What Could go Wrong?

The war targets are in Abagawa, docked at the moment.

This exercise is to give the members some combat experience, two of them have some and the other guy has little to none.

So we form up, Battleship, Battlecruiser, ECM ship and tackle Frigate.  The two targets should be in either Battleships or Battlecruisers.  My alt sitting outside their station has a good view of their undocking bay.

As our fleet approaches their system one of them undocks in a Battleship, an Abaddon.  So I warp my Battleship to their station and engage him, I call for the rest of the fleet to enter the system and warp to me, the second enemy Battleship then undocks.

All DPS is on the first Battleship whose shields go at an acceptable rate, then we start hitting the armour, a bit slower than I would like but okay.

However the bad news starts piling up, I hear over voice chat that we've lost our ECM ship, most likely to drone agro, though I later find out it had been shot at also.  The armour on my Battleship is going down, in hindsight we probably should have switched targets to the other Battleship, but it undocked second and I was fixated on the first one, potentially a mistake.

So my Battleship dies, I call for everybody to get out, my pod warps away, at this moment I think we have failed utterly.  The tackle Frigate gets away but the Battlecruiser is caught and destroyed.

The vultures descend on the wrecks.

I have an alt on the field, via this alt I start to take stock of the situation, trying to salvage something from the disaster, but somethings wrong.  Too many wrecks are on the field, taking a minute I realise we actually did kill one of their Battleships.

Yes!! This wasn't a total waste of time after all!

We make our way back to the home system, dock up, but the counterattack is not long in coming.

While we are trying to put the best spin on the battle we could, the war targets turn up in our home system, via the alt now sitting outside our home station I can see they have a Battleship, a Tempest and also a Proteus, a tech 3 Cruiser.

We discuss the situation, one of our guys undocks and they stare at each other for a short while, then they engage him.  So the decision is made to primary the Proteus as that is the smaller ship and should go down fast.  (hindsight laugh)

The pilot of the Tech 3 Cruiser, upon reflection, was very confident in the situation, this should have been a warning.

So anyway we start hitting the Proteus, its shield goes away fairly quickly, then we start hitting the armour...well I think so, it's not moving very much.

After a bit I check to see if my guns are still working, they appear to be, but it's all going wrong.

So the end result is the enemy Battleship docks up as we had changed targets from the Proteus, he was getting hit pretty hard but just disengaged and docked up.  We lost another ECM ship, our tackle Frigate, his pod.  Our Battlecruiser and my Battleship (a backup) survived the engagement, for a while the Proteus and I just stared at each other outside the station, after a bit I also docked up.

The previous night I had destroyed an enemy Battlecruiser for no loss, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.  Now we had destroyed a Battleship worth about 200 million but we lost a Battleship worth about the same, also a Battlecruiser, two ECM ships, one Frigate and a Pod.

However the worst knowledge is the Proteus is now on the field, we cannot kill it and they know it.

Time to think.