As The Universe Burns

  The red plague has been pushed back and the fight is being taken to their door this time.

  My last post mentioned a general call for help in wspace from AQUILA, a close ally of Narwhals Ate My Duck. Many responded and the big who's who showed up, like AHARM, Transmission Lost, DUCK, Talocan United, ADHC, and some others. The only way corps like this could come together and not shoot each other would be the threat of the Russians and their attempt to dominate wspace. I decided I wanted to be a part of this, since it's not every day this kind of a party goes down. And it turns out it's a good thing I did, because I can see Eve history being made.

  Apparently, over the last few weeks Starbridge forces were secretly infiltrating the AQUILA system with their forces, with as many as 4 dreadnoughts and a support fleet. This last weekend, with their wspace allies, Starbridge brought a 140 man fleet and began reinforcing towers. This was when the call went out. With these towers incapacitated, the defending fleet was hampered as arrays were inaccessible and resources became limited.

  But that hardly meant they were about to roll over. As the Russians logged for bed and left an RR Tengu tankball as hole guard, the defending pilots mustered their own force to kill and pod as many Russians as they could to free the hole and allow their own allies a route in to the system.

  In a surprising turn around, AQUILA was also able to hack the Russian POS forcefield password, through simply entering numbers since some Russians use QWERTY while others use Cyrillic keyboards and tend to use numeric passwords. This enabled them to steal some unsecured assets and decimate a couple dreadnoughts. Props on that. Although this also leads me to believe that they may have a spy in Starbridge, who knows. I believe this was also around the time when they reinforced the Russian tower. My knowledge is a bit broken up on all this.

  It was around this time I was able to make my way into the target system, quaintly named "Banana Hammock" with my cloaky Tengu. While they were running a mishmash of fleets, mainly armor, I was simply there to provide cloaky eyes and a bit of dps wherever it was needed. But I had only gotten in after the majority of the fun was already over. By this time, the Russians had decided to run as is their usual way. That evac group was around 55 ships with 2 Moros in tow, a force that could still put up a good fight regardless of what we had now. But of course, they had other plans and left at our low time.

  So all that was left was to wait for reinforce timers to run out and to pick off stragglers. I missed a few, but I was able to help pop and pod a Basi that logged on and bounced off the shields. I was extremely busy this weekend, so I kept getting off Eve to focus...only to come right back.

  The last time I was on for the day, I ended interviewing an applicant right before the POS bash. My computer was melting with the load I put on it with a Windows virtualization, web browsing, Eve and trying to do an interview while I shot a tower. Oh the fun of multitasking.  But that tower went down quick and I finished things up as I motored back home. The bash was quick with no resistance, although the CEO of Starbridge sat inside and watched in a nullified cloaky T3 til it went down.

  But as I motored home, it seems this group was still bloodthirsty and decided it was time to take the fight to the Russians. They got a way into a Power of Two system and are working on taking that down as of now. History happens when you least expect it. From this great "pew-alition" many things have come onto the drawing board. I hardly have the place to be talking about it, so I'll leave it at that. But maybe, just maybe, we can push the red menace out of wspace and keep their farming and botting in nullsec where it belongs. Or something.

  From all this I gained much. Much enjoyment in smashing a few Russians, a much different view of other corp cultures, and a much better post than usual :P It really was quite the scientific curiosity to watch and listen how all these corps interacted and how they all differ in terminology and philosophy when it comes to WH life.

  So I guess this is one of those times in Eve history when I get to say "I was there"....heh.
Now I am scrabbling to make up all the work I wasn't doing like I needed to be >.<
-Mem

PS. I want to also give another big thanks to Viperous Stark. PH readers best readers. I'll be shooting Russians that much longer now.

PPS. Make sure to check out the Aquila battle report too.