Waaaagh continues

Assembly

We were slow to assemble, the Avengers we are not.

There was some nice banter going on in teamspeak and it was very enjoyable hearing a mixture of Aussies and Brits as we were getting ready for the POS bash. There was quite a lot going on but the most amusing thing to happen pre-bash was listening to Trinket's Friend lose his Golem in a wormhole. 

Props to him he took the loss like a true Bitter Vet and "it's only pixels" was said a few times but he received a lot of laughter and friendly abuse for it. He was rechristened "Captain Lossmail" so as not to forget what had happened.

The Target

As I'd said before the Intel was excellent so we had bookmarks on each of the main defence arrangements and once we were assembled our rag tag fleet of Vexor Navy Issues, Oracles and Prophecy's supported by two Guardians were warped to a point outside of range of the guns of the tower.

True Sansha Control Tower, mixture of guns, webs/scrams and ECM

Bex called time on our preparations and we warped in at 75km from the nearest defence group and started firing on the warp disruptor battery. DPS wasn't too bad although the Warden II's I was using couldn't hit so I had to move in a bit closer and use Valkyrie II's.

We took, on average, five minutes to incapacitate a module so we focused on what was an immediate threat or in the case of ECM what was annoying the hell out of our logi. The Domination Webifiers had an effective 97.5% reduction in speed to any targeted vessel but as we were stationary most of the time it was not an issue.

Pilots Appear

Just after we had finished the second or third module we saw a pilot login and warp into the middle of the POS in an Anathema. Intel had found previously that this pilot could use POS guns so we weren't surprised when the sporadic fire we were receiving started getting more focused and ECM batteries were attacking our logi more frequently.

No C-Beams glittering in the dark here

Fortunately even with a POS gunner the small and medium guns on the POS were no match for our buffers and logi so no ship was ever in any danger but after a while we noticed that the guns were targeting our sentry drones and this was successful in disrupting our operation to the extent that we switched from using sentries to drones and killing whatever guns were closest so we could use sentries again.

One of the targets used a Nighthawk to try to kill drones for about 45 minutes and he'd exit the force field and fire a few missile volleys before retreating, rather fast, into the safety of the forcefield. Impact was negligible and after a while we ignored him enough that he stopped doing it.

Poking out of the force field to fire a volley or two

After Downtime

Downtime approached and we safed up after incapacitating over half of the defences that were present and the decision was made to attack the tower after DT from the hole we had created in the defences.

A number of pilots also took the opportunity to refit their ships for closer ranged damage and this would have the effect of nearly doubling the fleet DPS. All the better for taking down the tower, which has a mind numbing 48 million HP in shields. Armour is a little better at 12 million HP but at least that should take only a quarter of the time it took us (8 hours) to take the shields down.

We finished the reinforcement phase a little before 3pm EVE Time after having started at around 8am EVE Time. I left rather quickly due to really needing to sleep but I understand that the tower was covered in T1/T2 bubbles and noone has been seen since logging in.

Keeping Sane

POS bashes are mind numbing, they are about as much fun as having a colonoscapy is what I once heard someone say. Fortunately teamspeak with the fleet was both lively and enjoyable, several people were of a similar sense of humour to me and I had a great time listening and laughing at others expense.

Some of the things that made us laugh and passed the time:

• Architeuthis Rex using google translate to try to communicate with the targets (who were either Serbian, Russian or from Eastern Europe) resulting in quite a lot of banter and confusion, theirs and ours.
• I tried to ransom the tower for 2.5 billion ISK, promising that "I'd leave if I was paid". I was not paid.
• I also translated the Rolf Harris song "Tie Me Kangeroo Down Sport" into Serbian (Google Translate again) and spend 5 minutes copy/pasting this in local. The targets were not impressed, so I just linked them the youtube video at which point we didn't hear from them again.
• Weird Wally putting various comments and (bad) jokes into local and fleet in order to entertain, there were several space tumbleweeds seen
• Althanear finally having to face reality that his girlfriend could get work as a Chris Lillie lookalike

It was a fun night, I met a lot of great people and I'm considering putting an alt into this group so I can join in the fun on a more regular basis.

Special mention to our high sec eyes, a strange Aussie (with breasts) from Canberra, Johnno Ormand who did a fantastic job keeping our fleet safe from high sec visitors and keeping us awake with good questions.

357th Typing Pool Star of Derp

By far the funniest moment came from Bex, not content with forever being ribbed about bringing the "wrong sized crystals for his guns" when T3 battlecruisers were released he has been awarded a medal by his corp for:

Glorious service in typography disemination and cryptography.

The medal was awarded for typing our fleet safe POS forcefield password in Local when someone asked our targets what their POS password was.

Local is not for Passwords dear Bex

There was consideral mirth and laughter after that happened and Bex will never live that down.

Next Phase

The next phase is due Sunday night Australian time, there was a full stront bay so we have to now wait the 1 day 17 hours for the tower to exit reinforcement so we can continue the assault and kill it.