Purge the Heretic, Ch. 5: Burn the Nullbear

As cliched as it sounds, life in jspace can be likened to life at war: long periods of complete boredom interspersed with brief moments of complete terror. Gameplay is much less predictable when your home is connected to ten or twenty different parts of the universe every day. Whether it’s connecting to losec and doing a space police fun roam, or finding a solo draek begging to be purged from your chain, you never know what blessings Bob will bestow upon you.


Tonight, tonight Bob blessed the BAERS beyond measure. It should be noted that such blessings require sacrifice, and as devoted followers of Bob, we ~ completely intentionally and not due to misclick ~ had sacrificed two capitals to His bounty the night before He showered us with his favor.
We had just finished a brief round of nightly jewing, for we are poor and need shekels to purchase t3s and capitals. After bravely beating back the sleeper menace, we rolled our static to see what kind of connections Bob had in store for us, and found, by His grace, a pair of capitals and a hurricane (what) running sites. I pinged, and we quickly reformed a fleet to give love and hugs, and although sadly, the hostile Moros moonwalked before our scout could grab tackle, we grabbed the Archon and snuggled him a bit too hard with our bear hugs.


We were happy and satisfied. Bob had blessed us with a righteous gank, but we needed to roll into kspace – tonight was the final Catch timer, and I had been requested to perform the duties of coalition capital FC for the event.


We rolled a new hole, and scouts reported that Narwhals Ate my Duck was formed up in a t3 fleet and ready for action, sitting in defenseless POS. Being good neighbours, we got an archon ready and reformed our own t3 fleet to offer the traditional wormhole greeting: a hictor and fleet protruding into their hole, with a big sign that says “hi plz fight?”


I convoed Chitsa Jason, former CSM and CEO of Narwhals, to see if he was interested in <honobru wormhole combat>. Turns out, they were formed up and ready, because, shhhh, be vewwwy quiet, we’re hunting nullbears. You can read all about the lead up to this operation here, but this story is about glorious Dropbears. As we do in jspace, enemies became allies as Chitsa asked us if we wanted to join in on the fun, and of course, yes we did.


Unfortunately, we were on a timer: the catch station timer, specifically, which came out in 1.5 hrs. Chitsa said that the nullbears would probably start jewing “sometime before downtime,” and sadly we didn’t have time to wait around. I had just about ordered the hole rolled, when our private convo flashed: it was go time, the nullbears had undocked their carriers and were happily ratting away.


Like Mr. Incredible, I looked at my watch and thought, “I’ve got time.” I rage pinged and we merged fleet and coms with Narwhals, along with 3 other wormhole corps/alliances that had already planned to get in on the fun.


Dropbears brought the t3 gang from about 35 members up to about 50, which I am quite proud of, considering that we fly under the BRAVE tag, and I couldn’t fly a t3 when I founded the corporation 11 months ago. Now, if you’re reading this, and you’re from a jspace pvp corp, especially one who was on the op, be forewarned: I’m going to be a little spergy a little about Dropbears - I am super proud of our brave new little corporation and how far we’ve come from our humble beginnings.


Narwhals had the logistics of the operation all set up, including a Swaglfar on standby, links, cynos, and some tackle. Dropbears brought a big chunk of mainly DPS, a few guardians, and some extra tackle ships as well.


Newbies, hear me now: we were *begging* people to bring interceptors, and Dropbears seems to have dropped the ball there: I expected way more newbies who couldn’t fly t3s to be ready and excited to be specifically asked for. We were to the point of asking dudes to reship out of proteus and legion into ceptors and dictors. YOU HAVE A SUPER IMPORTANT ROLE EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU CANNOT FLY A BIG BOY SHIP. As we’ll find out later, anyone flying anything can be the difference between life and death.


Chitsa was flying a dictor, so he asked me to FC the main fleet, which I was happy to do. We rallied the fleet to the null exit hole (ifyouwerethereyouknowsomelightmishapshappenedbutlet’snotworryaboutthatnow), and jumped in the tackle crew while the main fleet waited to be called in. 3 jumps out from the hunting grounds, was our nullsec exit, like a siege tunnel dug under the walls of smug and secure castle defenders.


We only managed to tackle 1 carrier, and, not having been fully briefed on how Chitsa was expecting these particular nullbears, Fractal Industries to react, I gave the order to jump the whole fleet and free burn to the battleground.


As we listened to tackle after tackle call “I’m down” or “off field,” we burned furiously the 3 longest goddamn jumps, as our tackle dwindled at the end to two heroic interceptors bouncing in and out to keep point. Finally our first t3s landed on field, and the tackle was secure. I assumed we would end the day with a satisfactory carrier kill.


I was wrong.


As we began pounding through the seba1111’s armor with the power of 30 t3s, his self rep barely making a difference, our scouts began calling out reinforcements: “archon and thanatos aligning from station,” “another archon coming in.” They began to arrive on field, one after another, until five hostile carriers arrived and were tackled. Our primary exploded despite incoming friendly reps, and we switched to the next.


Confident in their ability to blob with carriers, it became clear that Fractal hadn’t yet dealt with this size of an attacking fleet come out of nowhere. Despite the reps of 4 of his buddies, our next primary, another thanatos, was steadily burning down.


Finally, another archon landed on field, and began repping his beleaguered companion with the power of triage reps. I immediately called for a switch to the triage carrier as primary, as there was no way we would be breaking his remote reps.


When you’re killing carriers, especially triage carriers, you will rely on one of two things to burn them down: overwhelming DPS, or enough neuting power to cap them dry and kill them before their cycle ends. We tested our DPS on Trixie the triage carrier, and his self rep was more than holding against our t3 fleet.


We had Kniht in the Naglfar on standby, and since we would be relying on the DPS it brought to punch through triage reps, we had brought virtually no neuting ships. It was time, so I called for the cyno green, and the nag to come in. “It’s jammed.” ?? Surely the cyno knew we had an inhibitor up. “You have to move off of the inhibitor.” “Yes I know, the *system* is jammed.”


Shit.


Without Kniht to break trixie’s powerful triage reps, and without neuts to run him dry, we were low on options. Our only chance was to bump the ratting carriers out of triage range – and that meant bumping 4 caps over 30km. I called for us to split DPS across Trixie and hostile subcaps on field while processing our options, hoping he might overextend his cap by repping himself or his subcap buddies too much.


As we sat in silence, a cyno went up on station. They had taken the jammer down. They had guessed correctly that they would be able to cyno in a lot more reinforcements than we could, but they must have assumed that we wouldn’t be able to bring in anything at all. Nobody expects the surprise Swaglfar.


I called cyno green, and our girthy verticalness arrived on field, warping down into the fray and pausing only a few moments to receive cap from the friendly Guardians before sieging up and thrusting 12x2500mm into Trixie’s hole hull.


Not to be outdone, Fractal sent in several more carriers, ending up with 11 non-triage carriers on field, all fit for ratting, which means max DPS. With the new drone changes, and geckos available, potentially over 30000 hostile dps on field presented a real threat to Kniht’s tank.


We switched subcap primary to the drones, gleefully destroying gecko after gecko, along with gardes, and curators. We sent our smartbombing jamgus through their drone clouds, evaporating their DPS as Kniht wrecked their only tanky carrier on field. Trixie exploded in a cloud of Trixie dust, and from then on we began slaughtering the carriers one after another, the DPS of the nag and subcaps combined chewing through 10 more carriers in two siege cycles.


Our smiles widened as the poorly tanked carriers popped one after another, until there were only 3 left on field. “There’s still 3 archons over here,” a voice spoke up - Mykol ansii, a newish Dropbear with low SP, who I had sent to watch the hostile cyno and report on incoming reinforcements. “On station?” “No, they’re outside of this POS.” What.


I quickly split the fleet up based on corporation, so that a strong contingent of guardians and t3s could go tackle down the extra carriers and hold them down under the fire of POS guns, while we finished off those remaining on field.  Mykol got the secondary fleet a warpin, and they tackle down three extra kills. (This is the part where newbros score extra cap kills despite being low SP. He was high on initiative and intelligence. That’s what counts.)


Kniht dropped siege after popping the second to last carrier remaining, and I sent the whole fleet to the next battlesite, keeping only a small squad to finish off the last carrier. Turns out, the guardians weren’t needed in killing the last 3 carriers, as the hostile POS, a jump bridge, had not been set to shoot neutrals.


The scene of 3 archons being destroyed outside of a well armed but well behaved POS, with a hostile Avatar chilling inside the shields (did I mention there was an Avatar chilling inside the shields?) was too much. We destroyed the remaining carriers quickly as Kniht’s DPS was brought to bear, and as the last of the explosions faded, the general attitude seemed to be one of, “Did that just happen?”


Carrying more loot than our cargoholds were meant to handle, and snagging an extra afk Claymore kill next door, we departed back to the blackness of our wormhole chain amongst much ass grabbing and more ass grabbing, high off the camaraderie that develops when 5 completely independent hostile organizations come together to destroy 60 billion worth of nullbear capitals.


We said our goodbyes and reset standings, vanishing back into our respective chains as wormholers do.


Big shoutouts to Chitsa Jason and Narwhals ate my Duck for planning the operation, which is a whole story by itself, Kniht for his pro Swag piloting, Ixtab, SSC, Exit Strategy, and Laurentson INC. As you can hear from the FRAPS that have been posted up, we came together and operated as a solid unit without a second’s hesitation. I love wormholers for that.


Also, and equally as important, big ups to Fractal Industries for having the stones to defend their ratting space, to the point of throwing carrier after carrier into a worsening situation. Big balls on these nullbears and they get our respect for that. We uh, may or may not pay them another visit.


And here I’ll be self-aggrandizing. Even bigger shoutouts to all my Dropbears who were present on the operation. Bros, we repped hard, and I’m proud of you. Despite this being a spontaneous operation, we brought more bodies to the fight than any other corp or alliance, including the broskis who planned it. You shined on this operation, and the only place to go from here is up. As the poet says, started from the bottom now my whole crew here.


And all because when Bob called upon us with a 1 in 113 odds connection, we were there to answer.


Where will you be when Bob calls?