Strategy over Tactics

Well that was a non-event.

Hell of a lot of work by various pilots and myself, but as far as the final fight went - it didn't happen. Here is why: As I reported in the last post, we managed to engineer a wormhole displacement after getting lucky and taking advantage of the enemy's mistakes. Basically they committed the cardinal sin of not leaving enough force in the wormhole to ensure that they could find it and control it. Once the observed alt and the Raven pilot were outside the wormhole (one because he left, the other because we caught, killed and podded his ass). We managed to kill the wormhole (a B274) in short order and just as they were assembling forces in the system it was connected to, and before they managed to get someone back in (why the alt didn't get back in is a mystery but far be it from me to jiggle the enemies elbow while he's making a mistake).

Over night we engineered a further move of the system. Did I mention that Orca's rock? We then proceeded to get things ready in case they still had an alt in system. Empirical evidence suggests not after the fact but we didnt' know this at the time. One hour before the tower coming out of re-inforced, we moved the wormhole yet again and then proceeded to weaken the new hole. There were about 2-3 BS worth of capacity left. The idea being to trap a small quantity of enemy in our system which would allow our defending forces in system plenty of time to take care of the enemy BS before they could get the new hole located and the rest of the fleet sent to it.

In the end, the wormhole manipulation tactics when the tower came out of re-enforced were not necessary as the enemy never showed. We were able to repair the tower and re-stront it. Then patch it all the way up and put a hello kitty bandaid on it without enemy interfeerence. This did demonstrate that a full understanding of the strategic implications of wormhole control are important to wormhole defense and assaults.

I would rate this intrusion as a much less serious one than the first one that happened in the grotto. Although the first intrusion had less ships it did a much more inteligent attack even though it never sieged one of our towers, they only lost the fight due to our dogged determination to press on regardless of casualties. This one had more ships involved in the assault but it never came to a serious battle due to the lack of know how of the attacker.

So they lost 1 well fit PVE Raven and a pod and spent a lot of ammo. We lost a lot of ammo and time. So far no War decs from them. One of my pilots who was observing them in high sec after our tower was repaired reported that they proceeded to try and assault some other hole. After my pilot observed vairous of their ships leaving that hole with structure damage I can only asume they once again chose a hole that contained a well defened colony. I wish my fellow wormhole residents some good kills.

Of course now I have some rather angry PvP pilots to placate, since the battle didn't materialize. Man some days you just can't win even when you win. The lesson to learn here is that knowledge of wormhole control is VERY important in both the defense and assault of a wormhole systems. The ability to control the wormhole connections during your operations (offensive and defensive) can pay off handsomely.