When you gotta, you gotta...

What a crazy vacation start it has been. A few weeks ago, one of the AMC wormhole-based corporations discovered a very desirable C4 Pulsar system with a C4 static and other goodies. There was a slight problem: the system was inhabited. Well, sort of. A Russian corporation called MEHP was the owner of a Large Caldari Control Tower, but after some observation it was clear that this corp didn't have a big active roster in the system. So preparations were made for the invasion. But it wasn't going to be easy to get a fleet in there; the C4 system is pretty deep into wormhole space, and sometimes finding the road to Empire can be... interesting.

After some logistics headaches, Black Line Inc. anchored a temporary tower away from prying eyes, which allowed the alliance to bring in the ships which would do the bashing. Things got slowed down a bit when last Thursday night it was near impossible to get a path that lead to Empire; the closest K-space exit landed in Cobalt Edge, on the very North-Eastern tip of New Eden. Things got better on Friday with exits in Amarr and Minmatar space so I was finally able to fly my specialty fit Shield Tempest into the system code-named GND. Because of various real-life activities like drum lessons (I'm on the giving end... scary thought!), the Montreal EVE Pilots Meet, and another party, I missed the opening ceremonies of what will be known as the 10-10-10 POS Bash. But my late arrival didn't matter much because as you probably know, everything with shields in a Pulsar gets tanky. In a C4, it gets worse. On Saturday morning not too long before down time, we finished incapaciting the defenses. Proof of the Russians' ineptitude: who needs Warp Disruptors or Webs on a tower?! Or Medium Guns? Yes there was some ECM and Neutralizers but they just made the defense neutering merely annoying. At 0515 Eastern time, I shut down the Tempest and went to bed.

At 1100 Eastern I got up and logged in before I even started making coffee. A few other pilots logged in around the same time so a quick check for activity at the enemy POS later (there was none), I formed the fleet that would get rid of this fail-tower. At 1610 evetime, 10-10-10, The true POS Bash started. Thankfully some pilots had stayed up right until Down Time to start denting the tower's humongous shields, which shortened the job slightly. It was still very long; at around 2100 evetime, the tower went into reinforced mode. And surprise surprise, moar fail! The reinforced timer shows 3h15. The tower being now clearly abandoned (with one Russian guy ejecting from a Badger containing T3 BPCs and building materials; how awesome!) and no time for anything to get repaired, everyone took a short break right on time for supper, and some additional forces were able to make it into GND, replacing some of the European pilots who had to bail. At 0015, 10-11-10, the bashing resumed as I opened the final ceremonies with volleys kind of like this one:

18:30:27 Combat Your group of 1400mm Howitzer Artillery II places an excellent hit on Велком! [MEHP](Caldari Control Tower), inflicting 12531.4 damage.

Once again the operation was most uneventful but the Pulsar-boosted shields took what seemed like forever to fail. But once that was done, the armor penalties made things a lot faster, and at 0331 evetime, the tower finally disappeared from existence. Let the looting and unanchoring commence !!!

Mmmm, pretty 'splosions !!!

Not wanting to travel more jumps than absolutely necessary, I left my specialty Tempest in the system and I asked the owner of the POS killmail (his first ever killmail by the way) to gracefully pod me to my HQ. It was funny because he was very reluctant at first, not wanting to fire on friendlies. But with a bit of good-natured insults he finally complied. Notice the nice killmail whorage :))

So all in all it was a good operation, if a bit too long for my taste. I am seriously thinking of training Amarr battleships just for occasions like this; these would be stupidly fail-tanked of course, but if all I have to do is shoot at least I don't have to press the F1 button repeatedly for hours on end. I will do my best to stay away from POS Bashing altogether :)

Thank you Black Line Inc. for this special weekend, even if it was excruciatingly long.

o7