A Tale of 11 Rifters

The Captains Log 8/3

Solar system: Doril

Station: Archangels Assembly Plant

After running some reactions in my Wormhole I had a 100mill to spare, which I decided to use to buy some more ships for PvP. With 100mill there is a wide option of ships that I can procure, but I decided to go back to basics and bought myself 10 Rifters with fittings.

High Slot

            3 x 200mm Autocannon II’s

            1 x OE-5200 Rocket Launcher

Mid Slot

            1 x 1MN Afterburner II

            1 x Warp Scrambler II

            1 x Stasis Webifier II

Low Slot

            1 x Damage Control II

            1 x 100mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

            1 x Small Armour Rep

Rigs

            2 x Small Trimark Armour Pumps

            1 x Projectile Collision Accelerator I

One they had all being procured I transported them down to Doril for a bit of fun.

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A tale of two battles

The Captains Log 27/12

Solar System: A1-AUH; Esoteria. Amarr; Domain

Shiptype: Drake Class Battlecruiser, Prophecy Class Battlecruiser, Harbinger Class Battlecruiser

GoonSwarm in all their might and glory came to our space in a Drake and support gang.  While the battle raged there another fight was brewing in Amarr in agains Privateer Allaince. Who was to win these battles. Read and find out.

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Knocking On the POS

The Captains Log 22/12

System: Ziona, Domain

Ship: Armageddon Class Battleship

CONCORD Preservation and Recovery has being steadily growing since we opened up recruitment (closed now by the way apart from exceptional circumstances) and we can now field a sizable fleet of Gank battleships and remote rep support. Unfortunately, though targets have being a little sparse due to potential targets either removing their POS or onlineing some heavy defences. We even war deced a sys-k alt corp, didn’t know it at the time buy hey what can you do.

This lack of targets led me to declaring war on three corps at once in the hope of being able to destroy some of their POS’s. Upon war decing one corporation, Medicean Rebellion, I had this nice little chat

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The Power of Disco

The Captains Log 16/12

System: Kamio, The Citadel

Ship: Armageddon Class Battleship

While I was scouting POS’s with Epimithius09 looking for a juicy target I came across a system called Kamio which had over a hundred capsuleers in it. Nothing exciting about that you say, very true. However, when I warped to the only station in system there were 5 exhumer pilots outside of it. I checked the belts and noticed that was a Ice belt in system so I warped to it to have a little look see. Low and behold there were 36 miners in the belt.

One thought crossed my head. Disco time.

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Invading Goons

The Captains Log 25/11

System: TPAR-G; Peroid Basis

Ship: Rokh Class Battleship

For those of you who have being regularly following my blog you will know that GoonSwarm tried to invade Esoteria not to long agao, which failed miserably.  Well over the last week or so the StainWagon Coalition has returned the favour and launched a invasion TPAR-G, a GoonSwarm held system in Period Basis.

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Combat Log: Week 43

The Captains Log 27/10

Kills

This week’s kills come from the Esoteria defence against GoonSwarm over a couple of battles.

Apocalypse

Megathron

Megathron

Megathron

Megathron

Tempest

POS – This POS had just about the coalition on it (350 people). Dropped like a rock.

POS – A small Battle ship fleet took this one out. About 45 minutes of constant shooting.

POS  - Same with this one.

Losses

I tried to lose my Rokh but failed. Damn Goons didn’t primary me.

Esoteria War Update

The Captains Log 26/10

The last week has seen the steady grind of POS warfare on both sides of the fight. Goonswarm would put our POS’s into reinforced, we would then rep them and then put some Goon POS’s into reinforced only for Goons to rep them. So far this has only taken place in two systems, A1-AUH the chokepoint for Esoteria as it divides the region into four parts (North, East, West and South) and G-YZUX, which is one of the station systems allowing for SOV 4 to exist. There is little actual fighting going on between us due the time zone differences between the alliance (Goons US and Sys-k Euro), despite this there have being a few battles when the play time of both the alliances overlap, with Goonswarm putting Stealth Bomber fleets to good use when attack the Sys-k battleship fleets.

The start of the war also saw the start of a new propaganda war with the Mittani releasing chat logs of a Simmering Rebellion taking place in Systematic-Chaos, in which the CEO and a Director of I.M.M and a i.NET director were talking with Zapawork about siding with Goonswarm in the coming war. Liam Freeman (the Sys-k leader) passed this off as a joke of which he was fully aware of. The fact that these chat logs have being released to me indicates that any deal that may have been made has fallen through otherwise the Goons would not be releasing this information and giving away their hand. Furthermore, as a member if I.M.M I can say that there is a lot of anti-goon feelings in the rank and file and that any pro-Goon decision made by the leadership would not sit well with them and probably lead to a insurrection in the corp ranks.

The biggest battle to take place so far occurred on the weekend when 16 Goonswarm POS where coming out of reinforced, which lead to a 500+ strong allied fleet turning up for the fight giving them the numerical advantage. The battle resulted in a large number of Goonswarm capitals being destroyed along with the majority of the POS’s that were coming out of reinforced. Goons claim the capitals lost were a suicide fleet as their insurance was about to expire.

While this loss may have not bothered the Goons much the loss of their Titan in a separate battle with Red Overlord probably did. Apparently a Goon mining POS placed in ROL space came under attack so Goons jumped in a Titan without support which was promptly tackled and engaged. So Goons launched a rescue mission with another Titan, which successfully allowed the original Titan to escape only for the second one to be caught and destroyed.

So the big question is why is Goonswarm invading Systematic-Chaos space? Well the first and the simplest answer is to give their members something to do. As a PvP alliance they have to keep their members active otherwise they may just disappear forever. However, the possible strategic reasons for the invasion offers further insights, which can be seen in the Goon post here. Basically the objective of this war is not about territorial conquest but to induce a failure cascade in Sys-k as they are the alliance the fields a lot the sub-capital support in the Stainwagon coalition. Be removing Sys-k from the equation the Stainwagon coalition will have a large cap fleet but limited sub-capital support, thus removing the whole coalitions as threat for awhile. Furthermore there had being rumours going through the alliance that Sys-k would soon be invading the space formally occupied by KIA and now Zenith Affinity. Invading Esoteria therefore is a pro-active from of defence.

So how long is this war going to go for? Well providing that Sys-k doesn’t failcascade I don’t foresee this war going on past Dominion (depending on how Sov is going to work) as with the release of the new Sov system all the major alliances are going to have to pull back and consolidate what they currently hold. Also from what CCP has released so far it does not seem that interregional wars are going to be the norm now, instead there is going to be more intraregional wars. Even if Goons mange to obtain the space occupied by Sys-k they will most likely not be able to hold it very easily post Dominion (again depending on how Sov works) thereby allowing Sys-k, or whatever it is afterwards, to reclaim it. So all Sys-k has to do win is hold the fort for one month. If we can do that we have won the war.

Combat Log: Week 42

The Captains Log 22/10

Kills

Oorukai – Hulk

VeePrime – Hulk

To Mar – Hulk

Olvi III – Hulk

Cindy Miner – Hulk

Sponti – Hulk

Api – Hulk

Hatecorner – Hulk

Losses

Catalysts. Lots of them.

Hulkageddon Day

The Captains Log 19/10

This past weekend (17^th and the 18^th) was Hulkageddon Weekend in which I. a few corp mates and 14 other corps went on a rampage through High Sec popping (killboard) Hulks left right and centre. All thanks goes to Helicity Boson of Python Cartel for organising it and to 00sage00 for telling me about it. I bought and fitted about 40 destroyers for this op (how I got the ISK for this will be covered in another post to follow) and gave them out to any corp member who decided to join me in this great task. After two days of Hulk killing I came out at number eight on the killboards, I was higher and could have stayed higher if it wasnt for sec status being all burnt up, thus preventing me from staying in empire. I.M.M though has come out at number two on the killboard with 18 kills and 107 points, which is not bad since we were just about the only non-pirating corp involved in Hulkageddon.

Even before we proceeded with Hulkageddon we had people warning the local denzians of our earlier Hulk killing antics which made it very hard for us to find some Hulks to kill at the start of the campaign. We were even forced to create a new Alt just scout out Hulks for us.

Gorax DaDestroyer > there are 4 pilots in system who are known to be suiciders.  be on the lookout fellow miners

commander savor > too all minner i.m.m is in sys they took out 9 bill of hulk the other day

However, after a few false starts we got our first kill in Elonaya, where we struck rich at the local Ice belt. Oorukai in his ice mining Hulk was quickly reduced to space dust floating amongst the Ice. VeePrime was the next to fall the might of our destroyers (and one Ibis). It turns out he wasn’t paying much attention though as his pod never left the tangled remains of his wreck, which forced Hansgrit to pod him. As we all wanted to see this happen we all warped to the belt and watched the pod goo splatter across his old Hulk wreck. CONCORD though didn’t look kindly on our inaction and proceeded to blow up all our ships, including the rigged hauling badger I was flying (YouTube). To Mar was the next to die, only tacking one Catalyst to kill him (we had three on him just in case) followed by Olvi III who didn’t suspect a thing. Cindy Miner (YouTube) was my favourite kill as he had a Hulk valued at 853 mill due to T2 rigs and a faction shield booster, which unfortunately didn’t drop. After filling the belts in Elonaya with CONCORD and forcing the miners to run a way and hide, we were forced to find kills elsewhere, which turned out to be in Piekura and the surrounding systems. Sponti was the first kill over in this new space. Killing sponti though brought my sec standing so low I was trapped in Piekura and Saatuban next door as the surrounding systems were now patrolled by CONCORD who were ready to destroy any ship I brought in there. Api died next bring my sec status to -4.28, a hairs breath from being outlawed throughout all of high sec. The death of Hatecorner though pushed my sec status over the edge making me an outlaw.

After the weekend was over 58 Hulks, 22 Retrievers and 5 Mackinaws had fallen victim to the combined might of Hulkageddon. In total 181 Catalysts, 29 Thrashers, 18 Coercers, 12 Typhoons, 5 Brutixs, 5 Armageddons, 3 Rifiters, 2 Coromorants and 2 Pilgrims (why?) had being lost. It also turns out the biggest tears that we got were from our own alliance, as some of our alliance mates didn’t appreciate what we were doing. Ah well next time they should join in.

Further Links

YouTube – Thanks to Daquaris for all of these.

I.M.M scam a Hulk, I.M.M Hulkageddon: Win some lose some, I.M.M Gank Ice Miners, I.M.M Hulk Gank Hulkomania

Blogs

Flashfresh – The Pirate

Caldari Outpost

Helicity Bonson

The Irony of Ganking

 The Captains Log 18/10

The last image of my Raven