I've been in many Black Ops fleets over the years, but I hadn't put one together at any scale myself. Over the years we've done some very limited BO style operations, jumping to a cyno is something you do every so often for one reason or another. But putting a whole operation together, that is a whole other operation. Literally.
And we've been trying to do this for a very long time. It is one of those things that something else always seems to push out of the way. So this week I made the decision that we'd put it together and go for it, no matter what. Enough talk, let's do this thing.
And you can imagine the hilarity that resulted. A bunch of Pirates trying to pretend to be organized and figure out what they are doing. But, in our defense, we did surprisingly well for our first time doing this sort of thing together. And we made for a pretty imposing force for low sec, with a little over twenty in fleet - stealth bombers, T3 Cruisers, and a few ewar support ships. Not to mention the Black Ops Battleship and my Rapier, which served as our scout during the initial phase. We added a few more scouts as more and more pilots arrived.
Eve was not on our side however and much of our hunting grounds were strangely empty on Saturday. Even Tama was just a bunch of smaller ships holding fast to the structures. But we needed the practice and eventually we found some. A lone Procurer mining in a belt. A Vexor Navy Issue I managed to probe down in a site. And another mining ship that another scout found. We came very close to having some fun with a Thantos, but to that pilot's credit, he was very skittish. Which saved his life.
This is when I noticed the Pandemic Horde crew shooting a structure in Ostingele. Two Brutix Navy and four Oracles hammering away on a Raitaru. (You'll see this in the last part of the video) It was easy enough to sneak up on the primary and hope we'd be able to spread points on the others. And while everyone was happy to shoot my poor Rapier, once the cyno went up they all bailed, leaving their friend to his fate.
While Black Ops is never going to be our thing, it is always great to have options and expand the range of operations at our disposal. We had fun, we didn't lose a single ship, and we learned a lot. I know I learned to leave room in my cargo for probes, because I ended up having to dump some fuel when I tried to retrieve my combat probes. :)
Thanks to LinkOn for making the video and chronicling our adventures.