From Russia with love

Like Schrödinger's capsuleer, Fin's here and not here. I see her in our corporation channel but not in our home w-space system, and thankfully she's not too far away, only in our neighbouring class 3 system and not some festering petri dish of biological samples that is empire space. Our neighbouring system, Fin tells me, 'was going to be a rich point of action, until a big null-sec alliance came in to shoot an off-line tower'. Quite why they are taking the time to shoot a tower that will only reward them with a few standard defences is beyond our ken, particularly when there are plenty of profitable anomalies to plunder in the C3. Maybe shooting a barn door for hours on end is what passes as entertainment in null-sec.

I grab the BMs Fin took time to make, jump in to my Manticore stealth bomber, and head across to the C3 to join her in watching the lack of action. I count seven battleships, four stealth bombers, and a battlecruiser, along with a couple of dozen drones swarming around the tower. We're not going to be able to do much here, and even a couple of bombs won't put much of a dent in most of the ships. We could try to collapse our wormhole, but there's no guarantee we can do that. It's possible that the pilots are only paying enough attention to reload ammunition and check occasionally that they're not under attack, probably confident in the low odds of a w-space fleet being formed to try to engage them directly. They may not even notice our Orca industrial command ship appearing briefly on their directional scanner.

On the other hand, we have some evidence that they've scanned the C3 and found our wormhole, and if they are paying attention then trying to collapse our wormhole will get us killed. Of course, throwing a bomb in their direction will definitely get their attention and perhaps get us in to trouble, but at least it's something to do. And now Mick has turned up, giving us a third bomb at our disposal. After a little contemplation, and noticing that a Nemesis stealth bomber in the null-seccers' fleet is making a stationary target of himself, we decide to poke the hornets' nest. If nothing else, their reaction will give us a good indication of how safe it is to push an Orca through our static connection.

Getting our three stealth bombers in to position is quite straightfoward against a tower operation. We have off-line defences at cardinal points to use as reference, and the tower itself as a guide to range. The static nature of the targets lets us approach from different directions, and there are celestial objects all over the place we can use to align to. All three of us get within optimal range of the Nemesis and are ready to attack when Mick notices a canister jettisoned by a Raven battleship, renamed to show the fleet clearly know we're here and what we are planning to do.

Bully for them. I suppose we could back off passively, but this assault is about opportunism and disruption, and if we take cues from our targets we may as well head back to high-sec and run missions for NPCs. A quick check confirms that we all all in position, aligned, and ready to fire. A short countdown synchronises our bomb launches, all aimed primarily at the Nemesis. My own position puts the Nemesis between my Manticore and a distant moon, so I align to the moon, launch, hold for a second, and enter warp smoothly, not wanting to hang around for the ensuing fireworks.

Fin's position also lets her align to a celestial body, and she warps away cleanly after launching her bomb. Mick sticks around to throw some torpedoes too, losing his Nemesis for his boldness, and I see his wreck when I warp back to the tower to a different position to witness the aftermath. I ask Mick what hit him. 'Everything', he says. And on top of that we get a verbal assault, the local channel flaring up with insults and threats, mocking or otherwise, all of which is rather over-the-top. We didn't even pop the Nemesis, it being slightly scorched but otherwise intact, not that you would know from the invective hurled our way.

These null-seccers are not only dicks, they are also not that bright. Either that, or we really are Russians from a class 5 w-space system and I've been in denial for a long time. It's soon made clear that they do in fact know about our wormhole and home system and are just filling in the gaping holes in their knowledge with bluster. And swearing. I can only suppose their corporation has a rather loose policy about smack-talk in local, and probably recruitment. But at least we now know that they have been keeping tabs on us for a while and trying to send an Orca through our static wormhole to collapse it probably would have ended quite badly. I think that's worth the cost of a stealth bomber.

There's not much else to do now, we pretty much have to hole up at home for the evening. We're not entirely sure whether to take their threats about coming to attack our tower next seriously or not. They clearly have the means and the motivation, much like giving a box of matches to a child gives it the means and motivation to burn a house down. Either way, there's no point worrying about it, and no point making it easier for them. As a precaution we load up the Orcas with loot, ships, and fuel and send them off to safe-spots, and Mick and I each take an expensive ship out to a safe-spot to sleep in overnight.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: eve online, hound, manticore, mmorpg, nemesis, orca, penny ibramovic, pvp, raven, w-space