now. Move back, move back.
Go. Go. Go. Go.”
A full-scale, organized retreat ensued. And while most of
the fleet made it out, there were a few that didn’t quite get there in time as
the swarm landed on their heads.
“Once inside the shields, warp to station. Go, now.”
“Guardians, stay outside shields as long as you can and rep
people.” The guardian anchor piped up. “Keep our Machs alive.”
I gave a big sigh of relief as my Machariel slowly slipped
past the shield bubble to safety, and began to initiate warp to the station.
The ‘bring supers when all else fails’ is a card we’ve
played against others in the past. So you will find no ‘grr goons’ here on that
account. They’ve been losing to us rather soundly since they arrived, and I suspect
that losing field again was simply not an option.
Well played, good fight.
“So, how long are we going to be in this station?” I asked
FC sleepily.
“Go to bed, Susan.”
And so I did.
