AAR: 23 Feb. 2019, Insmother

I joined a late night/early morning whaling fleet. No whales killed, but we got a few subcaps in the chaos.

Our 60-80-man group of Goku Bombers took off through a wormhole to the Insmother region, via the Cache region. Our target(s) were Rorquals that Fraternity had in the field.

On our way to UDE-FX from 4S0-NP (our ingress system), our scouts reported a lone Rorqual in a belt in 4LB-EL, so that’s where we headed. The scouts tackled and bubbled it, and the fleet warped into the belt.

By the time we landed, at least one enemy subcap was on grid and they had cyno’d in at least one Apostle (there were two on grid at one point). We were unable to take down the Rorq, as we had a limited number of Focused Void Bomb users (myself included) to neut the Rorq’s capacitor, and the fleet was never sorted into proper bombing squadrons that could do bombing runs. I don’t think we ever broke its shields.

We eventually placed a Mobile Cynosural Inhibitor, which our logistics pilots managed to keep up for quite a while. A Nyx and a Nidhoggur showed up as well. It started to get a little hairy as our Interdictors were sometimes bubbling us in the chaos of an escalating situation. We nearly took down an Apostle before leaving. One enemy Nestor was destroyed.

The Rorqual escaped, replaced by multiple enemy caps.

From there, we moved next door to 5IH-GL. By now, FRAT was well aware that we were in the area and had begun responding. While no equivalent fleet was met, several FRAT subcaps moved to intercept us, along with a handful of caps.

With the majority of fleet in Bombers, we were hard-pressed to directly engage. We resorted to guerrilla-esque hit and run tactics, warping back and forth from the gates to see what we could catch. Additional subcap killmails were had in the process.

But with limited number of Interdictors left, and FRAT fully aware of our presence, we had to extract. The goal was to get back to our ingress wormhole. We warped and jumped around a bit to lose our tail, did so, and eventually set course to 4S0-NP. The route back was uneventful, as was the journey back home on the other side of the wormhole.

We stood down once safe at home. Though we didn’t achieve our objective, the final Battle Report showed us winning the ISK war, about 60% vs 40% efficiency (4LB not shown).

A couple of issues we ran into included the ridiculous TiDi as we jumped around in Cache. Altogether, there were probably less than 100 pilots in any one system, so any TiDI made no sense, even if it was just moderately-intense at most.

In addition, our FC, who was in a Harpy, was often just too fast for a fleet of mostly Bombers (I was in a Manticore). The fleet was often “smeared” in a long line behind the FC. We had Command Destroyers (“Booshers”) with us, which made booshing difficult. Sometimes members, even if anchored, missed the boosh. Our FC was often not paying attention to speed, and would even yell at us to catch up, even if we already had MWDs on and flying at max speed.

Overall, it was a good time and everyone did well, considering. Looking forward to the next whaling fleet.

Made it back in one piece!