So, last Saturday was the culmination of a month of organising and advertising. I had decided that I wanted to take out my first UNI “DragonSlayer” fleet, which for those who don’t know is a fleet where the goal is to hunt and kill capital ships. It presents the opportunity for all of E-UNI to bring somewhat more expensive ships than on our usual roams, as well as giving out capital pilots a chance to dust of their Archons. In short, a massive show of force by as many UNI members as possible.

The first thing I learned from this roam is:

– Getting a 175 man fleet through a gate sucks ass.

Yes, we roamed for ~3.5 hours without seeing any action whatsoever. entirely understandable with a 175 man fleet consisting of well over 100 armour battleships, 20 dedicated logi and 10 neuting battleships including a Bhaalgorn which were supported by 7 cap Augorors (Think cap guardians but cheaper, marginally less tank but still provide the same cap).

Regardless, as we started to meander back to Aldrat, we were told that Fweddit were fighting someone at the sun in Egghelende in cruisers. Fweddit has extended me an invitation for a triage fight for quite a while and I had messaged one of their FCs that we’d be out and about so I decided to crash the party. Crash the party we did, resulting in 200 killmails for E-UNI.

You can see from the battle how the engagement went, by an large it was a turkey shoot while I did my best to keep everyone in range of the enem,y and in range of our reps. Until PL joined us via a Fweddit cyno, our reps held perfectly on those who actually broadcasted and stayed in range.

You may be wondering why we dropped any caps in the first place, as the inevitable inevitably inevitabilised when dropping caps anywhere ever and PL dropped 13 supers on us. Despite being the FC, I didn’t actually know that the first capital was gong to drop when he did. He had very kindly organised all our cap support for this fleet and was looking after their logistics. Given this was my fourth fleet to ever feature capitals, and my first roaming fleet of this size I was quite happy to let him do so.

A second cap pilot spend a good while whilst I was trying to FC the fight complaining about boredom (who wouldn’t after 4 hours of nothing, followed by a fight you aren’t joining in on?) and not getting any killmails, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and drop him in. The third cap pilot had joined us halfway through the roam, and to be completely honest in that moment I forgot we had him, so while the second cap pilot willing threw himself to the wolves, I do feel sorry for the third, as well as that sexy Navy Megathron being used as our primary cyno ship. I have boundless respect and admiration for Korr’Tanas and that’s not a cheap ship.

In case you couldn’t tell from the video, our backcyno had dced, meaning the 3 second window we had to jump our non-triaged capitals out could sadly not be seized. Yes, from now on I will be double and triple checking that my capital pilots have redundancy in their backcynos.

We got a fair bit of flak in the reddit post for either being incompetent for dropping capitals onto a cruiser fight, which would inevitably cause PL to drop us, or for being “butthurt” for losing caps. Redditor “SpaceMonkeyBalls” sums it up far better than I could:

“You dont seem to grasp the point here, most of the E-Uni losses can be put down as noob mistakes as can be expected by a bunch of noobs. The carrier was just there for comedy purpose as the 10 or so guardians/oneiros were holding rep fine. Besides the Carriers and cyno BS there were only 12 other losses worth mentioning. 2 BS and a few BCs. And success doesnt get measured by isk/loss ratio its more fun/loss and nobody here cares about loosing ships not even the carriers. What do you think we thought was going to happen after parking a carrier at Egg sun for 40 mins.

Also it seems that you have been successfully trolled by the vid”

Yes, we knew the Caps would likely get dropped by supers and were unnecessary, but it was bloody hilarious and everyone had massive fun. We weren’t fighting for sovereignty for a system, we were fighting because fighting is awesome, especially in a such a fleet as we fielded on that day. I have no hard feelings against anyone who was involved in that engagement, including PL, as PL did what PL always do, and expecting anything else would be insane.

On the way home we managed to find a suspect Orca in a belt. I have no idea what he was doing there or why, but I’d be willing to bet the meager sum of ISK I have in my wallet that he was not expecting to be blapped in the way he was.

The fleet took some rather beautiful pictures of the fight, so I’m going to finish this post by linking my favorites.

Apoth ♥