This weekend was a busy one for Rolled Out, if not as exciting as it could have been.
I logged in on Saturday morning reasonably early to find that we had been invited by Disavowed to join them and a few other groups in an effort to evict one of the Blood Union/Quantum Explosion home system C6s that they had used to launch some recent attacks on other C6 PVP groups.
I am not entirely sure what sparked the recent shift in Blood Union's activities but rather than their usual site ganking of PVE farmers, they had turned their attention to performing full scale evictions of PVP entities in high end wspace and have been doing so with the help of Lazerhawks.
Doing this is their prerogative but given the close knit nature of the upper end WH entities, people do notice when one group starts bullying the others and it's gotten to the point where the Bat Phones of the past no longer actually need to be rung, they just tend to happen.
Their first target was RCC who they successfully evicted, primarily because RCC happened to be in the process of moving systems anyway and no real defence, other than the usual elite forum PVP, was mounted.
This weekend their next target became Whale Girth who did not fold as quietly.
There were all sorts of rumours and threats made after the RCC eviction which included BU/QEX threatening anyone and everyone who assisted RCC with an eviction of their own. Now, threats like this are made reasonably often by those with power and BU are certainly a group capable of acting on such a threat.
However, making this threat rang the Bat Phone all on its own and when Whale Girth got invaded, half on the non-Russian WH groups came to defend the WG system while the other half was called on to attack the BU home system C6. We were part of that second half.
The BU system only had 2 moons in it with heavily armed POSs on each and when Lazerhawks rolled into their allies and reinforced them with 3 caps and a dozen or so subcaps we called for a log off until numbers were brought in later in the day.
In the end NOHO, who were in the WG system defending them, talked to BU leadership and a 24h cease fire was called with all evictions cancelled and we went home.
Evictions are bad for WH space in general and this was the best possible outcome for all involved in my opinion but it did leave many upset about what they saw as a diplomatic blue balling.
In any case, Rolled Out moved back home and as it was hitting 2am for the AU TZ, most of us went to bed.
On Sunday I logged in around lunch time to find my corp reinforcing some random C3 POS as they were determined to find a fight this weekend.
The POS only had 10 hours of stront in it but waiting around for the timer is boring and we had no real interest in it so we moved on.
The day was spent looking for trouble in our chain and while some random kills were found, it did not yet satisfy our hunger for kills this weekend.
A few hours before downtime, someone found a twitch stream of a guy running C3 sites with some alts who was openly revealing his HS entry point when he made trips there to refit.
Now, this is quite possibly the stupidest thing you can do in wspace. There were only a few of us online and we decided to teach this guy that lesson.
There was no route from our home system but Sith was in HS and he started heading over in his cloaky Proteus while I logged on my Tengu alt and also headed over.
Unfortunately for us, another group had the same plans as us and got there about 5min before us.
Sith managed to tag the streamer's Typhoon with his Prot and bail as the 3rd party landed 4-5 ships so he ended up on the kill mail.
I had been slightly behind and had arrived in system with my Tengu by now and wanted to play so I jumped into the C3 and had Sith fleet warp me at range to the site the Streamer had been running.
I landed 60km or so off the 3rd party Megathron, Ishtar and Sleipnir and picked up some transversal.
The Ishtar and Sleip were shield tanked so I knew my main threats were neuts from the Sleip and Mega. I tested if the Mega had a neut by getting within heavy neut range of it and it did not so I felt reasonably safe.
The Ishtar was faster than my 100mn but it had no webs or any real non drone DPS so it wasn't really a threat so I went to town on it.
I set a closer orbit than normal on it as I needed to be able to web it to stop it from getting away.
As the Ishtar hit armour, I realized my mistake. I knew the Ishtar and Sleip didn't have webs but I had completely neglected the Mega and it DID have a web, which I had just managed to get in range of...
At this point I switched all my attention to getting away from the soon to be lethal web and the Ishtar got out in deep armour.
I had hit web range at around 60% shield and it began dropping fast as the web let the Sleip catch right up to my ass. Luckily it only had a NOS, no Neuts.
I was also very aware of the heat damage on my mids being around the 80% mark but I had to risk 2 cycles of heat on the AB to pull range and I managed to do so as I hit 5% shield.
Close one, but safe.
After that I regenerated some shield and crashed the HS hole through their HIC bubble, podding the streamer on the way who had just landed in his pod since he had no other way out.
We considered doing round 2 but we only had 2 combat ships plus an Onyx that has made its way over versus their 6-7 ships so we didn't go back and Sith headed home.
After DT I decided to run a home site as I had fit out a Vindicator earlier and needed to recoup some isk reserves.
As I was on the last wave with 8-9 sleeper BSs left, the few others that had logged on rolled the static and the scout immediately called that escalations were being run next door in the new static. This was the blood we were after all weekend and a ping was made and the fleet scrambled.
(I got very distracted at this point and nearly lost my Moros in the PVE site as I wasn't paying attention to it! Pretty sure it has structure damage.)
My main was not in the site but I had Archon, Moros, Loki stuck there for at least 5min.
I scrambled my main into his PVP Legion (Ew, I know...) to join the attack, I wasn't missing this, while trying the finish off the site as quickly as possible.
I managed to get my PVE ships off grid as the call to warp to the static was made and hastily reshipped my booster into a covops for an additional scout to take with us while logging off my other 3 toons while they were still in warp to my POS.
The call was made for our Flycatcher to jump in and warp to the hostiles as our caps (Moros, Naglfar, Nidhoggur) were in warp to the static which he did, bubbled them and warped off to safety before they knew what was happening.
Our fleet jumped, closing the WH behind us, warped to the site and made short work of the 2 Moroses and 2 Thannys that were trapped there after their Loki bailed.
Final tally was a tad over 12bil.
http://rolledout.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=23712736
It was a fairly simple gank but the execution was very smooth, props to Josh Tsutola for 1st rate scouting and Garothar for his bubble work.
With the fight over and the locals posing no real threat to our light fleet, the focus turned to extracting our caps to a jumpable LS/NS.
The locals has critted their static while running sites so we finished it off with our HIC and looked for a route.
(At this point I also logged in an alt at home and went to salvage the site I had run earlier. Girl’s gotta earn a living!)
Their static was a C5>C3 which lead to HS and it also had an incoming C5 which had a NS that was 1 jump to LS for the pilots with jump skills and only needed 1 mid-point for the pilot with JDO level 1 *cough*-Braxus-*cough*. Perfect.
Well, almost perfect.
Turns out that the C5 with the NS exit was occupied by our very favourite Russians, Quantum Explosion.
It was now around 3 hours after down time and while this isn't prime time for Russian groups, it's not a bad time for them and there was some activity in their hole with at least a stealth bomber and 2 T3s moving around.
Obviously moving 3 unsupported caps without web support (our Lokis couldn't assist as they'd be collapsed into NS) through a hostile WH with actives is not ideal but we didn't want to give up the exit so we went for it anyway.
As our caps entered warp to the QEX hole, a hostile Legion was reported on the connection, right on schedule!
The call was made to proceed and all 3 caps jumped into the hostile system, irrevocably closing the exit behind them, and hit warp to the nullsec hole.
Let take a short break here to consider how this must have looked for QEX.
The majority of our corp plus allies had spent most of Saturday attacking one of their main C6 bases.
We then had an agreed upon 24h cease fire, which for those counting had basically either just expired or was about to expire, with the agreement that all evictions were cancelled.
And now here we are, by pure coincidence, throwing 3 capitals into another one of their systems!
Awkward...
Cease fire or no cease fire, I would not expect anyone to sit idly by while 3 hostile caps crashed into their system.
Quantum Explosion seemed to hesitate here for a bit, unsure what exactly was going on, and our Nag and Nid made it into warp to the nullsec. Unfortunately our Moros, who was last to jump, did not make the warp before a Tengu and Legion decloaked and tackled him.
He attempted to drop a mobile depot to fit warp core stabs but it was quickly destroyed by the 2 T3s before it onlined.
At this point, the other 2 caps had arrived at the NS and the Nag had made its exit, being of no help here, and had mid massed the NS hole on its way out, raising serious concerns regarding the ability of the NS hole to take both remaining caps even if the Moros was let go.
Our Nid was still lingering on the WH side of the hole and the last ditch suggestion of fitting a rack of stabs off his depot and coming back for the tackled Moros to allow him to fit stabs off the carrier was made on comms.
In the 3-5 minutes since crashing into their hole, QEX ships had started to pop up on dscan.
'Moros on D.'
'Armageddon on D.'
'Archon on D.'
'2 more Moros on D...'
The welcoming party was coming, and it wasn't friendly.
Never the less, Fido immediately dropped his depot and fit his stabs. 'YOLO!' was heard on comms and his Nidhoggur initiated what may well have been its final warp back to the stranded Moros.
On landing, both caps hit align back to the nullsec and Braxus scrambled to fit his stabs.
'2 stabs'
'3 stabs'
'Warping!'
The Moros had been successfully extracted and the Nid followed right after.
On landing on the NS the mass question was raised and the Moros offloaded its valuable modules and cargo into the Nid as it would be jumping first, being the much lighter capital.
The mass held and both caps made a safe exit to nullsec to much praise on comms, cloaking up at a safe to wait for their cyno extract.
All in all it was a great finish to the weekend.
10/10 would roll out again.
JM
