Bombing The Ice Devils

The other day, or night, I don't recall exactly, but it was certainly in the last week.

Probably.

One of the guys in our corp, in fact the head guy.

That sounds wrong.

The CEO of our corp mentioned he'd seen a bunch of ice miners stripping the belts quite quickly and this was vexing him so.

Utilising our vast array of resources universe wide, we made haste to make this right.

Actually using some two month old alts that weren't doing much at the time, we started tracking the targets and thought about a plan.

My plan was to grab some food and then spend some quality time on the couch scratching my balls, but then we came up with a better plan!

The target was using ISBOXER (probably) to control a bunch of mining barges, an Orca and a Charon.

Our plan was to fit out a battleship, scout a warp in that lands in his tight group, and start up the smart bombs.

I was tracking the ball of ships, I had them on visual, I was cloaked.

Then they all just disappeared!

Strangely I still had the ship ball on d-scan.

Was the game bugged?

Was it lag?

Had I blacked out and was only dreaming of Eve while laying collapsed on the cool tile floor?

Then I heard a voice, it said "What if it's one of those invisibility bubble things?"

It certainly could have been.  I still had the ship ball on d-scan at approx 110 km, so I started slowly approaching them while calling out the decreasing range.

The tension on Teamspeak was rising as the distance dropped.

80km

70km

60km

50km

40km

Lost them!

Aaargh!  Where did they go!?!

I changed the d-scan to 360 degrees and I still had them at about 30km.

My aim must have been off.  Changing the d-scan back down to 30 degrees I moved the direction around a bit until I found the ship ball again.

The mission is back on!

20km

I call out to our smart bombing pilot to start aligning as it will be soon.

Suddenly I'm in the middle of a tight ball of mining barges, the Orca and Charon.

Warp! Warp! Warp!

The target says something like, "Hey what are you doing here?"

I warp off knowing the pain was about to arrive.

The battleship lands at zero on my previous position and starts banging away with the full high slots of smart bombs.

The target doesn't like this!

He starts complaining about being smart bombed, CONCORD not being quick enough, and various other things which are probably genetic.

So in the end it seems like time took on the consistency of molasses but it fact it was all over with pretty fast.

How many ships died in this encounter?

One.  The battleship.

Turns out he had the barges tanked quite adequately, and a smart bombs need heaps of capacitor.

Ahh well.