A Rock In A Cold Place

War journal of Marko Greggos

The Outcast Insurrection

Day 1 (9/18, YC 111)

That didn’t take long.  Received another comm from CONCORD yesterday at 1930 hours stating that the New Eden Outcasts had declared war on the Hactenus Project, and by way of that Barr Heavy Industries.  This appears to be another little up-and-unbecoming mercenary and or pirate corporations just like the last one.  I don’t think we’ll have any problems.  They have a couple of capsuleers who have been commanding warships for a while, but it’s a small force, and one thing that we have is numbers.

I was out of town, so to speak, so I gathered up my travel gear and sailed my Drake (still have to find a name for the damn thing, maybe this war will give me some inspiration) back to Raussinen.  I missed Abaddor, he scooted for calmer skies, but he left me access to everything in his quarters.  Hargatay, who has turned out to be pretty useful in a pinch, let me know that he was nearby and, in his words, “tuned into the ether”, whatever the hell that means.  I’ll never figure that guy out.

Tried to use some of the waiting time gathering intelligence, but there wasn’t much on the networks about these guys.  They used to belong to an alliance called The Ronin Brotherhood, up until recently in-fact, but as of now they seem to be going it alone.  Looks like a couple of them have been through their fair share of scraps, HybridOnslaught coming out the winner more often than not and the other way around for Proteus Maximus.  Their founder, Odvian, has been off the radar for nearly a year, so I don’t know much about him.  Interestingly enough, he’s not the CEO; instead a woman who calls herself Yellow Pearl is, and she’s nowhere to be found except some rumors about black market trading.

Olleyk, one of our security cheifs, organized a fleet to meet the agressors head on as soon as the CONCORD waiting period was over, so as soon as I was able I mobilized in my Blackbird to see how I could help out.  The Drake would have to say in the hanger, for now, because it was just too valuable to risk with the gang’s current cash situation.

On the way to join the fleet in Amarr space, I received another communication stating that the Brotherhood of Wolves had declared war on us as well, but that would be a problem for tommorow.

So after a bit of a trip I joined the fleet in Ashab on the gate to Amarr, the home system of the Outcasts.  All was quite other than the usuall commerical traffic coming and going.  We waited around for a while but there was no other activity, so the fleet started to move in tactical jumps back towards Raussinen.  While we were on the way, one of the corp members that was still back in local space called out a spotting on one of our targets one jump out from Raussinen.  Once we all got into Uemisaisen, we sent tacklers through then the rest of the fleet followed when they started to get locks.  Unfortunately he sliped away, and we followed his tragectory.   Again, he jumped from this gate before we could pounce, so we split the fleet to every gate in the system.  He was, however, nowhere to be found.  The fleet formed back up, but I had some maintenance issues so I docked and ended up out of the action for a couple hours.

 Looks like while I was out of the action the fleet took down a Drake and a Rupture and lost a Merlin.  All in all that’s a good engagement.  When I got back into the action there was a shortage of frigates for the fleet so I undocked my Rifter (the Irresponsible) and joined the fleet on the other side of the gate to Rauss.  There was a target in Rauss that we had trapped.

Hargatay tried to track the target down but was unable to as he kept moving around.  Meanwhile, another contact was made in Sotrentaira who eventually warped in close to the fleet.  He was at a distance of 50km, too far for me to close with safely, so I jumped back through to the Rauss side of the gate.  Within moments the other target, HybridOnslaught, warped to the gate.  I called out a warning to the fleet that he was jumping through and quickly followed him. 

I jumped in less than ten kilometers from the target, who was flying an Ishtar, and quickly hit the afterburner and gave the order to close with his ship.  The webifier, scrambler, and NOS all were activated and the target was efectively pinned down as I began a tight orbit and engaged the autocannons.  He was hitting me, however, with some Scourge Missiles, and once my sheilds failed my armor began to peel off like the skin on an onion.  I was down to no armor and aligned to a nearby planet.  My crew managed to get the warp drive activated by the time we hit 30% structure and I shouted into the comms, “Target not scrambled, pulling out, we’re on fire.”  I was able to dock at a nearby station for repairs, feeling shamed that I couldn’t keep the target locked down and that he might get away, but it seemed that the efforts of the Irresponsible kept the target tied down just long enough because the Ishtar exploded before it could warp.  The other ship, a Rook, warped out just after the Ishtar popped.

There were some scattered reports of some other minor losses, among them a mining vessel commanded by a very brave, or very confused, soul who is now no longer with the company.

War journal of Marko Greggos

The Protei Incident

Day 1 (9/13, YC 111)

Today saw the war declaration from The Protei take effect at 1700 hours.  At approximately 1745 hours I logged into the corporate comms channel and asked quite bluntly, “How are we doing?”  Ryssa replied that several of the enemy were in Uemiasaisen, but that they seemed unwilling to jump through the bottleneck into Sotrentaira due to the fact that we had a gate camp on our side of the gate.  Excellent, I thought, even if we weren’t trading blows yet we had a strategic upper hand.   I asked the fleet commander, Olleyk, whether he wanted Ewar or Tackle, and he replied “Tackle, but bring whatever you want.”  Tackle it was, by two votes, so I hopped in a Rifter and un-docked.

So I joined the camp on the gate.  It was quite the turnout.  The fleet, at it’s top end, was twenty two ships.  Most of the time we were at twenty one.  We had a few scouts in Uemiasaisen and a couple members patrolling or whatnot, but the actual camp was sixteen ships.  There wasn’t much going on as the two targets were docked up in a Home Guard station.  We got a message that there was a target a few jumps out and we were about to go when that target, Schmalgauzen, jumped into Uemiasaisen.  He docked up with the others and we continued to sit tight for a while.  A couple of times shuttles came through the gate and sat amongst us, one time going through scanning everybody.  We made sure our auto-targeting systems were disabled as this non-target was probably in the employ of the enemy and trying to illicit a non-legal response to the targeting from our drones, which would have resulted in CONCORD intervention.  The attempt was pretty much futile and I did some close and fast fly-by’s in the Rifter to show what I thought of the dishonorable tactic.

About an hour had gone by since I first un-docked and joined the fleet, and nothing else of note had happened.  Suddenly Ryssa, one of our scouts, reported that Schmalgauzen, in a Maller cruiser, had un-docked and warped to a belt.  Apparently he had gotten bored, and stupid, and decided to do some pirate hunting.

Ryssa was given the go-ahead to try to tackle Schmalgauzen and we all moved close to the gate.  Soon the comm channel lit up with the go-code and we all jumped through the gate and warped to Ryssa’s location.  After that it was pretty much fast and furious.  I hit the afterburner and tore a hot path through space towards the Maller, locking him on the approach.  Once I was within two kilometers I moved into a 1.5km orbit – still in afterburn – and hit the webifier, warp disrupter, and the trio of 200mm autocannons.  After my cap was nice and drained I hit the Nos and started sucking juice from his capacitor, keeping my energy situation stable with everything on the ship running. 

Meanwhile, he was tackled down by a few others, including Ryssa’s interceptor, and the barrage of missiles started pouring in.  We had several Blackbirds in the fleet as well, so the Maller’s targeting systems were completely jammed and he was pretty much waiting to die at this point.

There was some sort of backlash as the ship blew, probably a result of so many E-war devices in the same place or just the sheer destructive force thrown at the ship, but we were unable to target his pod when it ejected from the exploding cruiser.  This was allright, though, because we had definitely made our point:  if you play with Barr Heavy Industries, get ready to play rough!

The official report of this incident can be found here. 

 Thanks to other members of BHI for photography of the day’s events used in this report.

Amendment:  Hum showed up in Rauss.  He must have been spoiling for a fight and got careless, which suits his MO perfectly.  We watched him come and go and loiter for a bit, and unfortunately he got a kill on an interceptor that got to close to the station and got hung up in the stations defense field.  After some hounding and tracking with scouts, he started to move at sub-warp speeds away from the station.  Once he was about 150km out, we managed to get him tackled in his Maller and took him out.  This time I took out a Blackbird and kept his targeting jammed while throwing some heavy missiles at him.  Congrats to Ryssa again for a successful grab on this one.  Official report can be found here.