So Bex said:
"Let's max tank an transport ship loaded with "officer mods", with a high passive armour tank and a set of low-grade Slaves with an off-grid booster Damnation."
At the time I wasn't sure but after thinking about it and tinkering with fits I had to admit it was a interesting, verging on wicked, idea.
I'd provide the boosts whilst Bex would provide the transport, officer mods from a previous kill and the suitably equipped low-grade Slave clone.
Singularity
We retired during down-time one night to test and see if we could find any holes in the idea and getting to shoot Bex is something I'll never turn down :)
Cue the music...
Bex had already thought of a ship, the Impel, and fit that would work, he suggested that gankers will be scanning cargo not ships so we should be able to get away with a maximum passive tank. I couldn't see an issue with this logic and was really just wanting him to undock so I could start shooting him...
The Impel undocked and once boosts went active we were looking at a tank of 240,000 EHP. Yes, TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND for a transport, and all for a couple of hundred million ISK.
We warped to a safe spot and then using gank-fit Tornado's I warped to optimal and opened fire.
The results were interesting... we found that gank tornados firing again a static ship really did do massive damage, the shields were stripped in four salvos and the armour was going down at the rate of 9% per salvo. However moving the target Impel really made a difference to the salvos and damaged lowered quite significantly.
Instead of two salvos to remove shields it was seven and each salvo did 6% armour damage, obviously this meant that for maximum survivability we needed to keep the Impel moving as it was ganked. This actually played nicely into the plan, which called for Bex to autopilot to each gate rather than warp to zero.
Bex calculated that it would take at least twenty gank-fit Tornado's to kill the Impel firing a single salvo each. This wasn't a situation we saw happening as most Deep Space Transports were killed by one or two ships who saw an easy untanked target, something this Impel was not going to be.
We retired for the night happy with the fit and setting the date for the coming Sunday.
Postponed, Due To War
Unfortunately the booster pilot was in an alliance that received a war dec the previous week, I was hopeful it would be over by the Saturday but I did not figure in the stupidity of some of my alliance, who lost rather expensive ships in high sec in the last days of the dec, and the war was extended by another week.
Undock, Autopilot, Profit!
Shoot Me, I'm a Piñata!
Sunday morning we undocked and started moving up and down the Amarr->Jita pipe with the boosting Damnation staying out of sight and off grid, but boosting, to the Impel.
Scanning was frequent at gates but nothing happened, at least at first but a couple more runs up/down and a few breaks we eventually got someone who took the bait.
It was only a lone Tornado and their attack only took a third of the Impel shields, we couldn't even lock the tornado in time to get on the KM however Bex did get a kill right which he was quite happy with (must be the pirate in him).
We did get one other Tornado just outside Amarr who tried but again failed to get through the shields but that was it.
Next Time, Maybe
Perhaps it was bad timing, it was a weekend and early morning in our time zone so night everywhere else or it may have been that pilot who scanned us a couple of times and started calling our idea out in local as we moved through.
It was a wicked idea and all we go was two Tornado's and kill rights but was fun and we can always do it again in the future :)
