The Frog, the Squid, and the NullBear

Last night's fleet proved that the best enemies can make for good friends.

The Sunday night fleet was growing and rumours of juicy hostile fleets prompted us to ship into Rogue Squadron (TM) cruisers: Vexors, Vexor Navy Issues, and a few Ishtars backed by a squad of Exequror logistics. W set out looking for trouble.

At first, the only trouble we found was that all the target fleets we started to move towards disappeared quickly. But then, while chilling on the Eha gate in Oicx awaiting reports from scouts on a hostile cruiser fleet in Mochlimaud, we got surprised by said fleet jumping into us. And it was bigger than we were.

We scrambled our warp out and lost a Vexor Navy Issue that got tangled on the gate and an Exequror got probed down in a safe in the confusion. We finally got a dingo scan on the Circle of Two and friends fleet and determined that their 24 Arty Ruptures and 7 Scythes with 2 Scimitar logistics, accompanied by a number of miscellaneous cruisers and a couple battlecruisers, led by a Claymore command ship, was too much for our 13 Vexor based hulls and 7 tech 1 logi.

So some cat and mouse occurred while we tried to drum up some numbers and a plan to take on this larger force. Eventually we brought our DPS cruisers up to 16 (later 15 as one pilot fell asleep and got caught separated from the fleet) and supported by 9 Exequrors and proceed to setup inside a Medium plex. The enemy fleet setup outside the plex but refused to come into us.

I can see why: Although they had the numerical advantage, we had high ground inside the plex forcing them to warp directly into our guns which was against the best interests of their fleet comp which prefers to fight at an arm's length with artillery's high alpha strike. We were hesitant to leave the plex and allow them to warp at range to us where our DPS would be hampered. We were at an impasse.

Around this posturing our old enemies in Templis CALSF were haunting many systems away in Fliet and were poking us in our public channel for a fight. We chatted them up and negotiated a temp blue agreement if they came help us in this fight, figuring that 10-12 more cruisers on our side could be the buffer we needed to get to the Ruptures outside the plex and win the fight.

Unfortunately, just as we were all in position to launch the attack the Co2 fleet scouts detected the Caldari, put two and two together, and wisely decided to avoid that two pronged attack. We caught the hostile Lachesis pilot of the Co2 fleet and killed it in retribution for our three cruiser losses, and that kill plus the pod balanced the scales somewhat for us.

We bid adieu to the Templis guys that came to assist us and it was late so I logged of.