Tuesday 9 April 2013

Keeping solo alive

History, contrary to popular theories, *is* kings and dates and battles.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)


A rare lazy Friday night and I get buzzed in a shared Intel channel, I ask what's up and then nothing, OK, I carry on watching over Midnight's training and dueling activites.

Eventually it appears there's a rather large combat operation in the works by the residents of Molden Heath and I have received an invite. I eventually get all the details and Clone jump to Bosena. My ship for the op was all the way in Unertek so I would need to go fetch it and move it to the staging system.

The trip to Unertek went by uneventual, nobody interested in my rookie ship, but moving to the staging system would prove more interesting, in a massive Abaddon, with the agility of a brick in the Great Wall of China. I solo'd it, like a boss and waited for the op to kick off. We were quite a large gang, composed of Heavy Amarr and Minmatar battleships, some T3 support and triage carriers.

The POS came out of reinforced as we moved into nullsec and we took a round about way as not to plough directly into a waiting force, hostile numbers were growing, tier 3 battlecruisers, setup for range and Scimitar support. We enter system and warp to our covert eyes, but for some reason we land off grid, 150 odd km from the POS, a few adjustments later and we enter grid with the hostiles at 130km, outside our Abaddon's engagement envelope, but their Naga's were easily able to apply damage, our FC decides to jump one triage carrier in as we start to hit the POS instead of chasing the Naga's and getting out of range of our Archon. Inside the POS is a Broadsword and a stealth bomber, apparently POS gunning but we moved closer to the POS and applied high damage lasers being fueled by cap transfers from our triage carrier.

The Naga's would dip in and out of our range, trying to apply higher DPS to our setup, we would chase one or two and drop their shields but their Scimitar's easily dealt with that and they moved out of range again.

A strange thing happened when one of our fleet members mentioned he was inside the POS... a wtf moment but it turns out he guessed the POS password...

It was...
1...
2...
3...
4...

Cue Spaceballs quotes in local and in fleet

At this point local bumped and a fleet of Oracles with frigate support warped onto grid, well out of our and their range. The POS explodes and the action hots up, with superior numbers against us, our FC jumps two more Archons in and the fight starts in earnest as some of the hostiles start moving closer, we chug some Frentix, load Scorch and start hitting hard. One or two failed bomb runs on one of their bombers part doesn't do much, but as we now have three carriers on the field, the odds of escalation start to rise and one of our carriers is out if Stront, so the decision to extract is made.
Carriers, once out of triage, jump out to refuel.

OPI4-E engagement
We took some losses in OP but they were not in 7-2 so not posted on their board

The Hostiles follow and both groups land on the B-VIP9 gate with us and they jump through, we follow and hold cloak, the order to decloak is given and targets are called, I decloak before the rest of our gang so get primaried, our cyno isn't in place yet for our refueled triage carriers to jump in yet. So I burn back to the gate and jump deep in armour.

On the other side only one other hostile is there, a Blackbird ECM cruiser, who isn't long for this Verse as I light him up and bring solo back. While waiting out my timer and feeling rather smug, our triage jumps into B-VIP9 but we've already taken losses but my re-entry into the system turns the tide and we obliterate what is left, scattering the remnants of the hostile fleet to the four solar winds

B-VIP9 engagement

A great nights entertainment and rather fun to fly with others, Sard seemed to enjoy himself and so did I, solo isn't dead, but sometimes even us old Soloists can fleet up with others and kick ass.



Rens Fight Club got it's first big money kill last night, the fights have been great, the losses a learning curve, it's not so easy when you have under 3million SP but this guy must be fucking furious.

There are only three of us at present and recruitment hasn't gone as well as I expected but BLUDZ are here to stay and it's so much fucking fun. Please spread the word and bump our Recruitment thread from time to time



3 comments:

Sard Caid said...

Yeah, it was shooting a POS, but there were people we were skirmishing with/brawling with the entire time. People were exploding on both sides. It was pretty silly in OPI, but the tension of the 7-2 guys was pretty palpable with the threat of a hotdrop, which added to the fight tremendously.

The whole cyno fuckup in B-VIP made for a more interesting fight, kinda cool to do. The whole experience made me realize just how out of touch I am with FCing, which I'm keen to rectify soon™.

Kane Rizzel said...

Yeah, 7-2 were on edge and there's me just herp derping around without a care in the verse.
Thanks for the BLUDZ plug on your stream last night dude, much appreciated

Unknown said...

You know, IM going to need a new corp for my toon by the end of the month... Due to faction cane and some other intervention my sec status will plummet. I might take a look into BLUDZ. Ive read your blog for a while now and I like your style.