Go Big Boom

Your friendly neighborhood blogger is back.  A day off to provide much needed security for my son's school field trip, in which several attempted gate camps were averted successfully.  We did have a few ganking episodes but those were also dealt with in typical pirate fashion and the guilty will be spending some time in the brig.  So all in all a great day of Yarring around with hundreds of school children.  Which only makes Eve and blogging seem incredibly tame in comparison.


After the relatively semi-sorta nasty getting blobbed at every turn week I had last week, Sunday came around and it was time for some serious getting down to business and finding some decent fights time.  Or, failing that, time to organize a decent fleet and at least fight toe to toe with the blobbers.


We had some new friends coming up from Null to play with us, some guys from Greater Goon and Clockwork Pineapple.  We've been trying to get something together for a few weeks now and it finally looked to be happening.  Between us we managed to put together a decent enough gang, but once again we were banging our heads against massive blobbers and fleets.


As if often the case on the weekend however, we weren't the only ones out and about.  Seems our buddies over in Shadow Cartel and Pen Island were roaming up our way.  So we decided to fight fire with fire and we merged our fleets to try and deal with these "militias".


While the Cops in Eve are relatively harmless, more annoying than anything, these so-called "militias" are a pain in the ass for decent Pirate folk.  I imagine it wasn't that much different in the sailing ship days either, suddenly a safe port of call becomes annoying when the locals get it into their heads to organize.  Pfft.  More than that though, the militia pilots never flew alone or with less than 20-60-80 or more of them in a fleet.  I suspect Strength in Numbers is brightly tattooed on all their asses.


There is much about the ensuing fights on Sunday that I cannot tell you here.  Even us Pirates have our trade-secrets and we'd like to keep them that way.  What I can say is this, sometimes fortune smiles down on you from the First Gate and things go your way.  It didn't start out that way, reports of 100 man militia gangs, even some reports of Titans on the field, spread like wildfire.  Our gang was ready though and we've all been flying together for a long time now, we'd had plenty of practice on our tactics and our strategy and we knew our ships well.  So we decided to take the fight to 'em.


I wish you could have seen it.  There was some early posturing from both sides, mostly involving trying to get into the best position, but finally we all said screw it.  We set ourselves up and waited to see what they would do.  Sure enough their Carriers started undocking, at several points in the coming fight they'd have 6 Carriers on the field.  Heck, that isn't counting the Guardians and Oneiros, of which they had many.  They started sending in scouts to get a look at us, but we didn't budge.  Eventually they warped in the bulk of their fleet and the battle began.


Any kind of toe to toe fight like this comes down to several critical things.  Primarily among those is Logistics.  How strong is your Logi compared to the enemies, do your pilots know their job and how tough will they be under fire?  Proper kudos and mucho thanks to our Logi pilots!  They did an incredible job for being completely out-numbered on the field.  Other things are important, but proper and talented Logi?  That can be critical.


We were out-numbered on the field at least 2-1, maybe 3-1 at times.  The fog of battle reared its head once and reports came down that we'd lost significant Logi.  We de-aggressed and docked up in the station, but once the smoke had cleared it was clear we'd only lost one Basi.  So we immediately undocked and started up again.


At one point the Caldari guys showed up to add to the chaos in their Drakes.  They quickly regretted that decision as our tackle kept them at bay while we killed them all.  In the end we held and pwned large.  The battle reports are a little hard to decipher given the cross-fighting that was going on, Gal Militia shooting Caldari Militia and whatnot.  But it is clear when you look at it that almost all the losses for the day are on the other side.  Almost all the losses.  I haven't taken the time to add it all up, nor will I, but I've heard as much as 60-2, or 70-10, something like that.


You can decide for yourself.  The Shadow Battle Report and the Lucifer's Hammer Battle Report are here.  For my part, in my trusty Tempest, I managed to contribute significantly to 22 kills.


So the worm turns once more.  How long it'll stay on this side is always a mystery.


This is the best version of the final battle report.

And now with video!!  Check it out.