Bloodied

Over the past few months my weekly fleets have been quite successful, earning a variety of good kills including the occasional battle cruiser, battleship, and even a Chimera carrier once (to be fair, he was looking for a fight). In exchange I've been posting very few losses so I've been very happy. Its easy to forget how often the pendulum swung from green to red back in the day when Calmil was serious about roaming and contesting space.

So of course, karma decided I was due for a beating.

I decided to run a kitchen sink fleet comp last night so I could play with one of my favourites, an old Oracle battle cruiser fitted with mega pulse lasers. Hits like a brick to the face. The fleet started out OK getting a Thorax and Enyo in two skirmishes earning me a killmark on the golden hull. That should have been a clue I was in for trouble.

In Pynekastoh we got a report of an Orthrus hanging out on the outside of a PLEX. I moved in to bait him to tackle me and he did, but it turns out he was bait tackle for a cloaked Hel carrier 250 km off that quickly dispatched drones and reduced my Oracle to space dust. Worst part is, that same pilot has been doing that trap for months and I knew about it but just forgot. Even worse, in one of our intel channels another pilot 30 minutes earlier talked about the exact same trap... and I read his account!

I reshipped and rejoined fleet in a Hawk assault frigate.

In Akidagi where Templis CALSF alliance lives we got reports from our scout of a Dominix on scan, then landing on the Nennamailia gate. Since this is exactly the same gate we caught and killed a Hyperion last week, I ordered the fleet to dive in and attack. I should have been suspicious when the cal mil pilot opted to fight instead of try to crash gate, but blood was in the water and I wanted to make up for the Oracle loss. He was active tanked with neuts and drones and reinforcements started to drift in. Our fleet was not large and without serious logi and I waited too long and allowed myself to get caught and killed. And on my way back to Fliet I was too slow on the draw reporting another Cal Mil fleet of a couple Confessors and Thrashers and I lost my pod with mid grade snakes! So stupid!

I ordered the fleet to abandon the Dominix fight as we were losing pilots and more reinforcements were inbound. Podded back to Fliet and wanting to rejoin the fleet quickly I jumped in an Incursus and moved towards the fleet... only to get insta-locked and trashed by yet another small cal mil gate camp fleet of Thrashers and a Svipul in Abune! I rushed back to Fliet, got in an Algos, and went to help bust the gate camp but was too eager and lost the Algos as well before a fleet member in a battleship forced them off for good.

Four ship losses and an implant pod loss later, I was feeling quite beat up. We formed up the fleet and went looking for more fights, killed a couple destroyers before I had to call it quits due to tiredness. Definitely ended up in the red this time!