Friendly fire
After spending most of the day mooching around our Outpost in TDE, I decided that apart from needing more girls, it was actually a pretty cool place. A couple of decent bars, couple of entertainment hubs, not bad for a quality Minmatar Outpost.
Still only having my Rapier in the area (something I’d need to something about- a useful ship indeed, but not much damage output), I flew down to BWF with Doktor Soet, a fellow corpmate, to join a Daisho gatecamp on the Oijanen gate. The idea of the camp wasn’t just for ships n’ giggles, it was deny Smash and Roadkill easy access into and out of the area. After a fruitless 30 mins or so, we heard that a KIA op was forming back in TDE, so back we flew. 8 jumps later, 4 out from TDE, we heard that the op was to Titan Bridge down to BWF to join the Daisho. Meh. I considered turning around and flying back, as I’d still beat them down there given the amount of waiting we’d need to do before everyone was assembled. But I got a kick out of Titan jumping, and quickly had an idea- I’d pick up my Tempest from Airaken, so I’d use the Titan Jump in my pod.
Arrived in TDE, dropped the Rapier off, got my pod out and undocked. I engaged warp and warped to our Titan. As I dropped out of warp, the Ragnarok’s bulk filled the HUD, reassuringly massive. After waiting around for a while, listening to some casual chat, Eddz cajoling then cursing the attendence and sporadic reports of enemy movements, the cyno in BWF was fired and the Titan linked to it. We all jumped through, Eddz was the last one to jump, shouting at a couple of stragglers who hadn’t jumped through yet- the window of being able to jump wasn’t very long.
You gotta love instantaneous travel.
In a heartbeat, space ’shifted’, and we appeared 12 jumps away in BWF. Cooooooool. Unfortunately, as we exited the jump, we saw we were just off the Oijanen gate, and it’s large anchored bubble. Bubbles are scary to be quite honest, very menacing indeed- shimmering areas of death. Implacable. Unfortunately, also menacing was the guns of Daisho- the interference from the jump had messed with our transponders, and some of us were showing as neutrals. Not good.
As I was plodding toward the gate in my pod, this flashed up:
19:05:48 Notify Arnoud Langen [INE] DAI (Crow) has started trying to warp scramble “FR JackTheRipper”
Uh-oh. Despite frantic calls on comms that FR JackTheRipper was friendly (indeed in my corp), he had the misfortune of also travelling down in a pod like me and had no shields, armour or structure to speak of, and his pod popped like a ripe fruit. Fluid blasted into space and evaporated, leaving his corpse tumbling in space (pictured above). Shortly after, a bemused voice told us he was OK, and in a cloning facility in Nonni. Apologies all round from Daisho, but no big deal, just unfortunate he wasn’t in a ship or he’d have been OK.
Other than that, not much excitement. I got my Tempest from Airaken, flew back to BWF with no issues. Our scouts reported movements of neutrals and hostiles in and around Airaken and Akora. There appeared to be a build up of Smashkill ships, and we were joined by Goonfleet from the BWF station to bolster our numbers. In the end, after an hour or so, the hostile fleet withdrew- there wasn’t any way they could’ve jumped in and beaten us, we had all sorts on the gate, including sniping Battleships 150km+ from the gate (of which I was one). As it turned out, I didn’t get to introduce my Tremor long range ammunition to any ships… but there’s always another day.
So you travel in your pod with along with the titan ? How does that work ? Never experienced that :).
Basically, the Titan creates a ‘bridge’ (link) to a cyno field, and ships/ pods can then right click the Titan and jump through to the destination. Works the same way as Jump Bridges at POSs. The Titan itself doesn’t move anywhere.