Providence & Friends

This weekend saw quite a few engagements, from skirmishes to full scale battles. First off, I would like to congratulate our -A- brethren and allies on their success against CVA & Pets in D-GTMI. Isoruku Yamamato, who is remembered for many things, wrote a letter on January 9, 1942 which said "A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack". I'm not implying that CVA attacking SV5-8N, HED-GP and UX3-N2 were sneaky by any means. I'm just saying that they pissed off the wrong crowd.

CVA is one of the oldest alliances (if not the oldest) in the game. This is due to a few reasons, one of which is that people like having them around. Carebears love them because they are like CONCORD (with a 15-30 min delay). Killers like -A- and company, or us (The Mavs) love to have them around because they give all those carebears a false sense of security. This creates a target rich environment that we can all love and appreciate. Just a few months ago CVA was disbanded, and CCP actually decided to back them up (imagine that!) -A- actually helped CVA hold its space until their Alliance was reinstated. Why? Its good hunting in Providence. But CVA had to ally themselves and become a Goon pet. This is just stupid. CVA and pets are not capable of the kind of warfare that they now find themselves involved in. When we were in Atlas, we would vacation to a system called Yong, which was two jumps out of Mamet (a CVA low sec hub). We pirated to our hearts content; it was a vacation spot of sorts that we could unwind and have fun in after massive fleet ops. After leaving Atlas and in our transition to IT Alliance we based out of Yong. CVA would respond time and time again using the same crappy tactic. A bait Abbadon would come into Yong, we would tackle it and start killing it. He would point one of our ships and pop a cyno, titan bridge in a 20-3o man fleet of random ships and a few carriers. They would (usually) kill the one ship pointed and the rest would get out. Bear in mind we usually were camping with 3-15 RR bs (with a hictor or sensor boosted Drake). Hot dropping made CVA and pets feel good, but after 20 min in system they would leave and we were back to our usual stuff. This type of combat doesn't require any skills.

In contrast, 0.0 fleet warfare takes lots of skill (especially on the part of the FC), as well as street smarts (knowing when to warp out, and how to react in laggy situations). It also requires some degree of standardization as far as shiptypes and fitting. As we have seen in the killmails, CVA and company brought random ships to the fights... and as posted by many of the other bloggers, they got steamrolled. Standard fleet BS snipe range is anywhere from 100-150km. You bring bc's and HAC's to these fights and you are going to get smoked. No tank, oftentimes out of range, and not entirely coordinated. Battleships, with T2 Guns will out range, out damage and out last anything but another BS fleet of similar size. Ironically this article about T2 Guns is by Kirith Kodachi, a Provi dweller (though he knows what he is talking about). The lack of effective ships, the lack of training/experience in 0.0 warfare and the fitting of their ships leads me to believe this could be a very bad outlook for CVA. To that I say... oh well.