Archive for category Lessons Learned

Timeline of events

01/09/2009 – A new null sec opens to a region of space that bored people live. Same night some of us go out and have a look, and some of them peek inside. We exchange some trash-talk but we are bored to engage them at the wormhole. They probably take that as lack of strength or willpower from our side and decide that “they like this wormhole and they will take it” (pun intended lols).

02/09/2009 – They have entered at some point during the night and have started bashing our main POS. throughout the day we don’t really care much because their DPS is quite low to be a serious threat but as the day progresses, they bring in more ships and we assess that they are here to stay. We wait for their guard to drop and one by one we start some guerilla tactics and take down 4 of their ships. A probe dies alone in space, an Iteron dies to a bombing run along with lots of sentry drones. However we don’t push back but continue on random bombing runs – just to keep them guessing. They reach our shields to like 40%, but they get demoralized when they fail to collapse another nullsec opening that does not suit their needs, while they loose two more ships, a Manticore and a Buzzard which while having fail-fits tried to collapse that wormhole for hours. We go and have the Planet Risk Show as normal and have a great time, while we manage to fend them off just prior to the show.

03/09/2009 – We take a blockade runner and form an op where we go and buy and bring back inside Planet Risk lots of shield hardeners for the POSes and lots of other nasty surprizes. When they try to take a second round at our shields they see we have them repaired to more than 85% and that now they can do only portion of their previous DPS since the hardeners are now online and smiling at them. They spend about 2-3hours to take it down from 85% to 83% and then decide to call it quits. Before server downtime they exit Planet Risk.

What we did wrong

Obviously, first of all, we thought that a Large POS alone with no defenses would be enough to hold off any non-capital fleet. Well NOT! We will be going into details on the next episode of the Planet Risk Show, but suffice to say we should advise anyone who listened to our advice on the 3rd episode where we mention a Large POS in a small wormhole with no defenses a workable solution – well it’s not!! A fleet of 5-6 BSs can take it into reinforced in about 24hours – even less I guess depending on skills.

Secondly, we didn’t have a “Battle Plan” or a “Emergency Disaster Recovery Plan” if you like. When you are living in Wspace for 4 months and you have moved most (if not all) of your belongings inside your POS, loosing it could be disastrous. Not having a specific plan in place and trying to create one (who should do what – what ships and fittings to use etc etc) at the same time when your POS shields are melting down to less than 50% and you know you probably got about a couple of hours before you enter reinforced.. well.. that’s not the best timing to do your planning.

At some point we has a chance to take down the Ishtar they had – as it was firing alone and we had the firepower to take it down before any other ship could come to help him. However we lost the point on the Ishtar – a bit of confusion on positioning of some of our ships and bad fitting decisions (no MWDs) costs us another kill – oh well :-/

What they did wrong

They got bored easily – don’t plan to take upon a wspace POS bashing unless you get a lot of time to spare – remember no caps in small wormholes.

Do not keep your support ships together with the rest of the fleet. The killing of their Iteron, along with lots of Sentry drones from their BSs and their Ishtar with just a single bomb was by far a rewarding kill (and my personal first bomb kill! huzzah!)

Do not leave your support ships alone. Especially if they have the all-important role of being your ticket out of here. That poor Probe was sitting on it’s own and without cloak… ts ts ts…

Don’t use one of your two remaining scanner ships – nor your stealth bomber without any AB -  to try and collapse a null sec wormhole that can hold up to 2.000.000 tons of mass before collapsing. It was very amusing watching you jump in and out – wait 5 min – jump back in etc etc until we decided to stop ya. That Manticore had pretty much fail fit imho – why so many sensor boosters? why not a bomb launcher? Why no painter?

What we did correctly

Besides the obvious mistake in POS planning & fitting, fortunately we had the clarity and clear thinking on our side, being on the defender’s side, knowing our full strength potential and the resources at our disposal we where going to give a real fight and not abandon our POS nor allow our efforts and stuff go to waste by a small group bashing our shields. I stand by the conviction of our team – we had lots of people getting online in very short time after they received the “our POS is under attack” message and we could get twice those numbers if that would have happened a week from now when everyone would be back from vacations etc etc.

We did add every intruder to our addressbook, along with comments, ships, fittings and related killboard info etc etc that we could find – and we did that efficiently and quickly – even before they had the shields down to 90% we know lots about our attackers to create a “psychological” profile if you like. That helped up remain cool and pretty much be able to anticipate some of their moves.

We didn’t act hastily – we made calculated decisions, after getting the max intel we could get on a given situation.

We used delayed local to our advantage. At one point we had some pilots in cloaked ships, who we took great care in keeping them cloaked, waiting to hear the command to drop hell in our attacker’s heads, but we decided to keep them cloaked until we had formed a specific battle plan (see above).

We knew our wormhole-fu and found the null sec openings and other signatures well in advance from our “guests” and thus had cloaked pilots watching their every move.

We did understand that they where looking into collapsing the null sec exit, hoping that another one would open closer to their home turf, to allow them to bring any reinforcements. We let them jump-in and out and get careless while they where trying to collapse it. When the wormhole was nearing collapsing, we had a strike force ready to kill the ships trying to collapse it and killed them when they had the 4min jump timer delay.

We knew from the start that since we had a full supplement of Stront (never build your POS without) the whole game would be won by whatever team could go without sleep. Being on the defensive side kinda helps to keep you up at night and get the job done. As soon as they logged for the night we formed up an operation to bring back some shield hardeners for our POSes, extra bombs and various other stuff, while at the same time we got in our Ospreys and repaired the shields back up to 85% (Nictutu your stamina on repping those the shields was just astonishing! way to go mate!)

What they did correctly

After they lost their second scanning ship the last remaining buzzard stayed cloaked or pulled a logofski – anyways they kept it relative safe.

Two of their pilots suicide and pod themselves back in kspace.

They got the message and left Planet Risk before they got heavier losses

Lessons Learned

Any POS should not be considered undefended if there are dedicated pilots behind it’s shields. Before launching an attack on a POS that seems like an “easy” target, make sure you have a force that is able to take care of the defenders as well as the shields. Yes, pun intended

We had amazing laughs when they said that they want 1 Bil to let us alone and go away – back when our shields where 80ish% and 2Bill when they where < 50%. They had some balls to ask us of 700Mill ever after they saw all the hardeners and shields back up at 85%. We laughed so much… still do…

Aftermath

I need some sleep! and so do most of my corpmates! – but Planet Risk managed to fend off the first major attack on our POSes and got in tons of stuff to help defend in any similar war stories. We learned a lot from this encounter – and as luck would have it – we had TeaDaze, our very own Alliance Tournament VII PVP expert inside Planet Risk giving us tons of tips and info and coordinating with our attacks and giving suggestions to the battle plan! TeaDaze, thank you for your support mate! In the next couple of days we’ll award a special medal to those who participated in this absolutely thrilling siege!

GG and a job well done everyone!