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Dscan is your friend. Dscan is your most important friend. This is one of the most important lessons I have ever learned in wspace. Dscan is your friend. You remember last time, when wrecks appeared? Yes dscan is your very best friend. Shortly after the wrecks appeared some corpses. Corpses have name. Names is vital intel. So we ofc struck a convo with those names. Convo goes something like this:
Us: Hey, we see you self-destructed a capital in our wh?
Them: Uhm, yes, well we tried to roll and it failed so we got stuck :D
Yeah right. The lack of any new signature (and yes we kept an eye on them) didn't exactly confirm that. But they left convo and logged off. So this means that this wh we thought were empty had a capital force in it which of now at least two had self-destructed themselves. Just moving into c5 space and we get a wh full of content :P However we had seen at least one carrier as well on dscan. But the two wrecks were of dreads. So some of their cap force was self destructed and some not. Before you read on take a pause and try to figure out what this kind of intel means. To us, not used to intel gathering of capital fleets from c4 space, it was mildly confusing. The ones self-destructing obviously ment to leave. But the unknown capitals still inside (of at least one carrier was known) had decided to stay. Either to extract through a different wh or to launch an offensive. However. We had to start digging to find out who these guys were. We had two names to start with. Killboards showed them flying with different german corps and alliances. We also had the name of the corp whose POS we destroyed. All of them were added to watchlist by every single member in our corp. Time to hunt our ghosts.
To a keen eye the killboards show an awful lot about people. Digging and digging into the history of our ghost residents showed us a good picture of what to expect. Now I have to do a small recap here. We are still in the first two weeks of us living in this c5 wh. The killboards tells the history. At march the 16th we pulled the offline tower. And already march the 17th we made first contact with the owners of said offline tower. I just realized my former post was very out of order in the order of events. Thank you eve-kill. Ok we are taking a step back here. Lets take a breather and get a overview. Details I had forgotten are coming back to me. I need to bring you up to speed.
Axial Tilt whom we came out of was, together with No Self Esteem, in the alliance Malefic Aspects along with some other corps. You ever heard the phrase that in wspace corps and alliances change all the time but the people stay the same? You have? Good. Then bear with me. Both of these corps had the previous year come from Blue Moon Alliance (oh btw most of these went to Lead Farmers in KILL), TLC (for a month. Says
something.) and then Imperius Legio Vitrix. MALAS was
not a small alliance either. However that didnt help us very much. You'll see that in a bit.
So march 18 we were shown that you don't ignore the bonuses of a wh.
First contact was made. So watchlist already being made at this stage. The following weekend we initiated operation sologrinding POCOS. Yup. In the middle of the day. One oracle to put the pocos into RF. Took about two hours. Then 3 people to kill them off when they came out. Horrible work. But this is what in turn initiated the appearance of the capitals. And no the other corp hadn't joined us in there yet. Oh dear. Now I remember the panic we had. When those pocos fell. And when the capitals appeared. This was not to be a easy takeover at all. And our pvp skills was horrible. But no we had come to live in here and live we would. But it was a struggle. Our local ghost made sure of that. In all respect. Nimon knows his guerrilla warfare. And over the week we had a cat and mouse fight. Every time he logged on we had to be on our toes. Ship into something to counter his fast small ships. Then there was this turning moment. The first contact ended horrible for our part. The continued hunt didn't go very much better. But one day we got a setup and managed to tackle him on the static. He jumped through but we stayed. In with orcas and poof goes the wh. He is locked outside. Scan down the new one. We notice he relogs. We go to camp the new static. But then it happens. While sitting there he logs another character we haven't seen much online. We hit dscan. Thanatos. Wait.. thats a .. carrier! Heart starts beating faster. What is happening? Then the sabre lands on the wh. And the carrier. Panic take hold. We have no logi in our fleet. We start burning in different directions.
BS goes down to fighters. Then they start going for the next one of us. We get out of bubble and warp to safe. Fighters follow. Next safe. Fighters follow. Warp to POS. Fighters follow. But then they get recalled. Carrier warp to planet. They have no support. We need to get tackle and try to kill this thing. Warp a enyo in to speed tank the fighters but he swap to light drones and I have to warp out. He moves to safe. Start combat scanning. He cloakes. In the end he manage to safelog the carrier without us catching it. The next day he declare his intention. Hostile POS in system.
Now this is even more confusing. First his friends SD dreads. Then he puts up a POS. Will his friends come back? We take no chances and ask alliance for help. We put the hostile POS into reinforced. And without any battle to speak of its
taken down.
I think the show off alliance support is what made him take a step from the bold offensive. Never got to ask him about that. But come april he goes back to casual harassment and it also seem to us he start being online in the middle of the night. Which is odd, seeing he is german and same tz as us. However in april we manage to start settling properly in our new home. We eagerly harvest every gas cloud and PI our ass off. Slowly we start bringing more capitals in and more ships. We encounter
other entities and keep up the small skirmishes with nimon and morticia (that most often result in a lot of hunting without any killmail for either part). March also see some members leave the corp as the corp as whole decide to sell off the c2 and move everything into the c5.
At the same time we also started recruiting. Having just a couple of guys isnt enough to defend a wh. And we needed to get more capitals so we could have a go at capital escalations (while having an unknown hostile fleet in system. thats logic for you :P). Now recruitment in a wh corp is a peculiar process. In fact I think it deserve a ramblings post of its own. But due to the situation at hand we decided we would perhaps need a better timezone coverage. We had one us tz guy that came with us from Axial and he was willing to aid with recruitment. Around this time I joined the ranks of directors in ENNE aswell. Dont remember exact date. Maybe a dusty chatlog will reveal that. If it still exist. The library of chatlogs from Eve is probably my most extensive collection of documents. Yes I save them all and they have served me very well over the last year. Everything from a recruit showing up from chatlogs of other peoples pubchannel to diplomatic negotiations. Never underestimate what people may say when they think noone cares.
But now spring had come and May was at our door. May is usually a lovely month here. Temperatures change from aprox 10* C to well above 20 and you get that early summer feeling. But in Eve and our c5 that was now our home it would be different. Very different. Ghost never rest. And at the very end of april a hostile POS was back up.
Continue to Part 4>>
Its only a navy vexxor. Dies quickly. We hold a bit more and then they
come rushing to engage. We jump to Retreat and burn off the hole. Jams
go on their logi and it hits almost every cycle. They sit on our static
now and mostly jumps out as we down them, but then they get a cynabal at
range from wh. Finally a kill of an otherwise stalemate fight. RCC
calls it and head back home.