Whelping a Titan

If there is one thing that -A- isn't short on its PVP opportunities.

I shall start with the story of how a titan was lost on Saturday night...

Roaming in Curse with a 30ish gang of Canes/Sabres/Scimitars/other fast movers I was alerted by Manny that there was a possible drop about to go down. So I started burning my gang to Querious (some 20ish jumps away). On the way Herc drops down to tell me the same.

Apparently PL had some carriers and a super in 5V- that had gotten in when they cycled the jammer down. I was getting no communication from the convo with Manny as we freeburned to 2j out and held.

I finally hopped on comms with him to ask what the hell was going on.

"Get to 5V- planet 1 and keep bubbles up"

"Ok"

I switched back to my fleet and gave the orders. In we went and to planet 1 we warped. Landed in bubbles amidst several carriers and a Nyx with only a few blues on field. My dictors went to work and we primaried the Nidhog hoping for shield tank... which of course wasn't the case.

We twaddled our thumbs and kept the capitals bubbled while Manny formed up the supers on the jump bridge into 5V- (as it was cynojammed). Maka and Herc weren't quite sure what the whole story was but came along for the ride.

Without any leadership on the field I took over managing the ships while we continued to wait for Manny to pull the trigger. With time ticking away I became more and more anxious-PL had ample time to get organized as we approached a half hour. Finally we started jumping in supers and the bridge ran out of LO. Supers were instructed to align to planet 1 to wait for the other supers to get through.

So here we were dancing with carriers neuting and throwing fighters and drones all over the place with supers aligned waiting for the rest of the supers to come through. Why we couldn't bring the ones in system to field I didn't know... so after a few minutes I suggested that we were wasting time and to just bring them in. Maka agreed and so we did, shortly after LO was found and the other supers made it in.

I called primaries on the carriers and they went down one by one. As time had dragged on my suspicious meter kept rising-especially given that the Nyx pilot hadn't logged out yet. With how long we took to bring DPS to the field he could have already dissapeared in space... yet there he was approaching half armor.

Suddenly grid filled up with about 10-15 PL; first name that flashed into my brain was Phobos.

Shit.

I waited for Manny to make the call to warp off-didn't come.

Maka finally yelled "supers warp! warp! warp!" as his titan escaped. By some miracle all supers managed to get out-except the Cascade titan. Manny had called for a re alignment shortly before PL dropped onto field and his titan had not yet fully aligned.

I burned my support fleet away from the bubbled Nyx-still in half armor-and primaried the numerous bubblers on field. This became a moot point as a cyno opened (wtf?) and PL dropped numerous supers on field.

I asked Maka if we could disengage-as it was pointless to stay, he replied in the affirmative and I got my boys out while the Nyx started getting reps from the PL carriers that jumped in.

I asked where the hell the cyno jammer was and someone piped up "oh I guess thats what the other supers were up to"

what??????

After getting my fleet the 2j to Catch I got in channel with Herc and Mak and tried to understand what had just happened.

Apparently there were 8 or 9 supers in addition to the carriers and Nyx on field when I entered system. This was not brought to -A- leadership's attention when we committed supers. Of special note was the comment "they warped off". Not "jumped out".

Pieces fell into place now. Why the Nyx pilot stayed logged in... why not? He had several buddies hard at work taking down the cyno jammer without anyone figuring it out. I didn't think to ask about the couple dozen reds in local when I arrived as I figured that would have already been sorted and accounted for. PL turned what may have been a tense situation into an opportunity. Hell, we gave them 45 minutes, I would hope they would come up with someting in USTZ prime.

Good fight.

ET's account of events