o.O we HAVE capitals?

Resuming the story. The dis-satisfying end to the festivities of the previous weekend had my CEOs and my PvP'ers talking. And there was the fact we had discovered a non-high sec vulnerability of this griefer corp. They were kind enough to lead us to their low sec POS at one point during this aborted war. It turned out to be a badly fitted medium tower (2 cruise missile launcher modules were part of this medium Minmatar tower).

Lets see, they rebuff all diplomatic contact and they drop the war they started like a hot potato. It is evident that all they want to do is play high sec griefing games where they pick on one or two man corps with towers in high sec. It's like dangling chum above the shark tank. Regardless of the fact that I've got a decent proportion of carebears, these are the type of guys carebears want to kill more than the PvP guys do (Makes my life easy when EVERYONE wants to kick these guys in the nuts).

So we decided that going to visit the low sec POS and apply a little of the lessons we've been learning in the various wormhole POS bashes we've gotten under our belts. The only question in my mind was whether to war dec these guys or just take the sec hit and pull a surprise assault on their POS. Once it was decided that it was a go, we only used un-affiliated newbie alts to make sure they didn't take down the tower. The initial plan was to do a surprise attack on Friday night (they seemed to be more euro time zone), with the plan that if we timed it right the tower would come out of reinforced for Sunday evening.

And that's when the capitals started coming out of the wood work. Don't get me wrong, but with our concentration on wormhole operations, capital ships are not a big part of alliance planning. And it turns out that quite a few pilots had carriers and dreads stashed away in secret low sec pockets. The opportunity to dust of the ships and actually get some use out of them proved very telling. With a week to prepare I was sure my pilots would be ready when the day came.

Well things got re-scheduled a bit when it turned out that Saturday night would be better for the capital pilots. I was a little worried about this since conventional wisdom would put the fight for the tower on Monday evening but went with it anyways since I wasn't primary FC for this one.

So late Saturday night rolled around and we got things underway. All the capitals that were going to support the assault managed to get within jump range of Tabbetzur and as the last capital got itself into position and the BS heavy main fleet was gathered at our designated kick of point, we gave the green light and charged into a rather sparsely inhabited low sec area. 23 man fleet including 4 capitals and 2 members as pipe scouts with an emergency cyno alt went to town on the target POS. Really the sec hit was not that bad since I think all of us stayed positive and right before kick off, known enemy CEOs and Directors had logged off so the "put into reinforced" part of the operation went well... for the most part. We did loose one cyno alt's frigate to a gatecamp and due to a mixup on the pilots part a cyno main managed to loose his cyno stabber at the pos itself (was trying to dock up and switch to a combat BS from one of the carriers - but forgot that ships with non-ammo things in their cargo bay don't go in any more).

The actual cyno vessel at the POS was kept repped up and it's pilot was able to switch to a cov-ops and scouting duty soon after. So all in all not too bad for getting into position, although the rust was showing in places. A fairly concentrated assault allowed us to disable all the guns in canonical order (scram first, then all medium guns (only 3???) then the two missile launchers then the small guns last - leave the web it might actually help someone warp out faster).

The 1st phase ended up totally un-opposed. And apparently my scout reported that the local pirates consider a 23 man fleet to be a "blob"... ok ... yea ... right ... if it makes you feel better...

The biggest surprise was finding out that our nice opponents only put 6h of stront in their tower o.O

"Ok, phase 2 of this op will resume one hour after downtime tomorow, the enemy will have one hour after it comes out of reinforced to do something but we need our sleep."