First off, if you don't know what I'm talking about, read here.
We started scouting quite impromptu at around 20:30 last Sunday after Niv poked me about the PvP daytripping concept I promoted (see above). After some minuets of scanning KSpace for a connection, we found two WHs leading to WSpace, with one of them being a C6 and another a frig hole to a C2 with around 9 people sitting in assorted citadels... plus some 10 signatures, among which a guaranteed C3 static. Twas the time to get the ball rolling.
Despite another roam going on at the same time, we were able to form two Deacons, four Confessors, a Sabre and a morale Svipul, plus two probing alts.
The first attempt at milking content was from the C2 residents: when I entered the system with my scanning alt, they soon undocked a Buzzard. I didn't want to spook them, so I kept my alt in there and stayed quiet, without dropping probes. My guess here was that I was the one spawning the hole, so they saw the new sig and got out to scan it. In the meantime, I got the fleet into position on the outside connection. We tried to bait the people in the citadels by derpily running a combat site in their home system with two confessors and the two Deacons, but there was no interest.
After being around halfway through the site, I asked Ferius to join us in the system and start scanning. We soon found a C3 connection and decided to go ahead and peek into that as soon as we had finished the site, since the residents were not taking any actions.
Me and Ferius peek with our scanning alts into the C3 to find an Astero on DScan. I DScan a cluster of planets while Ferius gets the other, and we soon find two Deimoses on DScan. The site was almost finished, sadly, and we decide to wait until the next one to try to ambush them. They start another one soon and drop an MTU. Ferius gets on grid with them and confirms that they have a Rook along with the two Deimoses... Belonging to MOA. The fight sounds doable, so we set to try to drop on them by bubbling them with the Sabre.
For those confused about how 2 Deimoses and 1 Rook are a possible target with 4 Confessors and 2 Deacons, here is my decision process: They're siterunning, meaning they're selfrep.
A selfrep Deimos can usually get around 600/800 EHP/s of reps, and we have around 350 DPS per Confessor, so that's plenty to get them down. They also probably have rails fitted, or they wouldn't be able to kill the rats, and medium Rails really struggle to track small ships. (this is just in my mind tho, because I didn't ask for visual confirmation on their weapons - something to remember for the future)
As for the Rook, to fit selfreps, he has sacrificed some midslots, meaning it doesn't have a full rack of ECMs, probably topping at 2 or 3. A reasonable jam strength for a Rook which is not built for max strength is on the realms of 10/12 points on main race and 3 off-race. Confessors have an absurd amount of sensor strength, especially in sharpshooter (~30 in that mode, ~15 without), so I'm not too worried. Also, if he's ECMing sleepers and he's not a moron, he probably has a race-specific jammer, and the chance of that being exactly Amarr is 1/4. Pretty decent not to make me fear we'll all get jammed.
We bookmark their MTU and decide to use that to get a warpin for the Sabre close to them. Here's where we screwed up: I really overcomplicated the fleet layout, making us unable to fleet warp effectively if we didn't want to wait for bookmark propagation time. We ended up landed more than 60km away from them and they were able to simply decommit. After scouting the chain one step deeper, we decided to call it.
The good:
- We formed up 8 people with no advance notice. Guess that's the power of CEO pinging!
- Most people had doctrine ships
- We had almost got some nice kills
The bad:
- All in all, it was a veeery slow fleet with not enough action going on
- I didn't do enough scouting in advance, leading to a lot of idling around for the main fleet
- Still in this sense, my rationale was that I didn't want to spook the people in the C2 by dropping probes, but I could have scouted the C6
- I didn't explicitly ask for probers. I was lucky Ferius brought one along, or it would have been way more boring than it already was
- The fleet layout was way too complicated and this bit on our arses
BTW, the correct way to catch the ratters would have been the following:
- Warp my scanning alt to Ferius'
- Get either scanning alt as close as possible to them
- Have all the fleet jump
- Have the sabre warp to the closest scanning alt
- Wing warp the rest of the fleet to the same scanning alt
Lessons for the next time:
- Have a common bookmarking scheme (Ferius, can we decide something together if you want?)
- Scout more in advance
- Have more probing alts
- Don't have the FC be also the primary scout/scanning alt
- Make fleet layout simpler
- Find a time in which this doesn't clash with other alliance activities and announce it with more advance
p.s.: This was our chain at the end... Pretty darn solid!
All said... This was actually quite decent IMO! Feedback?
Cheers,
Kyle