Atlas, Hotdrops, and the Coalition

Hey everyone!

I know it's been a while since my last update, so bear with me. The 2 biggest items of news since last time are our Secret Atlas Hotdrop (tm) and grabbing Sov from WI. Lets start with the first.

So, roughly 3-4 weeks ago, Stealthfield and our good friends Origin. decided that it might be fun to shoot at the new Stella Polaris (read: Northern Coalition) tower in EOA, right next to where we lived. So, we killed it, with Stella Polaris incurring losses every time they attempted to defend it, or their other tower in TJM, which we reinforced 3 times before destroying. Stella Polaris didn't seem too unhappy about it, although this was probably because they were not often online at the same time. They did tell us that "you will all die later." Ha ha. Cute, right?

Well, seeing as pissing of Stella Polaris was fun, we wanted to go for the real deal. So Elo Knight of Origin. stuck up a Minmatar Medium control tower with some autocannons in QP0k. It took a while, but WI finally reinforced the thing with a large fleet. Excellent! That meant that they would have to come back! So, we repped up the guns and announced a bomber CTA. I think we ended up with something like 23 bombers in fleet, all loaded with Shrapnel bombs. WI brought considerably more.

The numbers ended up being something like 1 Interdictor, 23 Stealthbombers, and a few autocannon batters vs 45 RR BS. WI start shooting at the tower. Elo starts aiming the guns at WI, while we remain cloaked. He kills a Raven, Scorpion, and Rokh in short order. Whoops, there goes their emergency cyno, you know, just in case 45 battleships wasn't enough to take down a medium tower from a 16 man corporation.

The Stealthfield guys get ready for our bombing run, Elo runs outside and bubbles the fleet, and we warp in. Unfortunately, only one wing warped on time due to noobishness and bad comms, so we only killed 1 armageddon. The rest warped off in 70% structure, and didn't come back. As I listened to their teamspeak, I heard that they lost several hundred million ISK worth of tech II drones as well.

Well, we repped up the tower, and before too long, it was reinforced again. This time though, WI weren't taking any chances. Ya know, those small corporations are real dangerous. Better to be safe. Better to bring a capfleet. And so they did. They ended up bringing 30 capital ships and 31 battleships to the party. We attempted a bombing run, but the lag was so bad that it failed, and I died. It was entirely my fault though, I forgot to turn off effects.

Regardless, Elo and I were a little bit unhappy about this whole blobbing deal. And so we plotted our revenge. But that's later. Over the next few weeks, Stealthfield achieved a record 49.9 Billion ISK destroyed in Geminate in 88 Days. This was unprecedented. We began plotting to take space. (That's a story for later but, WI brought a mothership out to kill our small tower. Then they didn't come back for it when it came out of reinforced. We still have it.) But then something big happened; a large coalition consisting of a few dozen small alliances arrived in the region to attack WI, and so we ended up blueing them.

The first operation was the day after we joined the coalition, and on relatively short notice, we had 117 in Fleet. We formed up a capital/rrbs gang and reinforced a WI pos in AD-, as well as incapacitating a cynosural generator and a jump bridge. Thanks to awesome intel (read: me in WI ts) we managed to jump our capitals out seconds before WI hotdropped us, and got our BS fleet into lowsec. Unfortunately, WI tackled us and destroyed the BS fleet on the 0.0 gate in lowsec.

The interesting part, though, is when this tower in AD- came out of reinforced. Elo and I had contacted Atlas ahead of time, and they had staged 100 capitals within jump range of the system, with an additional 150 support. Our own fleet numbered 90. We were going to teach WI a lesson about blobbing. Without even telling the Coalition fleet about our reinforcements on standby, I convinced them to move in as bait. But first, some pre-bait bait. Elo and a corpmate of mine fit cynoes on their carriers, and jumped them in on the pos, pretending to attack some carriers that WI had stationed off of it. Of course, this was WI bait as well. Once our carriers were in, WI counterdropped their 50-or-so man capital fleet and bridged in support.

Oh no!, they must have thought, look at those helpless carriers. Then, as a pretend-trap, we warped in our 90-man Coalition support fleet. The numbers were still heavily in WI's favor, and we started to lose BS. We decloaked a dictor, bubbled WI, and for a few moments, nothing happened but losses on our side. Then the cyno on Elo's carrier opened, and over 200 Atlas jumped in. WI, according to their own killboard, lost 65 Billion ISK in one fell swoop, only killing ONE atlas dreadnought. Stealthfield got on maybe 20B of this, but of course, since we set up the trap, it wasn't just pointless whoring. It was a great way to start Dominion, suffice to say. The WI capitals were going down so fast I barely had time to lock them in my cyno covops before they died.

And then Dominion came, and our alliance, Ihatalo Cartel Navy, in conjunction with some other allies, took sov in Western Geminate, rendering it pretty much our own. We do not plan to become conventional sov holders, simply to use as a ratting/isk making base. To be honest we spend very little time actually in our systems; we spend much more time in WI's Sov 4 constellation. We are now the proud owners of 3 systems and the proud killers of a capfleet. So things are going well.

Have a great day,

Thanks,

Sec