Phoons and Lesser Strain Mothers

Once again things are progressing on the Typhoon front. Both #13 and #14 sold withing 24h (weird for the middle of the week, but I did price them aggressively. So the 120mil and 2 Tyhpoon BPCs were sent of to Teena of [ASMIC]. (Shhhhh, he doesn't know about the 2nd typhoon yet).

I then proceeded to go through all the usual maintenance. Get the finished jobs delivered, put up new research jobs, check the market, put up any items sold out and put up any new manufacturing jobs. All the usual having been taken care of it's then time to figure out what to do for the evening. Hey! I know!, I'll go check out that 5/10 drone plex I found in Auner the other day. It should still have a day to go if no one else bothered to find it. But what a sec, I'm pretty sure my BC won't be sufficient.

Now Carbon Freezer (long time member of my corp) has recently finished getting Caldari battleship skillz, along with attendant cruise missile skillz. He's been trying it out in high sec exploration sites that don't have much for a BS even when he can get it by the first gate. Here's a perfect opportunity to get him into a BS level job without getting into missions (which would mess up his Minmatar neutral standings).

So we start. Carbon finds out quickly (to the tune of 1.2mil in repairs to his armor) that you don't take a Raven and charge into close combat. While he's off getting repairs, I'm able to distance tank with my mission Cyclone without a problem. After he gets back and changes his tactics (more than 120km away is nice and comfy for a Raven), things go much more smoothly. We get into the 2nd room and there are 2 gates. Things proceed nicely for the next few rooms. We acquire, in order, the 9th, 10th, 11th, 13th and 14th Overseer's Personal Effects. I suspect the 12th is stuck behind the "surging" gate we didn't take. Reading online it turns out that I would have been the only one able to take it as my good buddy Carbon didn't have the plasma physics skill learned.

Then there was the comedy that was the last room. We're doing fine till I get a little too close to the lesser stain mother in my BC... 20% structure later and it's let the BS shoot at it. Good god he ran out of cruise missiles. So I head back to get a whole bunch of cruise missiles in my blockade runner. 2.4mil in repairs for me. On the way back most of the previous rooms the wrecks have gone, but I do manage to spot an important wreck we almost missed (that's where the 14th overseer's came from). I get him the missiles and he starts taking down the lesser stain mother again - this time with paradise cruises. This goes better, but it really calls for either tech 2 heavies or 2 Battleships shooting it at range in order to come down in any reasonable time.

Once again I get too close and have to warp out (the mother will shoot at anything it targets that gets within 50-55km or so, and boy does it hurt). Stay out of range and kill at a distance. I had to warp out (man thank god the blockade runner can warp on a dime, got out with about 15% shields left that time). Eventually he managed to kill the darn thing - after hours of cruise missiles. He went through probably 7000 cruises in this one complex. As he mentioned, if you had told him he would have shot over 4000 cruise missiles at the start of the evening he would have laughed in your face. He now understands why cruise missiles sell in 10k lots. At the end he picked up as much loot and the 15th overseer's.

So after 6 hours or so, the next morning I dispose of the loot for the split. Note that we could have had massive amounts more loot and we got no salvage so we could have done better. But this was our first experience with something of the order of a 5/10 complex. We each came out of the evening with 31.7mil isk and about 7.3mil isk in minerals from the few battle ships we looted. So if we did that with a third person to salvage and haul all the loot to high sec (or a pair of them with one in a blockade runner) as we went it would have been much better.

2:30am local and I finally angered into bed. Note to self: complexes are long. Really long.