I finally managed to get myself to try out FCing and had my first try at it yesterday. I stared it with advertising the roam via our forum:
>>> secure connection opening ..
>>> transmission commencing ..
Dear BTA pilots,
Solitude our quiet and remote home has a is also the home of countless Gallente people who do have the same problems like us: namely living in the same remote location far away from the other Gallente regions. So most of their foodstuff is produced locally. Sadly Solitude high-sec doesn’t offer many oceanic worlds to fish-food is not very prominent which makes beef very important. Sadly some local cows have contracted the mad-cow disease for which treatment is unfortunately quite costly. So when I heard that a new form of treatment is being tested by Duvolle labs I decided that we – as Solitude residents – should help in this research project which involves ferrying some research-livestock which has been treated with the new active ingredients on our ships through as many warps as possible to test if it hyperspace fluctuations can make the vaccine even more potent in the test cows.
If you are willing to help, please proceed to (censored) station on Saturday May 5th at 18:00 EVE time in a Destroyer with enough cargo space left for the unit of livestock.
Thank you in advance for your help in this research project!
Regards,
Zargyl
>>> EOF
>>> connection closed
This Mad-Cow destroyer roam is meant to be a fun-event which will surely end in lots of explosions on our side (especially as it is my first roam) so please make sure your destroyers are insured and that you do use implant-less and up-to-date clones!
To entice you into giving it a try I have some prices for participants as well! Prices will be: 1x Hound, 1 x Taranis, 1x Purifier, 1-2 Thrashers.
All ships are BTA products (the thrashers come from my own production line whereas the t2 frigates have been produced by no one less than the esteemed BTC director swisstuck which could make them collector-items as well 8) ).
The winners will be announced after the roam. I can already announce two categories though:
One Thrasher will go to the first person in fleet – so don’t be late 😉
Another ship will go to whoever gets killed first 😮
Hope to see you soon!
Cheers,
Zargyl
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The advertisement did manage to get 18 pilots into fleet which was quite a lot considering that they were all flying to their doom with me doing this for my first time ..
The MadCow fleet undocking
MMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Thankx guys for having me!! It was a huuuuge fleet and I was very happy to many of you did make it!! My last try at a fleet got me not a single pilot so I was very happy to see so many of you guys this time!
We had 18 in fleet which is quite a nice showing!!
The cow-fleet undocking
Sadly the cows weren’t too happy because quite soon they would turn into beef (as promised). Though I do hope that at least Duvolle got enough research data to get a vaccine for the madcow disease 😉
For the first part of the roam I had planned on flying through low-sec and using a bait-badger to entice a pirate to attack and then to pounce on him. Sadly there was quite a lot of activity going on and when I did get a Cane to aggress the bait-badger the warp was sadly too long (or the tank of the badger too weak) and the badger died first.
Also he did get backup so we had to retreat back to high-sec and lost ships during retreat 😦
Valiantly some of those who lost their destroyers did reship! Go them!
As bad luck would have it our voice server decided to break down and we had to visit another one which did cost us some time. Due to this I tried speeding things up a bit (fearing bored pilots) which in retrospect was probably not the best idea either.
Our next try was to go to Syndicate with where we had reports on a Stabber and some ratters.
We first went into the direction of the stabber and did manage to hunt him down. Sadly those of us that got close enough to the stabber in time wheren’t equipped with points, so he did escape 😥 (Instead he fell prey to another gang in system).
I was quite anxious the whole time and so time went by very fast. We had to make a short break and docked up for that.
Fleet undocking after a 10min break.
I got the report of a large gate-camp in one of the adjacent systems and therefore decided to check out the other one to which a Phantasm was moving. Some of us did manage to engage the Phantasm which promptly jumped through the gate.
There I made another mistake: I told the fleet to jump after it (hoping to catch it on the other side and not believing on there being a gate-camp as well). Luck wasn’t with me: there was a gate camp on the over side of this gate as well 😦
As I still had an aggression timer I couldn’t follow myself and didn’t see the size of the gate-camp. I guess I should have tried to get us at least some kill from that gate camp instead I ordered the pilots either to re-approach the gate or to try to get out of the bubble. This resulted in all hands being lost regardless.
The loss on eve-kill.
The few of us that did escape (hadn’t jumped through because of aggression timers) when retreating found out that the third gate of the system (in the direction of our home) also had a gate camp. Seems various fleets managed to box us in quite well while we had our bio-break.
So all in all I am a bit of a sad panda: So many cows lost and no real kill for us :-\
Some MMMOOOOOs in local where had though 😉
At least I had some prizes to give away at the end of the fleet (which actually lasted nearly 3 hours instead of the 1 hour I thought it would last).
Feedback and tips are welcome!
Zargyl - A Sebiestor Scholar 