Down to the wire

I haven't been too active in EVE lately, as it's the fall and I have a lot of RL shit during the fall. But I do log in every now and then and putz around a bit. Last night I was creeping around, scanning and not talking on TS like usual, when a call went out for a tackled carrier in null (where else would it be tackled I guess). I hustled back to grab an interceptor, then changed my mind enroute and switched to an ishtar. We had enough tackle, but not enough dps. So we all zip out to some shithole in the Drone Regions, with about an hour on the clock before downtime.


We arrived and took down the initial grab, a chimera. Then something happened that I am not accustomed to when taking down a ratting carrier: resistance. The Russians sent in a respectable subcap fleet - a tengu, a ferox, and eight or so maelstroms. When flown properly, eight maelstroms can be really mean against a small gang like ours (10-15 for most of that hour). When they landed, they smoked a few of our ishtars in the preliminary sortie. Their alpha was amazeballs. I was third in line and one concentrated volley took me to 41% structure, which gave me a flaming asshole (engine compartment) for the rest of the fight. We wouldn't be able to fight sniper BSs at their 100k warp-ins. So, we reorganized and our FC decided to yolo our whole gang on top of theirs. We landed at 0 and our gambit worked - unable to track fast-moving cruisers at such close range, and without logi or really any support at all, the maels all asploded.

HRDKX had only lost a handful of ships at this point and more were streaming out of the wormhole to assist. After their maelstrom attempt, the Russians committed no more subcaps. Instead, to our delight, they warped in several more carriers. Two carriers working together can put out a lot of repping power, and it took us a full half hour to whittle them down. The second one was destroyed with only forty seconds left on the clock - barely enough time to warp off the field. The nice thing about two carriers side-by-side is that they can refit off of one another. These guys should have had triage modules in their CHAs - if they had, they might have survived. That second one was also using large remote reps, which is not really a great idea for carriers.