A Fresh Start

Needing some more independence, I split from Ethereal Dawn with two or three others and formed my own corporation, Stealthfield. We're a mercenary black-ops corporation. Our recruitment thread is here, along with all requisite information.

Cheers to a new start.

Securitas

What a Day!

Alright, so finally I got some more people on in Delve. They're kind of busy, so it was only one at a time, but more had actually made the move. The beginning of the day was quite boring, and I finally meandered into NOL- in search of some fun. Luckily, I found it on the station...an entire FLEET of goons, just sitting there and shooting at eachother.

Very pumped up by this sight, I ran back to my home station and grabbed some bombs. Hands shaking, I warped to my 1st bombing spot at the NOL- Ishukone Corporation Factory. I quickly lined up a shot, dropped a bomb, and warped off. My bomb hit nearly every ship there and took out a dozen or so drones, but I didn't get a single kill. Then, local exploded.

---------------
[00:31:04] Matteyo > OMG THE DRONES
[00:31:05] Jack Gates > not aimed at our battleships and moroses
[00:31:06] Morrigan Shaikorth > MIEN SHIELDEN!
[00:31:08] Jack Gates > these guys are horrible
[00:31:08] DrNeato > haha, that was a great bomb
[00:31:08] Berious > you are all fucked now!
[00:31:10] RobTheRad > help my shields
[00:31:11] Lume V > lmao he killed all your drones
[00:31:16] Ford Cruller > did he actually bomb us
[00:31:19] Ford Cruller > i didn't even see anythin
[00:31:19] Jack Gates > c
[00:31:21] RobTheRad > ya
[00:31:21] Lume V > c
[00:31:24] Jack Gates > a hostile nemesis decloaked and bombed
[00:31:29] Cymoro > booya booya
[00:31:29] RobTheRad > thanks drneato
[00:31:34] Jack Gates > roughly 5km from station?
[00:31:34] Tschkih Npahppayi > broadcast in local for rep
[00:31:40] Berious > Securitas Protector nice bomb brah
[00:31:44] Cymoro > yo dude in nemesis we can get you a frigate
[00:31:51] Cymoro > join in
[00:31:52] Griff Skyshock > haha ED came down here to bomb us
[00:31:53] Griff Skyshock > ARGH
[00:31:58] Berious > ya
[00:32:00] Jack Gates > he should come on the op
[00:32:00] jm24 > 00:30:51 Combat Scorch Bomb belonging to Securitas Protector hits you, doing 3225.6 damage.
[00:32:02] Ford Cruller > IM TRACKIN YOU SAM
[00:32:02] Jack Gates > the nemesis dude
[00:32:03] Lume V > Well it's not like they have their own space to protect.
[00:32:03] jm24 > o noes
[00:32:06] jm24 > O NOES
[00:32:06] Ford Cruller > IM FUCKIN TRACKIN YOU BITCH
[00:32:07] Berious > he killed an iteron
[00:32:09] Lume V > they are freed from the shackles of owning space.
--------------------------

Encouraged and out of bombs (I did it again, and again, and again), though without kills (they didn't die but it was fun to watch local) I went back and grabbed some more. I ended up bombing them two or three more times before another bomber pilot in Delve logged on. Yelling at him to get from two jumps away to NOL, I loaded up even more bombs.

Together, we took our bombing positions, aimed, and fired. Instantly, the chaos fell behind me as I slipped into warp. I got the damage report and smiled. Any second now, the other bomb would explode....

But it never did. They had set up a trap for me with a cloaked interdictor, however, I had moved spots. Unluckily for Max, my fellow pilot, his own bombing point just happened to next to my old one, and he was caught and killed. No kills for us, but I think I must have destroyed 5-10 mil of tech II drones, and the local chatter was priceless.

Then, regretfully, I had to log off, and came back about 2 hours later.

This time Jalak, a corpmate of mine and an avid Cormorant pilot, was online. I grabbed another Cormorant and off we went. Long story short, we camped the PR to NOL- gate and ALMOST got some kills. I say almost because by some twist of fate Jalak missed his scram range by 500m and a Goonswarm Eris got away in 90% hull.

Then we got jumped by a Crow, and I put that into 10% structure before managed to get away too, and then an enemy fleet jumped in and killed Jalak. Undeterred, I warped back to the gate, engaged yet another Crow, put that into 25% armor, before I was jumped in and killed as well.

Why did I do this foolhardy thing? Well, because my destroyer cost a total of 1.5 million ISK and a Crow costs at least 20 million, or over 10 times as much. If the fleet had jumped in a fraction of a second later, or I had pointed him a fraction of a second longer, we would have come out ahead. But enough whining, today was a great day, even with only 3 or 4 people out in Delve, it was great fun and I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Securitas.

Delve Day One

I and one other wingmate finally arrived in Delve, and after logging in for a quick 30 minute session, I checked the map for "average pilots active" and found that NOL- happily had 30. Smiling, I headed over there and waited on the station with a Scorch bomb. Sure enough, some time goes by and a Coercer undocks. I shrugged and sent a bomb his way, then warped off. I sighed as no damage message informing me I had hit someone came up.

Then I suddenly see a message in local.

Durendale Zukuri > oh no
Durendale Zukuri > my empty itty

What? Then I checked my kills, and sure enough, there was a killmail for an Iteron there. Apparently the Coercer had warped off while an Iteron undocked a second later.

After the Iteron kill, everyone in local began smacking for some odd reason. I thought that you normally smacked after you had killed someone else, not the other way around, but obviously in Delve the rules are different.

Vio Geraci > Behold as the combined forces of the Triumvirate Alliance lay waste to the impotent goonies!
Durendale Zukuri > its me im the one being laid waste to
SamHandwich > sup
Securitas Protector > We're not Tri.
SamHandwich > ima dd you right now
Durendale Zukuri > or a sapce hold ing alliance
Durendale Zukuri > boosh
Wim'sei > We are helpless in the very space we hold while they stand free of POS warfare.

At first I had dismissed SamHandwich's threat of a doomsday as a joke or smack, but sure enough, within a few minutes a Leviathan appeared on scan. I guess us two in Stealth Bombers must be pretty scary, eh? Scary enough to pull a titan, anyway. I wonder what they'll throw at us when the full Black Ops fleet arrives.

I also spotted a neutral (probably Triumvirate) Strategic Cruiser flying around, but I didn't have the firepower to take it down with only two bombers. I soon had to log off, but not before I wasted another bomb on that Coercer.

Delving Away

Last night, I ordered the move to Delve. Unfortunately, there's not much to say as the route was very boring. I cut straight through AAA space and Goonswarm space, encountered one 10-man roaming gang while leaving Curse, which I easily evaded with my Nemesis, and one gatecamp as I entered Delve. I managed to escape the bubble and get away, but they left before I could drop a bomb.

I'm wondering though, why is Delve so empty? Indeed, I looked at "average number of players" on the map and no system had over 30 players. The only action I got before I had to go to bed was foolishly just-for-fun bombing an undocking Rupture. I didn't kill him.

I also made an idiot out of myself by wasting a precious bomb by clicking the bomb launcher instead of my cloak. Fortunately no one was around to take advantage of it, but I felt stupid nonetheless.

Anyway, I'm now in Delve and looking forward to some action.

Also: whoever invented the stereotype about Goons flying Rifters is an idiot or Goons somehow got their hands on some money. I would have loved to bomb a Rifter or something easy, but all I saw Goons flying was Tech II ships, mostly HACs and HICs.

A New Dawn (Again)

Alright, this is a public service announcement. Though I am enrolled in a summer class, the Ethereal Navy will be redeploying away from our new home in Curse. Look out universe, here we come!

Hint: It has NPC space and lots of reds!

Gentlemen's Club Run-In

Alright, although this is not strictly black ops, yesterday I decided to take a foray into wormhole space to equip our blackops team with tech III covertly reconfigured ships, as it's my dream to have a fleet of these. So, in my specially fit all-purpose Myrmidon, I scan down a wormhole and warp to it, waiting a few minutes for the rest of the fleet to catch up. I definitely deserved the following.

I managed to jump and engaged a Taranis, putting it into high structure before the other ships came in and melted me like butter. In seconds, I was in a clone in the same system. Definitely props to the mad-fast scanners in Gentlemen's Club. Fortunately, I think I trapped them in the wormhole, because their prober and a members re-entered local before the stream stopped. I think my ship plus their fleet jumping into the wormhole and then some of their fleet collapsed it.

To Gentlemen's Club: you guys are good pilots, very nice scan work, even if you did get trapped in there.

In other news, looks like I'll have to wait to get those parts for my dream fleet.

Up to Speed: A History

Before I begin blogging in earnest, I'm going to write a little "history" post that will show how the team got to where it is today. It all begins with a string of defeats that the Ethereal Crossing Coalition(Ethereal Dawn/Intrepid Crossing) suffered during the Drone Wars.

Red Alliance and friends had gotten a foothold in our "loop" area, including a station or two, while we had no systems in their space. This put us on a constant defensive, unable to put pressure on their miners, ratters, and other carebears, while we were unable to make ISK to continue the war.

As a newly-minted Junior FC with not much political power in my alliance, Ethereal Dawn, I thought about what I could do. Having just trained Stealth Bombers, I thought maybe I could get a group of 5 or so and go down to Insmother to put pressure on ratters. Little did I know how big it would grow.

So, I posted a topic called "Operation: New Dawn" on the forums that laid out a template for how I thought this team was going to work. I made an ingame password-protected channel and mailing list, and waited.

A day went by, and when I checked my Evemail, 8 people had already replied. Problem was: not all of them flew bombers. So, I expanded the mission a bit. I'd take all cloaking ships. That very day, I formed everyone up in 3H5(a station system), and we went off. To where? Well, C-J6 of course!

Why? I had recently learned that Goonswarm and RA held this place as sacred, as undefilable. I wanted to wage psychological warfare as well, so this became our quite literal home for 2 months. I did not dock in a station once during that time. The very first day of deployment, we escorted a pair of blockade runners down and deployed 6 giant secure containers at a very deep safespot. Regulations dictated that no one at the cans was decloaked for more than 30 seconds.

Over a few days, we brought in tens of thousands of torpedoes, dozens of bombs, sundry ammo and modules, and then, upon discovering that C-J was not cynojammed, finally jumped in a Chimera carrier. This carrier would only ever leave the area during our deployment to fetch materials and ships from our loop area.

By now, I had almost 20 very active pilots in my Blackops team, all of which could fly bombers. We practiced and got very good with bomb deployment after a few mess-ups(like me, the esteemed FC, destroying his own fleet.) This led to a massive, unprecedented victory later on while I was on vacation(more on that later.)

After bombers, I had a few Falcons, a pair of Rapiers, an Arazu or two, the Chimera, and a Redeemer Black Ops ship. It was time. I gave the order to begin attacks, so we gatecamped the YPW- gate for about an hour. No one came through. Finally, we moved to the C-J station, where we noticed some bombers from Republic Alliance having a go at some Red Alliance ships.

Immediately seeing an opportunity for cooperation, I contacted them and within half an hour we had blue standings. One of the Republic Alliance(RE-AL) corps was eventually to join ED and become an integral member of the Black Ops team. Thus, every day, we woke up, logged in , and appeared in C-J. We started getting insults from the locals, smacktalk, and so forth. That was okay by us; it meant that we were being recognized.

Then, one day, maybe 2 weeks after initial deployment, one of my pilots gave me the location of an undefended moon-mining POS. After a day of few targets, I quickly rallied the 8 stealthbombers under my command and attacked. I will never forget the surprise of our whole fleet when the thing went into reinforced in an hour and a half. 8 stealthbombers had attacked a POS and succeeded! It was unthinkable. This started a whole strategy of search-and-destroy; we actively searched for red (relatively) undefended POSes to hamper incoming ISK. They fell quickly.

By the time we withdrew, we had destroyed over 13 POSes, including a few medium-sized control towers. Additionally, there were often moon-mining materials left over, which contributed to our net profit for the whole operation of a few billion. The whole point of all this is to illustrate what kind of effect we were having on our enemy and the constant new tactics we had to devise. Many of these moon-mining small POSes were the only things holding sovereingty, so Red Alliance and Ultima Rati0 lost about 7 systems.

All the while, we were gate-camping, roaming, baiting, and so forth, netting dozens of kills(and not a few embarassing losses.) For example, one time we attacked a seemingly harmless Drake without ECM. The Drake died, but we lost 4 bombers to it first. We also used the Chimera extensively for POS bashing, with it's sentry drones. An amazing feeling swept through the team and the alliance: we were living in their space, using our capitals and bashing their POSes with impunity.

Because of this feeling, I ordered our own POSes put up in the multitude of unclaimed systems, two of which were just 2 jumps from C-J. In between moving ratting ships down and storing them, running complexes and the like(which also gave a nice feeling), we refined ice, put up guns, and claimed 5 systems, 4 of which eventually reached Sov 3.

Then we discovered that 90% of the reds in spread-out systems were macros that logged off every time a red(to them) was in local. This lead to the tactic of leaving cloaked bombers and other ships spread across different systems to discourage their ISK farming. One of them got so upset that in exchange for us setting him blue, he sent us 10 Million ISK a day. And we didn't even have to do anything.

Morale got higher and higher as we kept bombing, torpedoing, and generally trashing Insmother, and then suddenly I went on vacation for a month in Europe. I appointed 4 commanders(overlap), but when I came back, everything was in shambles and everyone was inactive, which I'm still repairing now. I did discover while I was on vacation a very interesting and relevant fact which made EVE history.

The pre-mentioned bombing practice had led to a massive victory. Red Alliance had titan-bridged a massive fleet into one of our systems TP-RTO. Our fleet was roaming the system, but when the cyno went up, the Black Ops bombers got there first. With over 70 ships clustered tightly together, it was a perfect target. 8+ bombs were launched inside of 15 seconds or so, and those bombers got 56( yes fifty-six ) kills. I was immensely jealous; while I left, my team delivered more than an improvised Doomsday worth of damage to an enemy battlefleet.

Unfortunately, that was the last major action on their part, and that brings me to the topic of this blog: a day to day account of a 30+ man Black Ops fleet in 0.0. Currently, I'm rebuilding after the disastrous summer, but I hope you will all enjoy it.