A sort non-fictional story by Merinid Dormer

February 14th, Sunday. 19:00 New Eden Time.

Vessper was sitting in his Thanatos. “I am aligning and waiting for instructions” he said.

“10 more minutes to go” said Nictutu.

Quivering Palm with a steady voice continued, “ Guys, this is it. It’s now or never”.

“Let’s secure that tower and the stuff we have in it”, I added with a bit of a doubt in my voice. Hopefully no-one had noticed. Morale was not on the highest levels. Some minor fleet changes of the last minute, nothing i could notice while i was shacking. My fleet fight experience wasn’t helping either. All I could think were the Blueprints, Components and Minerals behind the damaged force field of our Production Tower, sitting just 0.54 AU away. Those were what I’ve been working on for the past few months. All the research and effort Eowarian and I have put on these…

“Everyone who has a cloak jump in, the rest stay in place”. He sounded confident. He was Alekseyev Karrde. The CEO of  one of the most notorious and experienced mercenary corporations in New Eden. NOIR. When a mercenary, like his kind, is in your side your only fear is that he might get more money than you gave him from the “enemy”. Alekseyev and NOIR weren’t  like this though, they had the reputation of honoring their contracts, regardless of money. “ Members of SI Radio Corp. you don’t have to worry about anything. We are here and we know how to do this. Follow our lead and we will secure your system again.

TechPalatinus was patient. He and his 30 pilots were ready. All of them, well trained and experienced pilots. “We are in place and waiting for orders as well”. Wormhole Space colonist feared his corporation. Capital Construction Research members were ruthless. They were known for destroying Towers and stealing whatever valuables they could find. They were on our side. They have been friends for quite some time now.

“1 minute 30 seconds” said Nictutu.

“TeaDaze jump in” Quivering ordered. Orders is not something that TeaDaze is supposed to take I thought. The guy is a legend. He was always in our side. What a pilot. He was a daredevil.

“There is a command ship that we can provide for you to fly TeaDaze” said Luminus Aardokay. “Well thanks a lot man” answered TeaDaze.

“SI Radio Corp. members, are you ready?” asked Quivering.

One by one, Luminus Aardokay, Nictutu, Vessper, Estar Tarns, Sengiria, Verona Black, Eowarian D, Viscious Hunter, Sir Keldron, Drapetis and myself replied “Here”. 20 seconds of silence followed, or was it like an hour? At that point I couldn’t make the difference.

“Mr Deaker reporting movement in the enemy tower”

“Reinforced is down in our tower” said Nictutu.

“Vessper you are clear to warp” went on Quivering.

“I see an Armageddon Navy Issue, 3 Proteus, 3 Legions, 2 Bhaalgorn, 2 Thanatos and one Megathron moving & aligning towards planet VIII” continued Mr Deaker.

“Let us know when they are on grid Vessper” said Alekseyev

10 seconds afterwards Vessper was already repairing the Shields of our Control Tower. “They are on grid. I got hostiles all over me.”

“Everyone jump in. Quivering move your fleet in.”

TechPalatinus followed. 20 of his best pilots inside Strategic Cruisers.

Rooks & Kings have failed to spot the trap. And they paid the price. The day was to be remembered as Valentine’s Day Massacre.

The fight over our system was over. We were once again the ones to control it. The Siege was over. Things were getting back on track. But I was left wondering. What was to come next?

It was clear to me that Wormhole Space systems are special. Not just another part of space just recently discovered, but the foundation on which the world we live in is going to grow into something greater. The 3rd generation of Cruiser Construction is the present. But scientist are working on different aspects of any technology discovered in wormhole space. Rumors are traveling about 3rd generation Frigates and Battleships. If those rumors are close to being truth one thing is for sure. Wormhole space is the future. This is where new challenges arise. Where money is made. And day by day more capsuleers dare to be bold. More people pack up their stuff and search for glory,  money inside wormhole space, setting up colonies. 3rd generation production is profitable. Scientist of all major factions are paying good money to get their hands on items saved from Sleeper wrecks. They call them “Blue Tags”. A single Anomaly once gave our corp “Tags” that worth more than 700 million ISK, the salvaged wrecked provided us with enough materials to build 2 3rd Generation Cruisers.

Pirates, Mercs, Spies, Industrialist, Mission Runners, Miners, Traders. They all want their cut. They will come to take it. And to do that they will need to take control of wormhole systems.

The Era Of Capital Fleet Fights Over Control Of Wormhole Systems Is Upon Us

Are The Colonies Prepared To Defend?

We’d like to congratulate Alekseyev Karrde, TeaDaze and Song Li for their victories, and wish them a prosperous and productive reign. Along with them, we here at the Planet Risk Show feel victorious as well as it is more than apparent  how the CSM specials helped boost the profiles of the candidates (3 out of the 7 candidates that debated made it to the board, and Helen Highwater almost made it by ranking 10th).

However, this “victory” we feel that has been achieved comes with a certain amount of bitterness. The voter turnout was disappointing, as this time around, there were less voters than even the first elections. Furthermore almost 3% of the voters chose to push the “abstain” button in the ballot (which by design is something we find utterly stupid… declaring your abstinence by participating…).

Nevertheless, we do believe that this CSM board is capable of pushing great and useful things to CCP, especially during this troubled post Dominion time, something that will “force” more people to learn about the CSM and why it is so important.

Once again congratulations guys. We have high hopes for you!

Candidates, Helen Highwater, Mike Azariah, Song Li and TeaDaze presented their platform and their case and even though the decision of who made the biggest impression is yours to make, we got ourselves 4 quality candidates that put us in a four way dilemma about who deserves our precious vote.

We are glad to see that this first debate drew enough interest, players and candidates alike as it promotes the CSM concept and therefore we’ll run a series of debates and get as many candidates as possible on-air to share their views with you and give you a better image on their personalities and their platform.

Please, after listening don’t forget to vote on our poll on who shined through this Debate.

Download Episode 9

Tracks in this Episode:

Glxblt – Everything Is Under Control (Planet Risk Intro Version)
AlienHand – Dare to be Bold
lfODD & mc vocODD – World Domination
Permaband – HTFU
Luminus Aardokay – Jizz in my Pod
Quasian – Beertime X
Virt – Turbonugget
Irvin – Gamma
AlienHand – Above the Asteroids

All background tracks composed by AlienHand and are parts of his eve-online music project and Jon Hallur (CCP). Used with permission.

Download Episode 5

Episode 5 includes a special reward to those who will listen to the full show =)

Special shoutout to the peeps over at the Missions Collide podcast

Music Tracks performed on Episode 5:

Glxblt – Everything Is Under Control (Planet Risk Intro)
Sanxion7 – Dreamcatcher
Little Bitchard – Choose Zero Polys and Shaders
aMUSiC – Purple Corn
Quasian – Beertime X
Xerxes – On Base Percentage
Irvin – Gamma
Xenophobe – Function Invitation Soundtrack
Man With No Alias – Electric Kool-Aid
Puryx – Forever Again

Quivering Palm: On that episode I say “we have a large POS, we don’t have to worry about anything” and next episode we have people jumping in sieging our POS
Luminus Aardokay: And yet you’re still talking
Quivering Palm: And yet I’m still talking (laughs.. laughs harder.. starts coughing)
Luminus Aardokay: And so we got humped by the russians
Quivering Palm: (in between serious coughing) …you got me…
Luminus Aardokay: OMG, the guy’s dying here!!!… … … Can I have your stuff?

…wait for it!

For tonight’s show we shall:

• Talk about the Alliance Tournament 7 and the results after the first weekend, what should we expect on the 2nd round and much much more about the greatest Alliance Tournament yet!
• Discuss in more detail our learnings and experiences from the Siege of Planet Risk that happened last week, and talk about how a proper wormhole POS should be fitted!
• Answer the questions you ask from our official channel in-game OTHER\SIRADIO
• Discuss the Poll Results – it was such a heated subject we decided to keep the same Poll for the second week… or we slacked and forgot to change it… pick whatever you like :-p
• Play tunes that you like (so if the music breaks suck – you only got yourself to blame!) (No commercial music on the podcast mate =P )
• We shall be joined – LIVE – UNCUT and TOTALY UNPREPARED (it’s so funny because it’s true!) by an amazing list of guests including but not limited to:

• PVP Expert and AT7 Commentator TeaDaze from Agony Unleashed…
• Podded Podcast co-host and Stealth Bomber Expert War Childe… (Rescheduled for next week, as he’s out of beer)
• Declarations of War Podcast co-host and NOIR. Corp CEO Alekseyev Karrde…
• …a Mystery Guest that Luminus won’t reveal even to me – fearing that I will collapse prior to the show (he doesn’t mind that I collapse after I arrive at his place with the bee…err…the Spiked Quafe)

I am on my way to pickup some Spiked Quafe and then just 9 jumps to the SI HQ & Studio!

Join us live tonight at http://siradio.fm 20:00 EvE Time!

Podcast and iTunes will be available shortly after the show!

QP

..dary

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!

Dronebay 23 AT7 Part 1

Tune-in tomorrow at 20:00 EvE time on http://siradio.fm for the live show with Luminus Aardokay and Quivering Palm welcoming AT7 PVP Expert TeaDaze!

It’s gonna be a blast!