Irvin the Dockworker

Irvin the dockworker grimaced as he lay down the final box of gear. After wiping the sweat off his brow, he slid down into a sitting position and leaned against the box and looked out towards the stars. It had been one hell of a day.

A bizarre order had come in to move a large portion of Gunpoint Diplomacy's shared hangar into the self-proclaimed Commodore Avan Sercedos's hangar. Just as they had finished moving all the equipment over, both by hand and by machine, the Commodore himself stormed into the room screaming about shitty interfaces and mindless workers. After nearly knifing a dockworker who talked back to him, the Commodore made his exit, complaining that they could have at least moved the exotic dancers as well.

Irvin wouldn't have minded that so much.

After a few minutes, a flood of smaller orders came in from the Commodore's quarters. They would slowly but surely return all the mistakenly purloined goods from his personal hangar back to Gunpoint Diplomacy's. A good while later and the hangars were mostly returned to their former states. Irvin had been happy that a long day's work was finally over.

Just moments later, another order came in. This time it didn't originate from the quarters of the Commodore. A mysterious order had come in from some mischievous fellow. This time, somebody else entirely had ordered that the entire contents of the same hangar that had just been emptied and restored be delivered back into the hangar of the Commodore. Irvin had sighed and picked the box he had just set down back up, growling. He had known that the first order was the correct one, the Commodore had probably just been high on Exile or something.

With the articles finally back in the Commodore's hangar, he returned. Sercedos seemed to have grown several days worth of facial hair in the short time between his appearances. He just looked around the hangar with a depressed look, and went over to one of his vessels, his fashionable Ares interceptor. As he came closer to it, his sad look changed to a look of glee as he gave orders to swap out some of the equipment attached to it. Finally satisfied, he sailed out into the unknown, to eventually return in his pod. As he strode forth from his pod, completely arse-naked, his grin had only grown.

Irvin worked for some strange people.

Murder in Outer Space?

So there I was, relaxing in my home system of Oddelulf, when a certain link from a certain Wensley caught my eyes. It was a link to a Scrapheap Challenge thread regarding the latest Gank Night. It seemed that the theme of this GN was CROWS, CROWS EVERYWHERE, and the roam would be taking place later the same day. What further encouraged my participation was that the lowsec meetup was exactly one jump away from my home! How convenient. Unfortunately, I don't have Caldari Frigate V, so I was rather disappointed until I read a post which stated that all interceptors were acceptable, preferably tackle inties such as the Malediction, Ares, and Stiletto. So I checked the market, and found the one that was cheapest.

                                   The Ares. I wondered for a moment why it only cost 10m ISK.

When I opened Eve Fitting Tool, I rediscovered for the third or fourth time why that was. Eventually I decided upon a fit that would A) only use missiles B) not die instantly and C) let me whore additional loot from every battle we faced.

[Ares, sure hope i dont get primaried]
Emergency Damage Control I
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Catalyzed Cold-Gas I Arcjet Thrusters
Warp Disruptor II

'Malkuth' Standard Missile Launcher I, Sabretooth Light Missile
Salvager I
Salvager I

Small Core Defence Field Extender I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I

I knew from the start that this fit would lack any significant damage whatsoever, but what I didn't discover until the journey was underway was that my cowardice in fitting a shield extender over a sensor booster would cost me in ability to whore onto as many killmails as possible.

In the couple of hours before the roam would head out, I took a nap and at 21:15 EVE time, I logged back in and moved over to Bosena Bosnia, where our glorious FC Larkonis Trassler was leading what was supposed to be a conga line. In my opinion, it looked more like some sort of diseased blob but I kept my mouth shut and joined in. Fifteen minutes later, the fleet had mostly formed up. There were about 65 interceptors in fleet, accompanied by four or so interdictors and a boosting Loki and Tengu.

Now, I have to ask you to forgive me for any inaccuracies in the following tale. It was four hours of carnage that I'm going to super condense.

The roam began with a bit of lag on my end, but nothing unbearable. We were relaxing on our outgate in Astabih, just a few jumps from Bosena Bosnia, when a neutral Hurricane decloaked. While most people know that aggressing a neutral battlecruiser on a lowsec gate or station while flying a paper thin Crow is a pretty awful idea, some hero decided that they wanted to go through with it anyways. The sentry guns showed their displeasure and the fleet quickly took its first loss of the night. After a moment of said pilot being mocked on Teamspeak, there was a pause as the Hurricane decided to aggress one of our neutral pilots. Most people know that going GCC on a lowsec gate while you are in the company of 70 or so angry little ships is a really terrible idea, but not this heroic hurricane. Soon after its first loss, the fleet scored its first kill of the night.

Soon our scouts made it into 0.0 space, with the main fleet just behind. A small camp was reported on the first gate, consisting of a small number of battlecruisers and such. The wrath of our MURDER OF CROWS fell upon them, and much laughter was had. We proceeded onwards and encountered the largest amount of solo / duo blackbirds that I've ever seen. There is only one kill on the killboard, but I'm fairly sure we killed more than one of them. Next up was interrupting a duel between a pair of Drakes and defeating them both in honourable 70v1 combat. We carried on in this matter up to the system of UBX-CC, a system containing one of the various jump bridges in the NC's jump bridge network.

Our scout reported that a small number of ships were messing about outside of the jump bridge POS, and that he had tackled one. We jumped our entire fleet in and slew a diabolic Phobos heavy interdictor and yet another Hurricane, and then promptly lost a small number of interceptors to the POS guns, including our FC. Rather than leaving us here, we regrouped at a planet and some hero gave Larkonis a shiny Malediction. At some point during this, one of our pilots had figured out the password to the jump bridge POS. We warped our entire fleet inside and hung out with the NC pilots for a little while before having one of the most demented fights on a POS that I have ever borne witness to. After getting bored sharing the POS while shooting at them, we continued onwards.

On the out-gate in the system of L-HV5C we killed a bizarre procession of a Crane, Prowler, Ishkur, friendly Crow, and then a Harbinger. It was odd that none of them knew that we were there after we had been hanging around a jump bridge for twenty minutes or so. After a few more minor systems, we proceeded to completely get annihilated by the tactical smartbomb genius of Violent Entity... oh, wait, nevermind.

After mocking those who had managed to lose their ships to the smartbombs, we moved on to BWF-ZZ, where we fought Brick Squad. Most of the fight consisted of them warping in a small number of ships, their stealth bombers decloaking and dropping bombs around the ships to catch some of our guys, us tackling the ship or one of the stealth bombers, and then everything that got tackled dying horribly. At some point, Brick Squad got tired of dying horribly and decided that the most effective counter to our swarm was four Scimitars. Now, if their goal was to get rid of us, that's fine and good and they should have done it from the beginning. But supposedly, their goal was to get a real ~good fight~ out of us. I'm not sure who thought that adding so much remote repping power to their fleet that we had no real chance of breaking them would make us want to fight, but apparently somebody did. At this point, the Gank Night had been dragging on for four hours, so our FC had us jump into lowsec and "go the fuck home", and we were followed by at least one Brick Squad member and smacked for our cowardice. BR for all the fights in BWF is here.

Thanks Lark for FCing and "organizing." He also has a poast regarding this CROW adventure. Additional thanks go to Lady Spank, who kindly gave me a Gallente Federation Starbase Charter for use in my Ares, Wensley, without whom I would have never known about this roam, and Don Pellegrino for his Canadian moral support and mockery of my use of the peasant 'Malkuth' launcher instead of 'Arbalest' launchers.

Note: I'm aware that most of the battle 'reports' contain no information about our own losses, but that's because nobody gives a fuck about what we lost, only what we destroyed as a glorious Murder of Crows.