Countertrap on Hisec

I love combat in w-space. In my opinion it's the best in the game. There are some instances though when people generally avoid combat in w-space, such as on a wormhole that leads to high security space, but it does happen from time to time.

One such opportunity presented itself yesterday. A Transmission Lost pilot, Draconic, was utilizing a hi-sec wormhole that was at the other end of a chain which opened up as a K162 into our system; he was moving in some ships and supplies and had garnered the attention of a small Wayward 7 gang.

On his way out Draconic, our resident pedo-bait by the way, spotted a Harbinger and Drake sitting on the hi-sec side of the wormhole. I decided to go sit on the w-space side of that wormhole and keep an eye on things. Not long after I arrived in my covert Proteus a Phobos landed on the wormhole and bubbled up.

Now I'm not sure what these guys were thinking would happen. It's possible that they were waiting for Draconic to get back and try to kill him when he jumped back into the wormhole, but were they under the impression that he would jump in with a Harby and Drake chilling out at the hole? If so he would be able to jump right back out. Maybe they were hoping some other ships would be coming to access hi-sec and the ships in k-space would jump in, but why leave them in k-space? It's not like someone watching d-scan would jump to the wormhole with a Phobos on it, but not with the two battle-cruisers. Like I said, I don't know what they were thinking.

Nevertheless, I did intend on killing them. Draconic was on his way back with a heavily-tanked bait-Abaddon and while I was waiting I'd also seen a Tengu arrive and cloak up on the hole. It was obvious these guys had no idea I was there, which was perfectly fine with me. They were under the impression that they were going to net some easy kills in this "tarp" of theirs.

Guys from Loveshack, our home system, were already shipped up and sitting on the other side of the wormhole one system back.

A few minutes later Draconic jumped through the wormhole. Remaining cloaked I moved toward the wormhole, but kept my distance. We could never kill the Phobos since he could jump the wormhole as soon as he got in trouble. I waited for the Tengu to decloak then dropped my own cloak and immediately engaged him. Draconic's Abaddon drew the Harbinger and Drake in behind him.

At this point a hostile Proteus decloaked and engaged us, but our own gang was coming onto grid and the enemy began to flee through the wormhole to hi-sec. Unfortunately, their Harby had followed the Abaddon too far off of the wormhole and could not make it back before his ship and pod were destroyed.

While we looted the field a Wayward 7 Hound decloaked and launched a bomb. Bravo, sir! Once again I have no clue what you were thinking, but who am I to judge?

Late Nights

Writing the title to this post I immediately started thinking of a song from Aladdin: Arabian Nights. I can't stand that movie, but I really like that song. Anyway...

I've managed to work out a less-than-ideal solution to my recent lack of play-time on the home front (ie with the wife). Due to my work schedule I can't really stay up late and night during the week, which really forces me to get in all my gaming on the weekends. Since that is the case I've gotten the clear to stay up all night on Friday's and I won't be bothered Saturday. I can sleep in until mid-afternoon.

Now, while I can play all night and into the morning on Friday night/Saturday morning, that's not really how I like to do things. I'd much rather have a few hours on several days throughout the week, so let this be a lesson to you younger gentlemen who probably have never seen a women naked without paying for it: just don't get married! If you don't want to take my word for it then at least take the advice of the great and powerful Sam, possibly one of the wisest cocaine sages of the 1980's.

Existential Blue Balls

Last night was interesting in a fail kind of way. I logged into to find that we had a possible fight with Existential Anxiety (EA), a group that has become something of a pet project for Transmission Lost over the last few months. I'm not sure what lead up to this possible fight, but they knew we were there and we knew they were there and everything looked pretty good, so I hopped into my Proteus and headed down the chain.

I had to travel through two systems in k-space, which should be renamed suck-space, but when there are fights to be had suck-space is of no consequence. After those two systems I dived back into the beloved unknown and we gathered the fleet in EA's home system.

For a while there we thought they were actually going to fight us. I had about an hour before I needed to log which was plenty of time to blow some people up and get back to Loveshack. In the end they simply wasted about an hour of our lives. First their excuse was that we had too many people.

Are you serious?! You and two thirds of wormhole space, outnumbering us 6-to-1, invade our home and burn it to the ground and now you don't want to fight outnumbered yourselves?

Then they said they would fight a 10v10. While we mulled this over they took ten ships and moved them to the hi-sec wormhole. EA, why would you do this? Do you think we would come and fight you on the hi-sec wormhole? I think this got me pissed off more than anything else.

But it's okay. It's all fine. You don't like to fight unless victory is assured. When victory isn't assured you'll fight on a hi-sec wormhole so you can just jump to safety. Good. Insidious Design played these stupid Mickey Mouse games. They ran their mouths and made a lot of talk and hid inside POS's, wouldn't fight outnumbered and all that.

I would like to introduce EVE to the new punks of wormhole space: Existential Design! I hope everyone gets a good look because they won't be around much longer.

Burn Everything

During the first week of April we, Transmission Lost, identified scouts from Polarized, a mercenary wormhole alliance, in our system. Polarized, for those of you not familiar with w-space, are a spin-off of Exhale. They know what they're doing and are not taken lightly.

A lone covert ops frigate in the system is not typically a problem - we simply wait for it at the wormhole and kill it when it attempts to leave. The fact that this was a group in covert-capable ships and presumably lead by that alliance's fleet commander indicated that this was no ordinary scouting party.

An invasion was probably in the works and we had just put eyes on their reconnassiance team. That our alliance had just been war-decced by high-sec mercenaries only lent more credibility to that line of thinking.

Over the course of the next two days we stayed well ahead of this recon group, quickly scanning down the statics as well as incoming connections and setting up camps to catch and kill them or force them out. In this way we thinned their numbers, but their ultimate goal, J215338 or Loveshack, was still within reach.

We got intel that Polarized was rage-rolling and on the first of April they got their chance when a wormhole connected their system to ours. A swarm of ships from multiple alliances (Polarized, Existential Anxiety, Surely You're Joking, Ixtab, Ash, Buffer Zone, The Last Chancers, R.E.P.O., Exiled Ones, etc.) began pouring into our system and there was very little we could do about it.

Transmission Lost was not without friends, however. Our frequent and skilled opponents Sleeper Social Club and Kill It With Fire were, themselves, rage-rolling for our system. They didn't arrive in time to prevent our towers from being seiged into reinforced mode, but they did come. Unfortunately, their arrival was ill-timed. Transmission Lost forces were few at that point in the day. Thinking that if they moved quickly enough they could wrest control of the static wormhole and thus gain system control SSC and KILL attacked the enemy fleet camping the wormhole.

Transmission Lost pilots joined in on the counter-attack, but the Polarized coalition was reacted quickly with overwhelming force that was far beyond our expectations. We took severe losses and the reinforcements were forced to retreat back to their home system, collapsing the wormhole behind them.

Our fate was sealed and written in red on our killboards.

What was the impetus behind this invasion? It's uncertain, but it was clear that the Loveshack would burn and every capsuleer flying the colors of Transmission Lost would feel the cold bite of open space before it was all over.

Even as I write this the forces arrayed against us are destroying our POSes; obliterating a fortress system that has existed for longer than I know and has seen countless battles.

But their coalition is fleeting and as nebulous as wormhole space itself. Those who have instigated this will not always so grotesquely outnumber Transmission Lost. Their die is cast and sooner or later we will come to collect the debt that is owed to us.

† Many thanks to our allies in this. †

Throne of Lies

I messed up pretty bad today. I'll leave it at that for the moment since I think some back story is in order.

My alliance is currently under a declaration of war by some k-space bears (everyone who lives in k-space is a bear now) so we decided to take out a fleet and wreck some of their faces. The FC asked if anyone had anything good and shiny that we could use as bait in Jita, so I offered up my Navy-thron. It had a solid tank and would last more than long enough to act as bait.

A scout already in Jita had ID'd one war target sitting on the Jita 4-4 undock so I made my way there in a pod. The guy sitting on the undock was in a Megathron with a bunch of probes out. Naturally I was able to dock up without issue and proceeded to refit the bait ship for maximum tank.

I gave my thumbs up to the FC and once the fleet was in position I was given word to undock and engage. I did so, but this is where I screwed up. The guy wasn't firing back. I'm not sure what he was waiting for.

At any rate, I had him locked up and was giving it all the pew I could muster. When the FC asked how it was going I told him I had him aggressed and that he wasn't going anywhere. I was under the mistaken impression that if you're being fired on you can't dock. I'm not sure where I got idea, but it is wrong! So don't make the same mistake that I did.

Well... the fleet lands and starts applying DPS and the target docks. There was about a half-second of silence before the WTF's started to erupt. Here's a few of the highlights.

"I thought you said he was aggressed."

"That was definitely not 1 minute."

"He didn't even red-box you did he?"

"He said the war target was aggressed. He sits upon a throne of lies!"

Many of us have kids so I can make this analogy. You know how when a kid does something he realizes is incredibly wrong or when he breaks something he'll get really quiet and just hang his head? That was me last night once I realized what happened.

In addition to my throne of lies I also had a crown of shame. One might even say I Nutmegged us.

Ultimately, it was just a lesson learned and one I won't need to learn again. I'm sure it won't be the last time I have to deal with lessons learned.

They Moan ALOT

I logged in today and did the usual. Scanning, scouting, spinning my ship in the POS. When I got around to checking out the chain I saw a bunch of ships - likely inside a tower - on directional scan in our static. I took a second to put eyes on this potential pinata and at first sight all was as I would typically find a bunch of ships sitting inside a tower.

Ships. Stick. Corporate hangar. Bubble. Dickstar mods.

Alas, there was one small problem in their particular dickstar implementation: most of their mods were unanchored. Of the mods that remained most of those were offline.

Being the educator at heart that I am, I decided to teach them one of the lessons all true wormholers already know. I made a few million ISK in the process, but I would've done it for free, I think.

You might say I'm just generous, like that.

The Sidelines (twice)

I logged in last night to find that our people had already found a good fight - or at least the probability of one - against Sleeper Social Club. We've met these guys a few times now and were looking to redeem the honor of our good name since our last fight against them was a catastrophic failure.

I didn't have any ships that would fit in with the fleet comp so I stood by in my trusty Helios and took notes, more or less. With 3 Bhaals and an Archon the support aspect of the fleet was rock-solid. The rest was armor-tanked strategic cruisers (standard fare for w-space fights).

Listening in on comms, but never actually putting eyes on the fleet, I had to rely on what was being said. Luckily things were smooth and clear during the actual engagement portions so I had a good idea of what was happening and could visualize it well.

SSC pretty much ran up against a brick wall, which was good for us, but they weren't running very fast so didn't lose a ton of ships, which was good for them. Still, the victory went fully toward Transmission Lost.

After that fight we rolled the static wormhole into a c5/c6. The static was empty, but had a ton of gas sites in it. After scanning down the c6 I jumped in, leaving another prober in the c5 to finish up the signatures.

Intel available on this c6 system was promising. It looked to be held by a small corp who had been running sites daily at exactly that time. Another scout jumped in and we put eyes on both POSes in the system, confirming the wormhol.es intel on the inhabitants. There were no ships at either POS and both had feeble defenses.

For a few minutes we were pushing the idea to stront-check the POSes, but pilots of the c6 corp began logging on. First it was a Buzzard which appeared to be completely lost, but we allowed him to scan down the system in his own fail fashion. His logon was followed by several others: 2 Moroses, a Domi, another Buzzard, a Rapier and a Tempest.

Keeping eyes on the POS I relayed all this intel to the fleet which was massing on the other side of the C5s>C6a wormhole. We were hoping to catch one of the dreads rolling the hole, but that was not to be. The targets decided to use a Domi and their Tempest, so we took what we could get.

Both battleships went down in a blaze of failure, while I waited and watched the dreads at the POS hoping against hope that one (or both) of them would warp in to save the day. Neither of them did and my hopes were dashed.

I didn't whore on the kills so my efforts go undocumented, but one day some one will warp a dreadnaught to a wormhole in a failcascading attempt to rescue a battleship. I'll relay that information to the fleet which will eagerly devour the failcakes and maybe then I'll whore on the mail. Maybe.