Each week we try and take out a small fleet to start gathering, or in some cases re-gathering experience in small fleet PVP.This was one of those fleets.
We managed our first kill using the new, and possibly improved PVP roam doctrine system!
We will get to that in a bit though.
Finding a worm hole that takes us more or less directly into a null sec system was an utter bitch. At one stage I gave up and mowed the lawn, that held more appeal at that point than yet another bloody useless stupid effing worm hole. Eventually I found one we could use, or so I thought...
Our small but nuggety PVP fleet formed up at Home only a few minutes late, and left for the distant system of Bika. In there we jumped into the pre scouted worm hole, then through the worm hole, until we arrived at the exit into the region of Branch in null security space.
"Your ship is too large for this worm hole"
What? Bugger me! I'd passed through it quite happily in my probing ship which is fast, and more importantly small, but our seemingly massive cruisers were not going to jump through.
Plan B then. We use Plan B quite a bit.
Provi it is! So the fleet zapped down to the Provi entrance, took a right turn, and headed towards where I thought some miners might be.
Sure enough we found some, after we'd tried a belt already and found none, the next belt had some inattentive miners! They should have warped towards a safe spot once we appeared in local, but they didn't and we landed about 40km away from them. Just then my internet lagged so I couldn't see any targets on my overview so the standing rules applied, approach, point and shoot them.
We managed to grab only one Procurer, which proceeded to eventually go down, all the while I'm keeping an eye on D-Scan for the expected reinforcements that I thought would arrive, they did not. Happily by that stage my internet/overview had caught up with current events.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/63144444/
We checked the side systems and headed out of that pocket, but they were stirred up.
We had two options at that point, go home or go deeper. We went deeper.
Pretty soon we had to bust through a small gate camp of an Ishtar and a Harbinger, but then the're mates caught us.
Bubble Camp! Yes we'd been caught in a bubble after jumping through a gate, but we don't really expect these ships to come home anyway, and this is all a learning and/or rust removal experience so it was all good. All of our options in the bubble were bad and soon afterwards we all died.
Good times!
Afterwards, at Home, a small wake was held for our lost ships and pods, plus a quick discussion on what we learnt from the roam.
It was very instructional.