So to steal the theme song from Love Story

[sing] "Where should I begin?…….. To tell the story of the POS in P3EN"

For me it started around 20:00 Eve when I logged on to find that a couple of our FCs had started on plan and on cue with a Drake swarm to incap the two JBs in P3EN. They had done a really good job forming up and starting things off.

Why Drakes? Simply that they are versatile, do reasonable DPS soak up a lot of damage in a lag fest and are cheap! We could not foresee what range engagement we were going to get nor how they were going to fight. So this time we went for cheap and practical over shiny glass cannons.

By 20.00 the first JB was down and the cyno jammer on that POS was also down (with 100% hindsight we should probably have taken down the TVN JB first as this is where they got there continual reinforcements from but c'est la guerre). 

This was done to enable us to get Carriers in to rep up guns and stuff on the 5-1 POS that was coming out of RF later that night.

We had thoughts to bomb them on their JB as they came into system thus forcing them to use a Titan bridge instead. (NC reading this please note that ATLAS will not use the lagged out on jumping through a Titan portal exploit on you that others did the other day).

Intel had their fleet at roughly our numbers on their Titan (from TVN) and their usual tactic of a deep deep deep deep safe -330 AU away. So we were looking for a good fight. They had bigger ships (mainly tanked B/S and B/C with lots and lots of logistics) but we had a faster moving fleet. This would be fun!

I joined just as we started warping in on the second JB and the NC SB swarm (I think they had upwards of 15?) was immediately bombing us to pretty good effect. This happened twice at two warp ins before we changed tactics slightly and spread out a lot more on land to avoid this. Also it helps that once they have fired it takes 2 minutes before they can reload so we warped straight back on grid and were very spread out in any event before they could come back in again.

So there we were hitting scramblers etc as a prelude to hitting the JB with 200 guys in fleet mainly Drakes and the hostile bombing us to hell and back and 250 ready and waiting on their Titan. The Intel was that they had a cunning plan and lo and behold Obe fills up with another fleet as TCF and friends bring another 170 appx (?) into system and they take control of the P3EN gate in Obe leaving us 2:1 outnumbered. I have not had a chance to look at a good overview of the numbers yet but I personally saw local at >640 at one point and our fleet never grew more than 245 so am pretty sure that ratio is accurate.

We had a choice of leaving grid and trying to clear Obe gate but they had cloaked dictors and their SB fleet over there and the TCF guys. We took the view that we were going to defend the POS rather than trying to clear the gate as we could have no guarantees that we would ever load the grid at the gate nor back at our POS. 

The downside of this was to remove our advantage of manoeuvrability and speed though – which sucked – but needs must when the Devil vomits in your kettle as the Gallante say.

21.35: Then the cyno goes up at 330AU safe and they bridge in. We had made the choice to stay at the POS (probably a good job as we would have been mid fight at the gate and liable to be sandwiched between the two fleets) so there we stayed.

21:40 We lit a decoy cyno or two and brought in a dozen hardy, brave Carriers and began repping stuff on the POS.

21.45
The POS at this time had about 1 hour left of its RF mode. We had a few minutes breather and then Intel saw them align and warp to our 5-1 POS with about 45 minutes to go. Have to say that surprised us as we had assumed they would want to wait until it came out of RF but hey ho we certainly enjoyed a very ballsy move by their FC (L'assasine Noir -http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=6320678). 

22:00 A long and glorious fight ensued.

We had our fleet orbiting the POS at the shield edge so that we could duck inside the shields whenever the need arose but as usual the spies had been hard at work and they warped nano ships inside the POS shields using the password and proceeded to bump people out of the POS / stop them getting back in. It also meant a lot of their guys were also able to duck inside the POS shields at will.

We considered changing the password but it would have left our non alliance brothers flying in the wind so despite the disadvantage it gave us we chose not to. With hindsight warping off non ATLAS then back at snipe then changing the password might have been a viable tactic but with the lag there was it was going to end in tears doing anything fancy. So we stayed and fought.

The lag was pretty bad but manageable if you had brackets off, had guns on single fire and closed every chat channel! The advantage of the POS guns (about half had been repped back up by the time they came back in) was also nullified as they only cycled once every 5 minutes or so – go CCP.

At this early stage I cannot say much about the fight as the killboards need to synch and we need new hamsters for the ATLAS kb (Fluffy RIP you will be missed). But being 2:1 outnumbered in system by generally larger ships and with the NC having a very strong logistics backbone was always going to be difficult.

They gradually whittled us down as they went for the high value glass cannon targets of the sniper HACS) – much as we did. We had their voice comms on pretty much the whole time and the primaries on both sides where being warned that they were primary target! Our spy on the ATLAS TS relayed our FCs comments to their FC and vice versa! This made for some hilarity as we asked for messages to be relayed to the opposing FC etc.

22:30 They had a strategy of anchoring large bubbles all over the POS and we took the view that the tower was a lost cause about 23.20 – 10 mins before the timer elapsed. Intel had them with dictors ready on our other safe POS in system to catch our Caps if they warped there so rather than risk anything valuable we simply jumped them back to Obe. Sorry to those Cap pilots who came that you did not get into the fight properly but we did not see the point in risking a 1bn ISK ship to defend the 350m tower.

All our caps got out safely.

22:40 We finally worked out their FC at 23.38 and popped his Rapier – his panic on their comms was fairly funny (the f word is over rated). But our issue was that they kept the Obe gate well and truly locked down tighter than a gnats arse (US guys that is how the word is spelt correctly – an ass is a Donkey). This meant that the guys in Obe could not easily re-inforce us whilst they had a JB straight through to TVN and were able to replace their losses fairly efficiently. Again hindsight is a wonderful thing but next time we will have a second FC in Obe to either force a fight at the p3en gate or come through the long way round via Taisy / EIDI etc.

23:00 We were beaten back into the shields more and more often and eventually did not have the dps to kill their ships before logistics could rep them. So we just used the POS guns on their bubbles in an effort to clear the POS somewhat. 

23:15 We were short on cyno pilots but lit a cyno and bridged over a couple of dozen guys from Obe to join us but the POS was getting ridiculously bubbled by now and their logistics were keeping the bubbles alive sadly….

They were now able to start shooting the POS shields properly and the end was nigh…

23:30 I had to call time on my involvement as I needed some sleep ……no stamina. So someone else will have to say how it ended.

The results this morning are a dead POS and a loot field to die for. NC 'won' as they killed the objective but how much blood was spilt for a POS hehe.

The POS will go back up on Wednesday and the whole thing can start again. 

Meanwhile ofc the other members of the SC had an open field to take yet more moons off NC…….fighting on three fronts is not good for your wallet I hear. c/d?