Stand and Deliver - Plucking Five from the Middle of Summer

It’s been a busy summer with a lot of fights, to the point where it’s been a little tricky to find time to update.

Writing about ganks or even equal-odds fleet battles would be a little dull, so here’s a selection of fights where we have fought outnumbered on capitals and won. In all cases other than the 1^st August fight, where we chose to hotdrop outnumbered, the enemy chose to drop us with what they deemed would be overwhelming odds.

During the period covered here we lost only three capitals, despite using them often several times a day – two in a drop during one of the innumerable tower-reinforcing ops (the other five sieging extracted successfully) and one in the 10^th July fight, in a winning cause.

During the period there were many capital ganks – we are like anyone else and if we have a dozen dreads waiting to drop on a tackled hostile carrier, we’re not above doing so.

The time since my last update has also been a period where there were many fights which might seem to merit inclusion on an ‘outnumbered’ list but don’t. For example, our triage carrier + small BS group were dropped by a larger gang from New Eden Retail and two of their carriers (one triage, one support).

Luckily, their triage carrier didn’t immediately go into triage mode so we had time to kill/drive off their support. Once he did, though, quite a lot of additional support filtered in to break his excellent tank. Although the battle comparison only shows some of their fleet (since we took no losses), fraps shows that we definitely had more by the end, so not an outnumbered fight.

Another example would be a 39-man Huzzah CS/BC/Hac/Logi gang who jumped into 11 BS and a triage carrier.

We lost only a Brutix alt (warped in accidentally from an SS) but since we had a capital on the field and they didn’t, we weren’t really outnumbered and many aspects favoured us from the get-go (their gang jumping into us, for example, meaning their logistics couldn’t get clear of Shani's Paladin and double faction webs).

3 caps vs 4 caps (1^st August 09.)

We jumped bait into Ami to engage a BS group from Scum alliance. To keep our ships up we jumped in two triage carriers (Davinci and myself), whereupon Scum immediately warped in two carriers of their own and two Moros.

(We then jumped in Princess in a carrier, to make up the 3 caps listed in the title).

Unable to break the triage tanks or anything being triage-repped, they decided to try and kill off Eldareth’s Dominix, who had the pleasure of being primed by a fleet that included two sieged & gank-fit Blaster Moros at optimal range (shooting a stationary cyno-battleship). Nonetheless, he lived :)

In the end they chose to self-destruct their four capitals. Two of them made it to S/D and two of them were killed outright by the BS.

No losses.

(Luckily we also killed a Redeemer on the way home to justify this being the ‘Black Ops’ op that it was originally called as, in alliance mail).

10 caps vs. 15 caps (4^th July 09)

This was a great fight. We jumped a BLOC carrier outside the shield in Maseera and AAA/Red Overlord dropped 15 carriers onto our nine carriers.

Luckily we had a Pantheon group (more in the next video). We both tucked into each other’s support, though we managed to keep some BS up and smartbomb with them, while driving enemy BS from the field.

Towards the end we thought we’d finally kill one of their Chimera – but alas he made it back into the shield. We tried to drag them out of the shield by dropping in a Revelation and putting it in siege (to cap coast) in the hope they’d spread out while coming to neut it. But after an hour-long stalemate there was no prospect of a change anyway. Thereafter we tracked to the sun, AAA/R.O. held their tower, everyone had fun and we all went home.

10 caps vs 26 caps (10th July 09)

With our support outnumbered, too.

Sons of Tangra baited us with a triage carrier + BS support. We dropped some carriers – so they dropped the kitchen sink. But the sink lost.

Battle report.

3 caps vs 9 caps (30^th July 09)

In this case the enemy had nine capitals in dock range of their home station. Cap fights in dock range aren’t as much fun but to get a fight we were willing to take the bigger risk: we dropped a triage carrier and some battleships on them (and then bringing in two combat carriers to give us some more dps). Now, triage mode means you can’t dock and most of their carriers were neut-fit along with some of their support (such as this 8-neut apoc).

This situation got them to aggress and we killed six of their support before the rest docked. Since none of their capitals chose to siege or triage (and a couple of their Moros were fit with neuts) they were able to dock before we could get a capital kill.

We took no losses.

1 cap vs 6 caps (9^th August 09)

As we finished off a battle against a 20+ IDC fleet, bs-heavy, with 15 of our own BS and a triage carrier, eXe hotdropped us with 6 carriers.

Battle Report.

And now we’re finally going to do a HAC gang. Honest.