Drought Is Over

Last night I logged in for my weekly night of Eve action and found... nada. No corp ops, no alliance ops, no coalition CTAs. There were lots of fleets in fleet finder but nothing appeared local and I wasn't sure about randonly trying to join a non-RAGE fleet when I wasn't familiar with the North that much.

(I even checked the combined caps channel to make sure there was no need for the Wyvern and considered sending a message to Kesper saying "I'm here!! X-ing up now!!" but figured he might not get my frivolous sense of humour. )

Plus I had some logistics to do.
- The Wyvern parking alt is ready to park the supercarrier so I needed to get her the bookmarks of the region and move her into place.
- I'm pulling Kla'strit out of M3 to save on corp taxes as having two extra alts in corp is not needed once Kirith is able to be  useful combat character again. That means moving his clones and ships out of null sec.
- Once Kirith is free, he needs to go get some stuff from the south in Empire and begin pulling together a fleet of ships for use in ops.

I started working on this when I so a fleet invite link in Alliance chat. It was not for a RAGE op but a Razor/Morsus Mihi op forming up for a roam. I checked the rally point location and saw it was merely 11 jumps away. With Kesper's indictment still ringing in my ears ("XTFU!") I decided logistics could wait and set destination and got on comms.

The fleet was asking for long range HACs or Battlecruisers but Kla'strit had already discharged all ships except for a Rapier into the transportation back to empire. Figuring that a force recon capable of heavy tackle, scouting, and making warp in points would always be welcome I saddled up and hit the warp lanes. I arrived as the fleet was moving into position to take out a AFK Hurricane in a safe spot and he provided no resistance as we melted him and the pod.

We continued the roam into Cobalt Edge and soon an Intrepid Crossing gang was moving to intercept. At this point I was struck how I was in completely new and unfamiliar space, flying with people I had never met or worked with before, against an alliance I used to be part of, and how much I was loving the game.

We got ready for a tussle and saw that the enemy fleet was mostly in battleships with a few battlecruisers so we were going to have to really rely on our superior agility to avoid getting smacked down. They jumped into us and the fight was on. I helped kill the initial Mrymidon that we primaried but was just out of range of the Eagle we killed next, it going down just as I got to the 34 km range of my webbers. We retreated after that kill and regrouped, killing an Eris interdictor that got too close to us near a planet.

The next engagement found the enemy getting a drop on us and we lost a couple ships, but then they pulled back to a station one system over. We baited them out but lacked the DPS to kill the Drakes and battleships fast enough with the station to dock into right there. Instead we decided the gig was up and the odds growing against us so we headed back towards home space.

With the two killmails I was in on the monkey on my back was gone and I felt a little better. Nowhere near the goal of 10 for august but at least I was out there killing something instead of dying. Had I brought a proper sniper HAC I could have gotten in on  a couple more killmails and been almost halfway to the goal in one night. Just goes to show I need to overcome my fear of new situations and, as Kesper so eloquently put it, XTFU.

Here's to a better September.

* * * * *

As an update to the parking alt stuff: this morning before downtime I successfully exited the Wyvern and installed the alt into it, freeing Kirith to dock for the first time since... well, I don't remember when. I then jumped cloned to down south to retrieve my carrier and ships...

wait a minute....

why does the ticker say the region is ... Providence?

AH CRAP!

Wrong jump clone.