Revenge of the Cov Ops

Here lately I've found little time to play Eve, real life does indeed come first. But a few things happened before I started logging in less.

The day after our wormhole acquisition, I logged in and hit DSCAN, as I habitually do. To my surprise, a number of wrecks and three Drakes appeared on scan! This did not make me happy, so I hopped in my stealth bomber to go check out what was going on.

I quickly found them running a combat site, and they seemed to be fairly standard Drakes, and exhibited all the signs of being run by a single person behind the curtain. I decided to find out where they came from, and rapidly found an incoming K162. It was guarded by a Brutix, and a character I had met before, Gillopi. I believe he was part of this post, an attempt to bait me onto my B274 and jump in numerous battleships, but a large mobile warp disruptor I had anchored ruined those plans.

So he had surely seen my probes looking for his hole, but he didn't react at all to it, and his alts continued to run sites. Unfortunately, I didn't have the kind of firepower at my disposal in this hole to take care of a trio of Drakes. I could, however, gank a salvaging ship when it showed up.

As Chessur has pointed out in his stealth bomber blog, leaving a salvaging ship unescorted is a bad idea. Even worse is when you've seen probes on scan. Ever MORE worse is when my corpmates started arriving, and their ships were appearing on their DSCAN. By the time the Noctis did finally show up, as I knew it would, I had two Dominixes, a Harbinger, a Devoter, and my Purifier. I felt like I had enough to challenge them, especially now that I was sure they were all being run by, at the most, two people.

So I stalked the Noctis, trying to get into point range, and missed it on a couple combat sites, knowing it was just doing our work for us. For the first few sites, no combat ships showed up to support the Noctis, til the third site, when I decided to pounce, and right before I uncloaked, the Brutix warped into the site.

It was strange timing, to be sure. The Noctis left the last three wrecks and warped out. I have no idea if one of my comrade's ship finally spooked it, or there was a disturbance in the Force. I'll never know. But they didn't listen to that ESP like they should have. I found it salvaging a radar site.

The fleet was ready so I crept in, called for the warp in on me, and uncloaked and pointed the Noctis.

80 kilometers off, one of the Drakes sat, unable to do anything to me at range. I fired off my torpedos and had the Noctis in half armor when the Brutix showed up. I turned and burned, unwilling to sacrifice the bomber with my fleet already showing up within seconds. My fleet landed and the Noctis exploded. Unfortunately I was out of point range of the Brutix as our two Domis tore into it with Ogres and Hammerheads, as the Devoter got stuck on some POS module, and arrived late to the party. *Mental note, assemble fleet at POS away from all modules before calling for a warp-in....* I also neglected to remember one of the Domis flown by me had a Warp Disruptor on it. Oops.

The Brutix warped away and so did the Drake. I gang warped the squad to the K162, and all three Drakes jumped ahead of us. I jumped through on the SB to try to point one, but all three had warped quickly away before my fleet showed up. So we sat on the WH contemplating what to do, as we were not going to charge across what looked to be not their system, when a Nemesis uncloaked and jumped.

My entire fleet followed.

I was already sitting on the other side in my Purifier, and I hit my MWD and uncloaked as he did, getting the point and stopping his cloak from going up.

I don't think he even got a torpedo off.

And with the Devoter there this time, the pilot had no chance for his escape pod to escape.

Karma is a bitch of a mistress.

So we cleaned up the system, unfortunately losing a good number of wrecks to the time we had to spend going to buy a Noctis and fitting it, and then closing the open wormholes. A little while later we were up 100 mil and two more kills on the board.

We managed to take care of the ABCs in one grav site, the Average Frontier Deposit, which we despise, and most of the AB on a second. I bought the modules and items needed for producing Hulks, and set one in the oven.

Next day, I logged in to find Freethinker Zun telling me both the grav sites we had previously been working on had vanished. With a sinking feeling, I started to scan. I was pretty sure what had happened, as I had in fact done it before to some other invaders who decided they would live in what was our home. Four out of the six grav sites that were there the day before were now gone. The former owners cov ops had been hanging around, and obviously had been sowing its mischief. The two remaining grav sites had actually spawned after we had seen the cov ops last, so we hope they are safe.

Nothing else to be done, except to try to catch the bastard if we see him, but catching cov ops ships is very hard. I hope he has already grown tired of the game, as he can see we are not going to pick up shop and leave just due to a few missing sites.

WTF? Seriously? Again? How Many Jumps!?

So we've been looking for a C2 that is within our region, or even better, in our constellation, to do some testing, as well as give us more grav sites to mine. We also wanted to give our alliance an option to place other corps inside it, since we did not want any neighbors in our home C2.

So, after a few days of looking, I happened upon a post of a guy selling a C2 w static C3, just like our home system. It had terrible PI, so I offered the guy 200 mil. His asking price was 1.5 bil. Ouch, well that wasn't going to fly, and the best he could do was 500, so I let him slip back into the pool of goo he came from. Next day, I find a post on his selling post that he isn't in control, so I contact the other person listed, and they want 1.5 bil too!

I negotiated it down to a reasonable 300 mil, and started filling my Orcas with all the loose POS gear I had lying around while the seller and their fleet scanned down the high sec. He indicated the system and I dropped into high sec and set destination.

43 jumps!?!?!

15 through lowsec???

That wouldn't do, and the seller already knew it, and jumped into action, finding a K162 inside to high sec. 26 jumps away. Ouch. And it's End of Life? Double ouch.

Okay, I got my fleet moving. I was 12 jumps away when he told me the wormhole had collapsed. *head smack*

Okay, the seller says, we're still looking. There's the C3 static. In go the scouts.

The C3 has a nullsec static.

...

*thrown desk chair*

The seller headed out into nullsec and said there was no one for three jumps in any direction! No, sorry, that's not an option with two Orcas loaded with about a bil in POS gear and fuel.

Not to worry, this seller had his stuff together. His scouts went out and started scanning the high sec island for WHs, and found a C2 with a connection to high sec.

22 jumps away.

So I get started moving that way, re-destinationing my fleet, which is, by now, spread halfway across New Eden.

I'm jumping, jumping jumpingjumping....

10 jumps away.

Oh, and the hole is now critical.

$$$*#(#*&^@$$%!!!!

Alright, I'll bring in my cov ops and at least get one of us in there. So I arrived at the system, pick up the bookmarks.

I had to go high sec--> C2 -->High sec --> C2.

Yay, I'm in system.....and so are many other people, it seems. There are like four cov ops on scan. This does not look good. A gentleman from the high sec island is claiming to have sold the wormhole, so now it becomes a race to get a POS inside.

The seller uses a Falcon to get the hole closed, and the new one opens up.

22 jumps back in the direction I came from.

...

....

.....

*cat hurled across room*

Alright, no biggie, let's get going. again. Jumping again. By this time I had probably jumped over 200 times with the multiple characters I had logged in. What's 60 more?

So many many jumps later, I arrive, and get the POS anchoring. I release the seller, with a good job done, and leave all the transports in high sec while the POS anchors. We leave our small combat fleet circling the WH side of the high sec static. I'm off cloaked in my Anathema. The WH flashes and an interdictor destroyer jumps in. He squirts off an interdiction sphere and jumps out.

WTF was that? We already had our bubble up. Field disappears.

It's dinnertime, so I need to get some stuff cooking, so I afk while the corp watches the hole.

A few minutes later I hear something from my headset as I'm walking by, so I plop down...to find all hell has broken loose. There are ships with me yellow boxed, and as I put my headset on, they all turn to red.

"JUMP! JUMP OUT! JUMP!" they're yelling on Vent. I look down, my Devoter pilot is the last corp pilot on this side of the WH. My armor flashes red, I look down at my modules, slam both armor reppers on and hit jump.

WTF was that!?

Turns out, it was the interdictor's corp looking for kills. They had jumped through on the fleet with a Tempest fit with a full rack of neuts..and FIVE Tengus. JFC FIVE?

After some smacktalking local about how leet and uber they were, to the disappointment of the guy in local who thought he was selling to someone else, they jumped out the high sec.

We moved our fleet out of the system and took a break for dinner for everyone. We came back 30 minutes later and I found them on a locator agent, ten jumps away.

GO GO GO!

We warped the fleet over to the wormhole. Just as the final Orca was jumping through, the same fleet appeared in the high sec local and started talking more smack.

All they got was a single sentence before the wormhole popped in their faces.

Onlined the tower, got the shield up, and spent the next six hours onlining 40+ guns and ECM.

Hmm, I don't have as much ECM as I thought I did. Better open up the B274 and get some more.

I jump outside and check to see where I am by checking how far Jita is. Hmm, four jumps from Amarr....hey wait. Set Destination. omfg.

I am one jump from the system I started in that morning. Where my other C2's wormhole still is.

The things that happen in Eve sometimes are mind boggling. I ended up where I began this wild trip across the galaxy.

So I got a couple Impels and loaded them to the gills with more POS gear. And, lo and behold, I was ten jumps from where I'd dumped all the C3 POS gear, so I went and got that too. Now this POS was looking mean.

I had had a terribly long day, so I headed to bed, secure in the knowledge the POS was secure.

Unless the Russians invade.

Wormhole Topic of the Week: POS Defenses!

What is the most powerful force in wormholes? Knowledge, hide it well. Not saying where your static comes out, watching for people trailing you back to your home, scanning your system down every single day, and being generally aware of your surroundings at all times, are all keys to surviving for you, your corp, and your POS. Pilot situational awareness saves the lives of you and your corpmates.

There are really three kinds of invaders, one of which you CANNOT defend from. First, you have small corps or small alliances, which can muster a standard fleet of 10-20 BSes. These you can defeat with a single large POS, if you have it moduled out correctly.

The second is the LOLZ Fleet. They are there just to shoot stuff up and leave, hoping to get you out for some killmails. These are easy to deal with, if you follow the next points, these will not and cannot attack you.

Third are the giant Worldwide Russian Wrestling Federation fleets. You cannot defend from these. If they want your hole, they will take it. No one can stop them, they have the numbers to steamroll any and all defenses. All you can do is make it take a little longer. No amount of guns, ECM, or hardeners will stay them. This is when you do your intel, gather your most valuable stuff together, and get out of dodge with it in whatever can cloak.

So let's talk about POS Defenses! So I'm a corp looking for a wormhole to take from someone. What am I looking for in a system that makes it attractive to invasion?

Number one on the list is a POS that isn't large. With POS prices so far down from where they were when I started in the great black, there's really very little excuse to not have one. Wether you're a one man show, or an industrial only corp, a large is the first thing that will make people disregard you as a target.

And worse than that is faction smalls and mediums. These are nothing but hoeny drawing the bear in. Even my small corp will take these on. I'm not much on killmails, but this is hard isk you're looking to get destroyed here. They are nothing but isk pinatas.

About the only time you could use a small or medium POS is on some sort of excursion to clean out a stocked system, a place to hide and be safe. The POS has to be treated as a throwaway, because that's what will likely happen if someone finds it.

Number two is arming your POS. Nothing says "Come and get it!" like a POS armed with two smaller lasers, one warp scrambler, and a stasis webber. Half the game of deterrence in wormholes is psychology. Making the other person think you are far more powerful than you are. I have EIGHTY FIVE anchored and online guns on our POS. My defense force is going to be able to keep shooting, as the enemy takes out one gun, another is onlined.

Also don't leave your guns offline to "save fuel". An enemy force shows up and half your guns are offline, guess what? Those guns probably won't participate in the fight. MAX your power out with online guns. Offline ones only make you juicier as a target. Unless you have 40 more, and that scares the poo, to quote another blogger, out of them. Hit DSCAN in our wormhole with your active settings off and most likely your jaw will drop.

Everyone has their own theories about gun placement, and what kinds. The main thing that matters is to cover all fields of attack. Guns should be placed on all sides of your POS so that there is no "safe spot" in your defenses. Plan for your POS gunners to use guns on the opposite sides of the POS to shoot attackers in the gun's optimal. Space your guns out in groups so they can't all be smartbombed at once. Place ECM, warp disruptors, stasis webbers, and different size guns on all avenues of attack so that when the attackers concentrate on one side of the POS, they do not kill all of one type of your defenses. For example, killing all your warp disruptors so any ship can warp out if they get severely damaged.

Gun types is mostly a personal choice, exempting all missile launcher modules, since most people know to not use them since they shut off when the POS goes into reinforced. I use mostly lasers, with a number of small autocannons and artillery mixed in for tracking and range differences. Making sure the attackers cannot sit at a certain range and be safe from most of your weaponry is pretty key. As the recent siege of my C3 POS, once they get someone in your system, they can actually go to the test server and try out different attack options.

You're going to need a mix of mostly medium and small guns, since most of your attackers are going to fly BSes, or sub-BS size ships. I have read, and only read, mind you, that large guns are made for shooting capital ships, so very few of these, if any, is needed. I have a few due to my being able to man a large number of POS guns, and a webbed BS is probably a good target for a large.

Next up is ECM. The amount of ECM you should have onlined is definitely determined by how many people you have that can defend the POS. More ECM for less people. ECM can really ruin someone's day on it's own, but it will, at best, prolong the attackers time spent shooting at your modules before they move on to your shield. Dickstars are wonderful deterrents to the LOLZ squads out there, as it makes it no longer fun for them to siege your POS. The other two groups will care less, and will persevere through the loss of lock to down your station. ECM in a balanced setup can serve a POS gunner well in getting to pick the higher DPS targets, or those that are easy to jam, and make sure they are being jammed repeatadly. On to shield hardeners.

If your POS doesn't have shield hardeners anchored, you're a target. This is one of the key things people look for when gauging how hard a POS takedown is going to be. Having a set of hardeners that takes your shields to at least 50% in everything is vital to adding time to the takedown, giving your corp or your alliance more time to get there to save the day.

Going to cut it short here, got alot oging on atm, more on that in a later blog. o/

That Got The Blood Flowing!

So after waiting around for a WH seller to get us into a C2 that was in our current wormhole's region, the deal fell through and we had time on our hands. I had run most of the combat sites, so I and Soulofchaos decided to poke our heads into our C3 static. I was itching to try out my new Purifiers, so I headed in and scouted around.

I am not that good at combat scanning people down, I'll just say that right off. But my new shiny stealth bomber can't fit an Expanded Probe Launcher anyhow, going from a fitting on Chessur's bomber blog. So I've got Core Probes only, and of course, my DSCAN.

DSCAN is a powerful tool in the right hands, which are not mine if you were wondering. I can't figure out on which degree or exactly how far people are away, but I'm trying.

So this is where I found two Retrievers, a Hulk, a Mammoth, and an Orca on scan. There were two POSes in system, and I assumed the Orca was at one of them. And then it disappeared from scan. I found it at where the other POS came on scan, so it must have warped between POSes. Interesting, wonder why it did that.

So the Mammoth was moving back and forth from a grav site I couldn't find without dropping probes. Oh well. I headed out to an outer planet out of scan range and dropped probes, telling my corpmates, who now included Raphid and Freethinker Zun by this point, what I planned on doing. Hopefully they wouldn't see the probes, I could get up close, and have them jump in and help kill something worth killing.

Well, wouldn't you know, I probed down the grav site, stuffed my probes back in the bay and arrived....to find nothing. There was no one in the site.

Hmmm. They are definitely mining. There must be two gravs. So repeat, but this time I take too long, and they see the probes and get out of dodge. I scan the site down anyhow and warp to it, recalling probes as soon as I can. I arrive there to find, Sleepers? Looked like the Sleepers spawned as I probed them down, so maybe they were fleeing the Sleepers and not my probes. So I broke out a soda and waited to find out.

Over at the POS, a Cheetah appeared on scan. Rats. Means they saw my probes and were trying to find where they came from. Off to our connecting wormhole I went, watching the probes move about, until finally, they disappeared.

I let everyone know the Cheetah would be incoming, and to chase it back through when it arrived and found our welcoming committee. Waiting for it were Soulofchaos in his Tengu, Chaosofsoul in a Nighthawk, Raphid in a Zealot, Freethinker Zun in an Ares, and Nyslia in a Devoter.

On queue the Cheetah uncloaked, and it was indeed the corp I believed it was, with 41 members. This could get sticky.

The cov ops jumped into our home and I swear I heard another activation, so I jumped the Devoter through and bubbled the other side, when Soulofchaos reported the Cheetah was still in our system. Whoops.

But he was sufficently rattled that he jumped back to his side, our fleet in hot pursuit. I uncloaked and waited to see which way he would go, as we would only have the one chance to get him near the wormhole.

And there he was, 15km off from me and heading out. But Freethinker was quick on the draw in his interceptor and stopped him from cloaking. A few shots later, his ship was spacedust, and for some reason he floated in his pod, stunned and disbelieving, so we helped him on his way to his next clone.

Since they were obviously not going to come out and play again following the death of their scanner pilot, we called the Orcas over and started to collapse the wormhole. On the final pass, combat ships started to appear on scan. First an Abaddon, then an Apoc, a Domi, a Proteus...and a Stabber! Guess that was the anti-ceptor ship.

But, with only the jump home remaining, we collapsed the wormhole behind us, leaving their angry impotent fleet to rage about the system.

Onward to more targets! Our bloodlust having obviously not been satiated, we opened the next C3 static and found a C3 with nullsec static, NPC kills, jumps and a ship kill in the last hour. Hmm, looks like it might mean some business.

I headed out into the system and got a Nighthawk on scan. Hmmm. He was running a combat site, and I only had one on scan. I thought maybe it was bait, seeing there was a ship kill in the last hour, bu I warped into the site to see what was up. I found a Nighthawk busy running the C3 site solo, salvaging and using a tractor as he went. So his DPS was a bit nerfed. A conversation ensued since I hadn't had much experience getting shot at with missiles and wether or not they could hit me going 1.5k in the bomber.

In the end I figured, what the hell, that's what I bought them for. I have three fitted out and ready to explode, in a fashion after the Flight of Dragons Punisher experiment blog. So I crept in as he finished a wave and made my first mistake. I should have timed my attack for when he was almost done with the wave. Instead, I attacked while four cruisers were on the field.

But, I had him tackled and my fleet was on it's way. And then all the Sleepers switched to me. Whoops.

So my bomber quickly turned into glittering shards of tritanium, but not before my glorious corpmates arrived to resume the trap I had sprung. Freethinker's interceptor resumed the warp disruptor as the Devoter was warping in, but he too was targetted by the sleepers, and had to warp out as well. All our guns then turned to the Nighthawk as I headed home to reship in my Legion.

Somehow in the fight, I believe the Nighthawk continued to shoot the Sleepers, and triggered the next wave, including an advanced battleship. These are extremely nasty, and it and the wave turned on Raphid's Zealot, and he warped out of the site on fire after being webbed and focus fired upon.

But the Nighthawk went down in a blaze, and I activated the warp bubble to trap his pod. Nyslia's Devoter is going to need some time in station to wash it all off her nose.

So while spamming scan, we cleaned up the rest of the site and Freethinker slowly salvaged the site with the single salvager he mounted on the ceptor to salvage our kills, taking entirely too long as we glanced nervously about, knowing an entrance was open nearby, but not seeing anyone. Having performed an object lesson in how easy it is for people to sneak up on you in combat sites, we expected a null fleet to blob us out of nowhere, but we finished off the site and headed home before we tempted fate too many times.

Four Orca passes later and the hole went pop.

After perusing the T2 salvage, and counting all the sleeper loot, we found we had made 250 mil! Minus my Purifier, we had made 230 mil in profit. Not bad for a little roam, and we all sunk our teeth into some PvP and came away tearing huge hunks, blood spattering the walls....okay, too much.

High fives all around for some fairly well executed kills. We made mistakes, that's for sure. Hopefully we'll live long enough to learn from them.

And We're Out of the Damned Place

We said goodbye to another wormhole today, as Heretical Innovations moved out of the wormhole known affectionately to it's former owners as "The Zoo". It proved too much for us and eve the PvP corp that moved in to help contain all the incursions into the system. In the end, they were too few, and we were, well, still miners.

So after having to run off a group of Hurricanes and Drakes, we packed everything up and headed on home.

So now I'm interested in finding a wormhole in our Region, o4. Better yet, I'd love to find a wormhole in our constellation, C30, but that it proving to be difficult. It won't be the C3 we hoped to be living in, but honestly, we don't run enough people to take care of it and our C2. So, to that end, we'll be on the lookout for another C2 that we are sure we can take care of.

And due to that we'll probably bring a few more people into the corp soon.

And honestly, why in the stupid hell are POS so hard to take down??/ Cmon, we don't need to be punished when we're putting it up AND down, do we?