Pandemic Horde had been fighting our Deklein neighbours, Darkness, on and off for a few hours. They eventually brought out their capitals and our leadership thought we should respond in kind. A ping went out to the capital group while I was a dozen jumps in the wrong direction, trying to terrorise locals in my Svipul. I had found a fight with a solo TEST Drake but he was cheating with a Rapid Light fit that nearly killed me. Of course I forgot to take my Blue Pill and didn’t have the right ammunition loaded, but by the time I had corrected these faults he was nowhere to be found. It is a pity - I would have liked a rematch.
Anyway, as I was saying, a ping went out. I docked at a friendly citadel and jumped to my clone in O1Y. At first, I was quite disappointed because shortly after that we were told that our capitals would not be required after all. So I hopped into an Osprey and joined the logi channel. However, a few minutes later a fresh call went out and I decided to abandon my logi bros and return to my Moros. I wanted to play with my capital ship, dammit!
I was soon sitting in the dreadnought, safely tethered on a Fortizar undock and awaiting instructions. The call came and we were soon on the field, watching 150 Hordelings pounding two Apostle Force Auxiliaries. These support capitals have enormous local tanks and the subcap fleet of Feroxes was not able to break them. That quickly changed with the arrival of the dreadnoughts.
I will describe how it went for those of you who have not done much capital fighting. First, we were told to “go siege green”. This meant that we were supposed to turn on our siege modules. Surprisingly, I had remembered to pack the Strontium Clathrates which the module uses as fuel. Siege modules greatly improve dreadnought local reps, damage and e-war resistance, basically turning a dread from a good battleship into a super DPS machine. The drawback of these modules, however, is that they disable all forms of propulsion, including jump drives. You are stuck there for 5 minutes.
We entered siege and turned our guns against the Apostles who quickly melted under the added fire-power. We were then told, rather urgently I thought, to go “siege red”, meaning that we needed to deactivate the siege modules so they did not automatically cycle again. We still had 2-3 minutes to wait before we could make our departure so we spent the time shooting the Darkness Proteus fleet which was dying at a positively alarming rate in the absence of their logi support. Of course, the dreadnought guns (not high angle) had practically zero chance of hitting the cruisers but killboards are killboards and it is nice to have a record of your deeds.
The urgency with which we were instructed to go “siege red” was prompted by the imminent arrival of a White Legion fleet. This would not be good news for any capitals who remained on the field. So we waited, not particularly patiently, for our siege cycles to end and our capacitors to get above 71%. Finally! Just as the first White Legion pilot entered the system I jumped to the out cyno who was safely tucked up next to the O1Y citadel. I even remembered isotopes for the jump drive!
Apostle 1: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54663727/
Apostle 2: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54663732/
On a side note, I have decided that the Moros is not the best ship for this sort of thing. It has good tracking but appallingly short range. I reckon it would probably work pretty well against big subcaps with the new high angle weapons but for hitting capitals I think I want a different dreadnought. Or maybe I just need to get T2 guns and Barrage and remember the optimal range script for my tracking computer.
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