RvB Ganked 150: Golden Shower

The RvB Ganked NPSI community has been in operation for 150 roams, and its anniversary fleet coincided perfectly with an Iwantisk event culminating with a titan death in lowsec. Mangala Solaris declared that the fleet would be using the Golden Fleet battleship doctrine, comprised primarily of apocs and navy apocs supported by geddons, vindis, and bhaals. The Golden Fleet is expensive, but extremely durable, and the long neut range of the geddons makes pointing and brawling very dangerous for its opponents. Spectre Fleet came along with a remote rep-heavy pantheon carrier contingent.

I x'd up with a geddon because my lazarz skills are lol, and then waited for an hour and a half to actually get into a fleet. I was in the second fleet, FC 'd by NPSI vet Douglas Aurelius, consisting mostly of battleships with decent logi cruiser support. The first fleet was Mang's fleet with all of the napocs. Rumors swirled around of a third and fourth fleets, but I am unsure how they full they were. Between our two fleets alone we had 500 pilots and several capitals.

Several other HRDKX pilots attended, but I was separate from them, having arranged to fly with my bro Xuskii in an apoc and his bro Trytic in a mega. I wasn't able to get fleet invites for them right away, but all RvB fleets had standing orders not to fire on anything that looked friendly, so they managed to avoid trouble while we made our way to the event system. That process alone took over a half hour as we dipped into deep tidi as far as 10 jumps away. Battleships + tidi + moving as a fleet = not fun.

When we finally arrived in Ishomilken, we got on grid with the titan and the shitshow began in earnest. The system was at max tidi for the entire fight - it was a slow, syrupy debacle. Besides our huge blob, hundreds of other pilots flooded the field, and local peaked at around 1800. Everyone was there, from Circle of Two to Snuffed Box to Shadow Cartel and many more, both in organized fleets and in smaller, opportunistic gangs.

Doug began calling out Snuff guardian targets and we made little progress. Even with so much dps on field, their huge logi wing always caught reps in time. We only blasted one of the guards before Doug gave up and we started to work on enemy carriers in tandem with the first fleet. I used my spare neuts and drones to whore on nearby small targets like interceptors, destroyers, and a bunch of rookie ships that were strangely not fitted with cynos.

From left to right: Trytic, Xuskii, LA

With the combined firepower of both fleets, we were able to grind through archon armor slowly. The first one finally dropped and we started a couple of Bastards carriers that went much quicker. It was then that a Circle of Two rupture fleet landed. We temporarily abandoned the carrier group to start volleying ruptures with great success, and their 40- or 50-man group was routed in the space of a few real-time minutes. We took down a few more Snuff guardians before returning to their carriers.

The carriers took forever to whittle down, and during the second one, Trytic noticed that a random cyclone was smartbombing him. It was piloted by Deaths Rage and didn't seem to be part of a logi blob, so the three of us switched targets for the hell of it and smoked him. While looking at his ship, I saw what looked like a remote shield repper coming from a nearby rupture, so I called that one out too and we asploded it, although that one took much longer. No repper on the fit, oops. For the last hour we had been continually shot at by a mean proteus gang and had taken significant casualties, but none of my little three-man gang had been seriously damaged. We took down a third Snuff carrier and then switched to the Shadow Cartel t3 gang. I only got on one legion kill before my poor geddon was finally destroyed, and I bailed out through a HRDKX wormhole that had serendipitously appeared in the system, letting me avoid the massive smartbomb camps guaranteed to be on every gate back to high.

RvB left the field soon after, as the t3s were inflicting too much damage for our beleaguered logi wing to keep up with, even when the second fleet repositioned itself closer to Spectre's triage carriers. For most of the fight the titan had been ignored while the fleets fought over it, and it was content to smartbomb and doomsday to its heart's content. Interestingly, Spectre FC Jayne Fillon was able to survive a doomsday blast in his archon.

Xus in highsec

Trytic escaped unharmed after docking for some time in lowsec, while Xuskii noobed it up as usual and tried to yolo his way back to highsec. Of course the highsec gate was camped and he still had a supect timer, so away went his apoc and, amazingly, his pod. In highsec. None of us got on the titan kill, but that's alright because we had fun while racking up some decent mails. I have fought in tidi before, but not the soupy 10% variety. Never again.