When It Rains... It Pours

Friday:
I logged in to find myself in my Manticore in HED. Right, I was looking to bomb something to add to my paltry one kill assist this month.

I scouted around and found a large juicy Atlas Alliance fleet camping a gate. While I was scouting and getting into a bombing position, I saw an icon for a small mobile warp bubble but no actual bubble itself so I wondered if it was deployed but not anchored thus inactive. Now normally I would err on the side of caution and not try anything stupid, but I was impatient and the fleet was full of small fragile ships...

Well, let's just say that the small bubble was working fine thank you.

Frustrated and back at base I jumped into a Crow and decided to do some gate camping. A corpmate joined me with his Onyx and we moved into a position to catch any stragglers running around. Then we got word that a large Atlas fleet was moving up from HED and we burned back to base to avoid getting caught with our pants down. Out of time, I logged off with only an implantless clone to show for my efforts.

Saturday:
On for a bit Saturday, my horrible playing schedule and real life responsibilities screwed me twice. First in the morning when I was moving some stuff around and an op was called for repping a POS and scouring low sec of hostiles, neither of which I had time for.

Then in the afternoon I logged on to switch some skills and I saw there was a huge fleet battle on and I could not participate. It killed me to have to log off and leave my corp and alliance mates to the fight themselves.

I was getting quite frustrated and begining to wonder what I'm doing in 0.0 space when I can't help out. (Pity party! Woot!)

Sunday:
Sunday night I logged in for my weekly "long" Eve session (i.e. about 2 hours) and heard that Libertas Fidelitas Alliance was organizing a defense fleet. It seems Atlas was once again futzing around in Providence but in the Northern part this time and it seemed likely that when they came back home they would come right through us.

Last month I had some great success in getting Pew Pew in LFA fleets so I x'd up and offered my services in a Crow. The FC accepted the 'x' but emphatically told all of us in small ships to get bigger, medium range Battleships and battlecruisers prefered. Seeing someone told to get their "pulsepoc" (aka Apocalypse battleship with pulse lasers) I figured my Abaddon Callisto with pulse lasers would suffice as it can reach to 54 km optimal with Radio crystals. Hoping that would suffice, I joined up with the fleet at the rally point.

It started poorly when some reds in an adjacent system were reported and we were told to "warp yourselves to the gate" which I interpreted to mean to warp to your own optimal range,  so I landed 50 km off the gate while everyone else landed on it, jumped through, and killed a small handful of ships.

"Goddammit, I'm stupid and cursed!"

We rallied once more and the reports of the Atlas battlecruiser heavy fleet came to us. They were next door. We warped to the gate, this time actually at range for our battleship squadron, and Atlas jumped in. It was on.

The next ten minutes was simply listening to the primaries get called, locking them, activating weapons, and repeating while watching my cap and looking out for being primaried myself so I could call for reps if I was targeted.

The enemy fleet used warps to break locks periodically, and ships from both sides died as the battle continued but our battleships gave us the firepower edge and soon the hostiles warped off en masse leaving the field to us. The Atlas killboard has the most accurate view of the kills on each side; the battle I'm talking about occured from 1:46 to 1:57 and the kills per side were pretty even but we held the field at the end.

Personally, I got in on 12 kills in that battle although my damage output was typically poor as I was fighting at extreme range for my weapons. However one Drake drifted close by me and when he was called primary I dropped the web and point on him and opened up with the Multifrequency crystals and demonstrated what the Abaddon could do at shorter range.

After the field was cleared of debris we were about to stand down when the Atlas fleet came back for another go. It looked like we were going to fight at longer range so I swapped out to the Rokh Insisto Oblivium II (the one I saved from DIZ a few months ago) and got into a little tussel but Atlas seemed to want us to follow back to HED and we declined the offer, knowing that a Titan's Doomsday was the most likely end of that pursuit. I did get a few points of damage on a Zealot in the process though.

So with my name on 13 kill mails for the night and no losses on our corp's side I logged off feeling quite pleased with myself and the result of my first ever fleet engagement. Usually my schedule makes it impossible to join in such operations but this time the stars aligned.

*lights cigarette, puts feet on desk, and leans back* Yeah, that's the ticket.