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.