ARIDIA/ERTOO Capital Fight August 27th 20.00

A full write-up with a chance to indulge the clientèle of BDB with a report of more depth than SHC will allow.

Overview of sides:
Rooks and Kings: 20 BS + Triage Archon
Rebellion Alliance: 11 capitals (8 Dreads, 3 carriers) + Support
Neutral Large POS: shooting all sides.

This adventure began with a fairly typical HARK triage-battleship roam. We had just shy of twenty battleships and a triage Archon on standby. During this, our neighbours Excidium (who run a rather sterling camp in Van) mentioned a hostile Rebellion Alliance cap fleet, with support, that was active in Aridia. Most groups have friends like Excidium who, even though we shoot each other, pass on intel on mutual enemies. Or, in this case, metaphorically hand you a brown dossier marked “CAPFLEET” and run off cackling into the night.

Which still left the problem of finding this capfleet. Scouting soon revealed them to be in Maseera – though as the scout got there, they were already jumping out.

A little cat and mouse on their support led us to Ertoo, where the hostile caps had just warped in to siege a large tower (belonging to a third party). This gave us a proper look at their fleet: 8 dreadnaughts (specifically 4 Moros, 2 Revelation, 2 Phoenix), 3 carriers for the caps. Subcapital support consisted of some battleships (Raven heavy) and assorted lighter stuff – though admittedly their force-recons were presumably cloaked around the tower at combat range.

My first thought was to check that the dreads were using long range guns – if not we could simply drop the triage carrier at 50km from them to reduce, especially, capital blaster damage. However, they were set up sensibly for tower sieging, with rails and beams. That ruled out any ranged drop since the triage carrier had to be in rep range of the battleships, and with under twenty battleships they had to be close range fitted to actually do enough damage to sink sieged dreads and a carrier spider.

I also considered dropping the triage carrier at zero and having mwd’ing-BS bounce it around to make it harder for the dread guns to track at point blank range. But the dreads were spread quite well – all in range of their carriers but not bouncing-close to each other.

The triage would certainly be needed to rep the support. Aside from the large tower, which we correctly assumed would shoot us as well as Rebellion, we also had to contend with the drones of four Moros, the fighters from the 3 carriers and whatever dps their support might have.

During this discussion, we were sat on a nearby gate, with a Rebellion covert watching us (having followed us three jumps). Our scout then reported that their dreads had entered siege. This was met with much rejoicing on Teamspeak – surely it proved that they didn’t think we would go for it, and thus that they had been fooled? Well, maybe – except that I was considering agreeing with Rebellion.

I then was afk for a moment and when I returned, Shani had helpfully designated a capital for each person to try and get a point on (dreads are pointable coming out of siege and can be tackled if they don’t have enough capacitor to cap coast and jump, with Shani evidently assuming we’d still be alive to see that). Think of Shani as a charismatic Amarr fascist who sounds like a Welsh Brando. On account of the latter I don’t know if people actually knew which dreads to scramble but it settled the matter – we would go for it.

I’ve not written on BattleDB before, so I wish I could describe some wonderfully complicated plan, in the vein of our recent CAOD battle reports. But, in fact, the driving force here was the complete lack of an actual plan: we’d just try to tank it and kill them.

More specifically, the trio of Anubis, Link and Zuldjan argued that ‘real’ incoming dps would be around the 30,000 mark. A triaged Archon with a good Exile booster (and Damnation in gang) can tank 20,000. Granted, that would break eventually but it created a narrow window of opportunity: as we hit the field, a ship scanner tells us which Revelation has lower cap. Cap him out and then his friend. Meanwhile a smartbombing battleship forces the Moros’s (Morii?) and carriers to use sentry drones, which blunts their dps a little too. Drive off whatever support stays to fight, and from there a nip and a tuck and a dead dread or two and we have over 10,000 dps gone and it becomes doable.

With that, the theory session came to a rapid conclusion. Our battleships jumped the gate and warped in close to them. Cyno down, and it’s action time:

Eleven capitals are waiting, probably pleasantly surprised that our hotdrop consists of one:

It’s certainly high time for some drugs:

As expected, after trying to pop one or two webbed battleships (citadel torps hurt but 3600hp/s of raw rep does a lot on good resists; low 80s and you’re tanking over 20,000 on a bs), their capitals switched to the triage carrier.

Importantly, we’ve cyno’d in the carrier on the side away from their three carriers and we keep all three webbed at 30-33km from our Archon. Normally neuts from three carriers would not be a problem (there was a recent battle where six eXe carriers perished trying to neut it) but given the extreme capacitor pressure of keeping everything repped up whilst simultaneously local tanking, there is much more danger of it being tipped over.

A major problem quickly turns out to be the tower. Not because of a threat of it killing us outright but simply because everyone is taking gradual damage and needs topping up – allowing them to drop to half or 2/3rds armour would be risking an alpha strike from the dreads cutting right through a battleship before it can broadcast.

Anubis is spot on with his prediction – the log later shows the dps peaking at 30,134. But as soon as Jack (monitoring their cap levels) has called that the Revelations are neuted, the dps begins to fall quickly. High grade Talisman implants are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the incoming damage is falling fast and a curse because capacitor requests are piling up – the Archon’s capacitor is 1% over peak recharge, and some battleships are still needing a burst of 3xtriage remote rep.

The hostile support comes back in at range begins sniping – however, this puts their battleships out of rep range of their carriers and so they soon have to warp.

With a few dreads already dead, others neuted and their support driven off the grid, the enemy realise they won’t break the triage Archon and double their efforts to instapop battleships.

Everything stays up but it gets a little close for some of the battleships, even towards the end when many hostile caps are down, and especially when the tower damage coincides with good alpha from the dreads:

To prevent surviving dreads trying to ‘cap coast’ and jump out at the end of their cycle, a lot of cap is requested for neuting BS to hold all remaining capitals. At this stage of the fight it’s not too difficult though, since the carrier can tank on a single repper and going to half armour whilst busying one’s cap elsewhere, is no problem.

Unfortunately with so few ships it’s difficult to hold a point on everything and during the course of the action, two carriers manage to warp out and one dread is able to jump out as he exits siege mode.

With six dreads dead, the self-destruct message turns up. It’s become a bit of a feature lately and during the summer probably the fourth or fifth fight like this where we’ve had enemy caps self-destructing. In this case, though, the Phoenix in question is already out of cap and another three or four battleships arriving near the end help to win the race through his structure. He doesn’t quite make it in time to fall on its sword.

In the end we manage to get 7 dreads and a carrier. No losses at all (It was almost tempting to let one battleship die so that their fleet shows on related kills. As a result it also shows a smartbombing Rebellion carrier, lists some pos mods that were shooting us too, and a few late comers who arrived to beat the self-destruct)

We scoop loot and, with the POS scram incapped, extract from the tower safely. Since the wrecks remained, I can hope that one of the tower owners later logged in and noticed this capital graveyard hanging gruesomely above the pos, entombed with unscooped fighters and a sea of sentries, and wondered how this came to pass.