Utter destruction of virtual interstellar military assets is its own reward – go on, try to argue with that. Today however, it happened for a good cause. I also got to enjoy the benefits of lengthy days of skill training in armor tanking and projectile weapons.

All of these days that end up in massive fleet deployments seem to start lazy, warm and fuzzy. I was making three-chocolate mousse for example – not very war-like. Imagine my state of mind after consuming more than a whole bar’s worth of the stuff – that is when I read the notification about the fleet forming. So this guy Bacchanalian is supporting a charity, Extra Life Gaming Marathon, to help children with cancer, and he is regularly raising money by hosting fun events in EVE Online. Check out his page. In EVE, fun translates to shooting stuff.

noun [U] fun /fʌn/

To shoot or blow up stuff for light-hearted pleasure.

“The gankers were having fun with the warp scrambled miner.”

Also, there is the well known connection between the size of the ship blown up and the fun that was had:

Bacchanalian challenged the good people of EVE to try to kill his Aeon class supercarrier which is a very tempting offer, even Goonswarm was expected to show up. My group was invited to join the Spectre fleet.

Our fleet composition was armored Hurricanes supported by repair ships, and so my newly trained armor and medium projectile weapon skills (alas, not yet tech2) were at last put to the test. The Hurricane (just ‘Cane’ to its friends) is a versatile and trusty (rusty!) battlecruiser. I bought a fully fitted one for about a 100 million ISKs.

We assembled and the fleet commander (FC from now on) warmed us up by doing some basic fleet maneuvers before encountering two Orca mining support ships flown by pilots with bounties on their heads. Two of our pilots were so eager that they even started shooting before the FC activated the the killright, so as we were still in high security space, they were promptly punished by the police a.k.a. Concord. Health and safety tip: Always check who you are pointing your high caliber naval guns at before giving the order to fire! That did not stop us from killing the two unlucky Orcas and a Hyperion battleship that showed up a few minutes later.

At this point our fleet consisted of a a few tackler frigates, some logistics ships and about 200 Hurricanes. Impressive sight to see, and my largest fleet to date. We set out to find the supercarrier in the designated system.

We landed to find a group of carriers spider-tanking each other. In this formation, all carriers support each other with repair beams to shrug off most of the damage applied to them.

We were ordered to load long-range artillery shells and headed towards the carrier group. We opened fire at a Nidhoggur as destroying it offered the highest gain as it usually has the best repair systems among carriers.

Not long after, we were interrupted by a bunch of Tengus (Tech 3 cruisers, pretty much the pinnacle in cruiser sized ships although pretty expensive) exiting warp. They started doing some serious damage so we had to withdraw to a nearby planet, taking down some fighters that followed us in warp. After rallying we warped back into the fray.

While we could not bring the Nidhogg down in this run either, we took out several Tengus. Unfortunately my targeting range was only about 80 kms and they were around 100-110 kms away so I couldn’t land a hit this time. The FC moved us around in a fast pace, I almost constantly had my microwarpdrive on, depleting my capacitor. That prevented me from using the warp drive almost costing me the ship when the fleet warped out. I was left behind for only a few seconds and luckily the cap booster saved the day and I could get out in time.

This time of the year vitamin D deficiency is a common problem, so we took a detour to the sun to get some free UV treatment, and we took out a stray Scimitar as an added bonus.

A this point there were 420 people in the star system and half of that were us. The motto was, let’s kill the other half! We prepared for close range engagement and jumped back in to the conflict zone.

Being caught between the carrier group and the Tengus is not a good place to be, we needed to try again from a better angle. This back-and-forth went on for a while, the fleets trying to land in an advantageous position. At one time we caught a Naga fleet and managed to vapourize a good number of them, on an other occasion we started chasing the slippery Tengus in warp, but misjudged their destination and landed somewhere else. The FC decided it’s time to dock up for a bio break. That online gaming jargon will be left for you to be decyphered… Anyhow, after everyone got back from the loo, the fleet undocked (which started to take considerable time with so many people in the system).

This time a Naga + Machariel fleet interrupted us in bashing a Thanatos carrier. We shredded them – Machariels cost around half a billion ISK without equipment, so that must have hurt. As the FC called in the primary targets in rapid succession, I struggled with keeping up as they were often destroyed before my ship’s targeting system got a lock on them. Note that there are less screenshots around here, and that is because the intensity of the battle was high.

There was this guy, the Kwisatz’ Haderach in his Loki (The Minmatar Tech 3 cruiser) protecting the carriers. Any of you who did not read the book Dune, first of all you should do so, but in a nutshell a Kwisatz Haderach is a messiah, so no one expected an easy kill there. It was still uncanny that after three or four attempts we still could not bring him down. Then came the brilliant idea of how to break the spider-tank and the Loki down. The carriers’ repair beams have a limited range, so why not push them apart? The fleet headed to the middle of the carrier formation and started bumping the huge ships apart. It is worth mentioning that in EVE, there are no collisions, however when two ships would collide, the game bounces both ships apart. We used this mechanic to single out individual carriers and kill them.

It worked like a charm. Kwisatz went down, then the carriers died, one by one.

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As we were concentrated to small space, several smartbombs, area effect weapons were fired, some of them friendlies battling fighters, and I started taking armor damage – but our logistics repair ships saved my bacon – big up! We left the Aeon for last. The fleet started placing bets on its life expectancy.

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Op success! Supercarrier kill: tick.

So that was how it went down. It was incredibly intense. It was a pleasure to watch two hundred people logging on to a game just for fun see through a mission in such an organized way. FC Morathia was brilliant – thank you.

See you, space cowboy.