Ok, that was a lot of ops on saturday and sunday

Busy weekend in the NC.  Started off just missing a CTA to rescue a tower.  Having missed that, I hooked up with a home defense fleet that was organizing to go after some reds in our space.

Engagement the first.

I ended up choosing a cov-ops for this mission.  We ended up almost mousetrapping a Raiden roam that had gone up a one way street.  I was scouting as the fleet was plugging up the only exit.  At one point I did try to probe the Raiden roam that was probably at a safe spot while I kept eyes on a specific gate, but no luck on that.  The Raiden guys bolted for home at that point and we did manage to get a kill or two as they tried to burn towards home.  So we chased them back to Geminate.  At this point things got a little messy.  At a fork in the road we have the Raiden guys that went one way and at the other we're suddenly confronted with Blackline.  The FC in his infinite wisdom decides to find out if Blackline. are as good as he's heard.

Engagement the second.

Short story: they are.  I got a ring side seat to Blackline doing what it does best and our FC getting a little impatient and jumping into them.  Sure enough although we managed to dis-engage with most of our fleet intact we did take a few losses, mainly to our logistics. 

Engagement the second bis.

This is when things got fun.  That Raiden roam we were talking about?  Managed to slip between us and Blackline and then jump right into Blackline just like we did.  So our FC decides to muddy the water and after a quick u-turn comes back and jumps into the ongoing fight making it a 3 way for a very short while.  Raiden melted at this point and the engagement between Blackline and ourselves continued.  But we managed to get out and dis-engage at that point.

Engagement the third.

At this point we get to a rally point for a slight break and for some of our pilots to get some replacement ships.  While there we get wind of a roam that had some potential and was in need of some reinforcement.  So off we go to the Kavala Expanse.  On the way we manage to get lucky and two red ships going from point a to point b manage to run smack into our fleet.  Since I was pushing ahead they managed to be ready and go the two.  We then caught up with the other fleet and after some neutral results (no actual engagement was had once we caught up to them) we headed back to NC space in order to take a break before a scheduled CTA.

I make the CTA this time.

This one ended up being a simple shield repair fleet.  We flew to the POS and the POS was patched up and we flew back.  We did loose an interceptor to some shenanigans next door but otherwise it was un-eventful.  Not exciting but necessary.  After we went back to our rally point I decided to bail from the fleet as I'd now been on ops for about 7h total.


Flying with and against the Russians.

The next day was once again CTA time.  This time a combined NC fleet was taking to that hotspot in Geminate that is the O2O system.  My first thought on entering the fleet was: did I get in the wrong fleet?  Lots of Russian.  Turned out we had a Russian FC for this op.  My big problem is that I was in a close range battleship with no way of switching fits right before the OP.  Note to self: Re-fit some of the armor BS to long range fits.  At one point I did manage to get high damage against a Jaguar that had wander a little too close to our fleet, but for the most part the reds were outside my engagement range.  It was very frustrating.  The initial part of the battle went well but eventually it went south and I lost my Tempest just prior to the fleet getting hot dropped by enemy super caps.  Ah well, Geminate will remain hot for a while longer.

Towards the end of Sunday I did manage to solve my issues of getting an Orca into our operations area for my alt.  And I also got my alt started on PI in 0.0.  I'll be concentrating on tower fuels for the most part.  My robotics production is hitting high gear on my main.

I did manage to get a Scimitar fit out and brought down.  So the establishment of my "stable of remounts" is ongoing.  Mind you all this logistics work does interfere with making isk.  But such is life.