Bad Day For Triple A

I logged in last night with the intention of doing some ratting with Kla'strit to continue to improve his sec status and was surprised to see this message flash in the intel channel:

"CARRIER TACKLED IN HED ON KEB GATE NEED DPS"

I hesitated. I was on the laptop with no voice comms, and the overview setups were not perfect like on my gaming PC. Should I stay back? Should I rush in?

Well of course I rush in! Who wants to read a blog post about how I didn't go try and kill a carrier?

So I logged into Kirith, spent half a second picking a ship before deciding that the new Manticore Stealth Bomber in my hanger would bring lots of DPS while being a cheap loss should things go sour. Fortunately it was already setup with everything but a name last week so I was able to jump in, load more torps in the cargo bay, and undock the good ship Kirith Kodachi's Manticore.

Since I was off voice comms and flying off the cuff so to speak, I didn't try to join a fleet. I made best speed with a lot of other blues to HED, was relieved to see the in-gate clear, and warped to a safespot cloaked 200 km off the Keberz gate to make sure I wasn't warping into a deathtrap. I'm foolhardy, not foolish. The situation was as advertised: a Nidhoggur carrier was indeed tackled on this gate... with two other carriers, a pair of Archons.

Yee-ha.

I warped in, locked up the primary, and unloaded the torps while putting remote sensor dampeners on one of the other carriers in an attempt to disrupt the remote repping. No bomb launches though; too many friendlies in the cross-hairs.

The adhoc fleet poured firepower into the Nidhoggur and slowly its armour began to fall faster than it could repair. Enemy bombers warped in and dropped bombs on our fleet and I weaved and wove my way between them, warping out once to avoid testing the effects of a bomb on a bomber. Finally the Nidhoggur carrier fell into structure and soon after exploded in a flash of light.

The fleet turned its firepower to the first of the Archons while attempting the jam the second but it opted for self destruction rather than give us an official killmail, and by all reports the second Archon did the same. Kudos to the fleet commander for relaying his commands to HED local chat so us pile-on-ers could see what primary was while not being on voice comms. Much appreciated.

I left after that, not wanting to sour my first capital kill with a reckless loss, and once back in base I gave my newly blooded Manticore a worthy name: Nidhoggur's Bane.

EDIT: According to Scrapheap Challenge, "[t]hey were drunk and suicided into you. They insured their ships before, so good job killing them, I think that was the point". Also, "[t]he carriers are all one guy, and yes, he was 99% likely drunk, 100% likely insured, and more than 100% couldn't give a crap about losing a couple of carriers :p". How rich do you have to be to make losing three carriers OK? Don't answer that, I don't want to actually know.

* * * * *
Along with the carrier deaths I participated in, my CEO and another corpmate participated in an eariler fleet that took down a -A- Chimera carrier in HED. While I'm sure a powerhouse like Against All Authorities can shrug off those losses its still a bad day for those pilots. I'd love to be a fly on the inside of their forums right now to see the reaction of the losses.

* * * * *
A final footnote.

While I was wrapping up my ratting efforts with Kla'strit after all the action died down, a neutral in a Wolf assault frigate warped into the belt I was in. A first I ignored it since it was not red, but then I considered the possibility it might be hostile so I aligned to station.

My Typhoon was not a big loss should anything go wrong so instead of warping right away I gave him a chance to see what he would do. Better to find out if this neutral is a hostile with my shit ship than someone else's nice Tech 2 ship. Sure enough, he locked me and put a warp disruptor on me.

I figured I could not kill his frigate in a ship with battleship weapons and my light drones would probably be insufficient to kill him fast enough before they were targeted and killed. I considered calling for assistance but I was worried about calling in more ships into a possible trap. Instead I opted for the emergency flight of Hornet EC-300 drones and spammed the warp button while they did their job. Sure enough, after a few seconds my opponent lost his lock and I sped away to safety.

I reported the hostile action in the intel channels and his alliance will be getting a nasty-gram from CVA about being put in the KOS list.