As many know by now, Hard Knocks and friends recently attempted to remove one of the most prominent W-Space entities, No Holes Barred, from their affectionately named home, Polaris. Following the somewhat-recent burnout of another well known group, Adhocracy Incorporated, it seemed even bigger fish were set to fry. Thanks to some outside help, and some intelligent play from NoHo’s side however, this did not come to fruition, and Hard Knocks were forced out of the hole with some vigour.
Now, to the good stuff.
NoHo’s gratitude to not only those who showed up to defend Polaris, but those who offered their assistance and were turned down for whatever reasons, was repaid on the morning of the 8th of November. Repaid many times over, somewhat in ships, but for the most part, in good times. Those involved went in to the whole thing with one question on their minds: What were we flying? You see, NoHo merely told us to bring a pod, make sure it was cheap, and that ships would be supplied at form-up, so few people had any clue as to the events to come. Well, the events to come would be spectacular, to say the least.
Now, I’m not big on large-scale fights, TiDI is a bitch and it’s just a generally rather uncomfortable situation for me, being as fond of small gang PvP as I am. After this though, my opinion may be a tad higher, and I can definitely understand how people get a rush out of it.
So, at 0700 hours my time, we left the form up system, and set off for blood. 120 PPC’s + support made their way to nearby lowsec, hoping to kill something, but ultimately, we’d have been happy trying and dying in a glorious fire I reckon. We also had two, rather pricey Thanatos’ on standby, known as SWAT Teams 1 and 2. Anyway, it didn’t take us long to get our first kill, a lone Caracal who felt the full brunt of concentrated police brutality, being alpha’d off the field before I could even cycle my guns. His pod escaped, and that was that. We moved on
It didn’t take long for the locals and not-so-locals to catch wind of our presence. We soon found that the RvB Ganked fleet was running that night, in the same area, and that a “small” Snuff Box slowcat group were operating nearby. It seemed we had caught the attention of both groups, both just as eager to slug it out as we were. While we had already dealt justice to several citizens of New Eden already, we knew something big was brewing, and we were all chomping at the bit, ready to get into some proper police work. At first it seemed that we’d be teaming up with the RvB crew, who were rolling around in a large Armor T3 gang + Guardians, and taking on the group of slowcats + NApocs and Vindis. That seemed to break down though, and we engaged RvB.
This was a pretty one sided fight. We managed to knock out some of their T1 logi, but the Guardians and T3s were just too beefy to break. We ended up losing a good portion of the fleet, but Jita wasn’t far away, so we didn’t lose out in numbers too badly, as many reshipped and came straight back. We fooled about with RvB for a little while, failing to break the tank of anything while more of our brave officers fell in the line of duty.
It seemed Snuff Box had decided they were sick of watching and wanted some action too. We were quickly informed to halt DPS on the RvB fleet, and prepare for the slowcats and NApocs of Snuff. While they may not have known, I reckon Snuff had a pretty good idea that they were coming in to this fight to face the combined forces of The New Eden Police Department and Red vs. Blue. They were indeed correct.
This was an absolute slug-fest. It didn’t seem like much was dying at all, save for a few PPC’s being picked off by support vessels. As little as the individual DPS output of our ships were, we actually made for a significant amount of total DPS when positioned correctly. Unfortunately “positioned correctly” means sitting on the face of your target for however long it takes for them to die. As such, we were in amongst a flurry of NApocs and Vindicators, hoping for something to budge. Well, it budged. Shadow Cartel showed up as well, bringing Rattlesnakes with carriersupport, making them the honourable third party. They promptly began shooting at Snuff Box, managing to start sync up their primaries with RvB and ourselves, which, combined with some good target calling and the massive amount of damps our PPC’s had in total, battleships started dropping, fast.
As the fight went on, things went from bad to worse for Snuff Box, and the call to retreat was made. Untackled carriers and battleships began to warp out, leaving those still pinned by our massive blob of scrams, webs and disruptors to their fate. Though the group of Archons was quite large at the start, in the end, only three remained tackled on field, though for only a short while. We made quick work of the few remaining battleships, and then it was on to the carriers.
Justice was swiftly delivered to the carriers, now that their support had flee’d the scene. Their sentence? Capital Punishment. While that was happening, SC were posturing to continue the fight. Us and RvB however, were in no hurry to continue this, and quickly bailed before anything could be tackled. Perhaps we could have fought SC and won, but that was enough TiDi to last this group of wormhole dwellers a collective lifetime.
That’s where the good pictures finish, there’ll be an album with more+these ones at the end.
We didn’t find much after that, though an amusing fight between us and some smart bombing battleships that resulted in them dying springs to mind. Not sure how we spun that one, but we did, and though a few of us wondered too close and became scrap metal, we ended up killing 2-3 of them. Maybe that’s how we killed them. There were only 3, and they warped in piece-meal. After making sure they didn’t send anything else along the conveyor belt, we continued on.
From this point on, not much happened, and everything was starting to wind down. We started heading back towards Hi-Sec, still looking for targets on the way but mostly just talking shit in comms and getting ready to pack up shop. Until we found him. The Tornado, sitting on the station with a lone Osprey for support. One brave officer gave his life to ensure this cowardly perpetrator was brought to justice. He was the Tornado pilot, odd choice of ship for a pod with High Grade Slaves.
We were pretty happy with that, so we decided to venture back in to null to see if things had changed. They had. An Archon was sitting on the station in FD-MLJ at zero, and, being that we’d planned on wrapping things up anyway, we engaged. It went about as well as you’d expect, many of us being dispatched by the support that un-docked, though not before we snagged a Brutix, an Eris and a handful of bombers. Not a bad way to end the morning! This is where I involuntarily bowed out of the fleet, with my ship being removed from around me by the carrier and his friends, and had some remaining fleet members punch my ticket on the pod express.
It was an absolutely fantastic roam, massive props to No Holes Barred for putting together, and a huge shoutout to the W-Space groups that came out and had a good time. Big ups to Snuff Box, RvB and Shadow Cartel for bringing the heat as well, Snuff put up an exceptionally good fight for what they were up against, local was at 400+ at some point, so they were definitely up against it. If anything like this happens again, you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be there for it, come hell or high TiDI!
This is already pretty wordy, so I’ll wrap it up here, thanks for following along everyone, take it easy, and fly safe! o/
Attempt at BRDoc: http://brdoc.dog-net.org/#battle/712
Album of the Uuna fight: http://imgur.com/a/ru1K4#0
