Compton, in my EVE?

Just Another Day
In A Violent Neighborhood


So, as I am sure most of you know, we lost a couple ships while dismantling one of our POSs last night, mostly due to blind luck, but also one key issue: hesitation.

Throwing up or taking down a POS always hinges on one pivotal period of time, being the point at which the shield bubble is not up and you have hundreds of million in ISK floating helplessly not only in ships but in the tower itself. The trick is to know when the timing is right to take these kinds of actions as a tower takes an hour to bring up or down. For argument's sake let us call this window of time the ante bellum period, or before the war as it were, as besides capital fleets or takedown blobs of battleships, there is only one other time where a POS is quite so vulnerable and you never know when the preceding moments may ultimately lead to total chaos, as was the case last night.

Last night, I spent a majority of the evening taking pieces off the POS, and docking and redocking repeatedly in system with the components. Having taken down nearly a billion in assets, I removed the fuel to a day's worth remaining in the tank, but left some EWAR online at the tower, just to snag any would be opportunists, so a fleet could come dispose of them if necessary.

Now there are two sides to POS management, the violent and non-violent. You can either let every one of your alliance brethren, blues, friends, and the like know you are going to be in the critical ante bellum period soon and need their support or you can sneak it in on a quiet night and let only a handful of trusted confidants know what you are up to. With the violent option, while you let your brethren know your business, you also let every spy, boob, tool, opportunist, disreputable, or just damned careless person know when and where you are going to be vulnerable for an entire hour. Much like blue intel in Citadel, I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to this kind of thing, as an hour is a long time for someone to prepare a hostile fleet and move it to my position so why let the ubiquitous spies have any chance at getting an upper hand on me. So what you get is the second option, you time it right, hopefully, you commit yourself to risking X amount of material assets, and you go for it. This is what I have done since February, without a hitch mind you. I had even thrown a POS up in a system over this past weekend with absolutely no drama. That changed last night.

So, the once research POS, turned reactions POS, has always been a thorn in my side since the first few weeks. Located too close to both pipes, giving little time for warning, and receiving relatively little support in some sense from the residents around us over time, the POS has always frustrated me with its presence. I would prefer it to be a jump deeper, to be perfectly honest. I wanted it down three months ago, but the only reason it stayed was for our reactions project. How I wish I had just taken it down when I had the opportunity to do so, before the area got consistently hot enough to merit me taking the risk I did last night, which in my mind was at the lowest risk point I could have taken under recent circumstances.

Anyways, word to the wise, every time I have lost a ship, and it has been my fault, even if it was sheer luck that landed me in a difficult situation, I have lost it due to one thing, as noted before: hesitation.

What is this seemingly neutral, harmless, somewhat tepid word that can do so much damage? Because when seconds matter, hesitation only escalates the potential for disaster. Such as in fleets, so as in day to day operations, a moment's pause can mean the difference between coming out with the shirt on your back as opposed to hanging onto your frame in tattered pieces.

Quiet. Is the best I can describe the local area when I decided to finally remove the EWAR modules, and offline the tower. Who knew about this? Evidently only myself and the red fleet that would soon make my night one to remember, for better or worse.

At 11:15pm last night I noted three residents in local, one blue, one neutral, and myself. A good start to my plans to take the tower down, right? An hour later, having observed the intel channel for hostile movements, noted the red fleet in the low security pipe was busy camping the empire gate, and still seeing only a handful of people in local, I made the call. Assuming that because the hostile movements in Providence itself were on the outer rim, and that the pirates in the low security pipe where none the wiser, touche, I began taking down the EWAR modules. Bearing in mind I had planned this. So with only a Geddon (120mil), Occator (100mil), Tower (342mil), day's worth of fuel (10mil), and five EWAR modules (50mil) I was playing the odds with well less than a billion ISK worth of things. "Okay, this is not too bad," I think to myself, "I just do not want some random neutral catching wind of this and giving me trouble, the Geddon should be enough for that."

I noted that Devin had logged on a few minutes earlier and was unable to stir the troops into a roam, and thus might be available to give me a little moral support. After all, while I may love taking calculated risks completely solo and unfettered, these were corporate assets I was playing a dangerous but controlled game with. So he came out in his Deimos, and warped to my position, under the jokingly humorous impression that since I would not tell him what he was warping to, that I might have laid some trap for him. In retrospect, I suppose I had.

54 minutes 32 seconds
That was the time remaining for the tower to go down when Devin joined my fleet. As far as I knew no one but the wind, myself, and Devin knew any of this was happening.

45 minutes
I noticed a spike of neutrals in local. I commented to Devin that this made me uneasy. It had been so quiet for an hour or more, why the sudden spike?

38 minutes 27 seconds
There is a spike of reds in local, some seven or eight. I exclaim over ventrilo, "Ah well... fuck me, Devin align immediately." Only here is the key, while I immediately aligned my Geddon, I hesitated on my Occator. I had 400mil floating in space, and this had not once ever occurred to me, what to actually do when it really happened, so I was battling my instincts in this totally new situation, you know, the fight or flight response. Sure, I knew I was going to lose no matter what, so why give it a second thought? Well, like the captain who ponders whether he should stay with the sinking ship or not, I was questioning whether I should just beat it, or if I should align first, and warp away only when the reds arrive, as they inevitably would, my gut was telling me, and that way I could report their numbers and types when they showed their ugly faces. I decided, after only a few seconds pause, that I was in no position to play chicken with a fleet of unknown composition in a ship worth 100mil so I hit the warp button.

38 minutes 10 seconds
Reds begin appearing on the grid as my Occator is in the process of aligning and warping to a station. I warp my Geddon away and dock. My Occator, not so lucky. Devin's Deimos did not fare so well either. This was bad, I made a poor choice, I hesitated for mere moments, and that was all it took. Seconds from warping away in my Occator, and I'm tackled by not one but two HICs with infinite point. So much for Deep Space Transports. The first impression I got after I was popped, and got away in my pod, was that they were after the jetcan of modules I had, any contents within my cargo bay, and the tower itself. But not sixty seconds after I warped away and even before I managed to get to a station to dock my defenseless egg, the reds were leaving system again. "No way that had been enough time for them to scoop and run", I thought to myself. Compton, in my EVE? Was I the homie laid out on the sidewalk after the smoke from the tires cleared or what? I could not escape the feeling I had just been had, for no other reason than that they could do it, and the tower was the last thing on their minds. The only reason I would not otherwise have admired them for such a brazen and well executed kill is if I had not seen them babbling like kindergartners in local only hours before, as if they all shared a single brain cell between them.

35 minutes
Sure enough, as we frantically reported the aggression in the intel channel, I warped to the grid in my blockade runner as valiant men from the alliance began joining my fleet and approaching the grid themselves. I've always liked cloaks better than stabs. Much to my surprise, not only was my wreck, jetcan, and the like still present, but there was a neutral in a hauler scooping my stuff! "Shoot the shit after I warn him in local!" I told our newest member BJ, a friend of HuffDaddy, who arrived quickly upon hearing of our dilemma. *BOOM* the neutral is annihilated after refusing to leave the grid once warned to do so. "At least something is blowing up and it does not belong to myself or the AU-F," I mutter to myself.

33 minutes
I start receiving private conversation requests left and right from fleet commanders of holder alliances, blue alliances, and just anyone you can imagine. They are all on their way. Suddenly fleets of twenties and thirties are being mobilized, I am being asked a hundred questions a minute in private conversations, the intel channel, over audio, in the fleet channel, not to mention the voice in my head going "Stupid stupid stupid, you got impatient and made a poor decision on a relatively quiet night after reds had been active off and on for weeks prior!"

28 minutes
Here comes the cavalry. Blue after blue, neut after neut, are here to save the day, warping onto the grid, making my loss of an Occator pale in comparison to the wealth of ships laid out before me, only in my defense this time. If I were to describe it in any way, it would be to say it was magnificent, just magnificent. Logic had always promised me, and as my members have worried me about from time to time, that this area is well protected, and while minor skirmishes, guerrilla warfare, piracy, and fleet battles may or may not receive universal support from the residents in our space, anything involving a POS immediately becomes everybody's business. How right he was. And so the man with the key to the golden city had delivered on his promise. Our POS was in danger and people were coming out of the woodwork to defend the AOV, and it was glorious. Now I understand, Amarr Victor!

20 minutes
No more sign of our reds, nor our friendly neutral who tried to ninja my wreck and cans. The fleet is on standby, my head is still spinning, and I sit there, tapping my fingers nervously on the desk waiting for the tower to finish going down so I can scoop it and run like hell. Thoughts of red blobs of unimaginable size jumping into local and wailing on my defenders in some epic pitched battle race through my head, which is filmy and hazy from the couple of beers I thought would relax me, that instead now haunt me as I desire to be alert as possible while the weight of a day's work and a few drinks numb my senses.

0 minutes
What an anticlimactic but most fortuitous end to an unbelievable string of events. Not a red in sight, I scoop the tower, the cavalry warps off to pursue my aggressors, and within minutes, what was once our first POS, having stood resolute for five months straight, was just an empty grid, with a few cans floating aimlessly through space, and some of my alliance brethren still hanging around to make sure I made it to the finish line. Now I can take a breath again.


So, in retrospect, what more could I ask for, I got to get rid of a troublesome, hard to fuel, poorly placed POS in a relatively hostile system too close to the pipes, and for all my troubles, I lost an Occator I had owned for four or five months anyways, and a good friend lost his Deimos. But not a single drop of fuel, POS module, nor the tower itself was lost. Amazing. Simply, amazing.

What is the lesson here? Well, I do not think I made an unwise choice to take the path I did as it was quieter last night than it had been in weeks. I simply think that this is proof positive that you can never let your guard down in this game, as just when you thought you had learned exactly how to sneak by unseen, someone snoops you out and all hell breaks loose. My mistake, in all honesty, was simply hesitation. Never hesitate. If you know the odds, but you are having second thoughts, you are going to lose your ship. Thankfully at least the Geddon survived, so maybe I can hop in a fleet with it sometime, and return the favor to our friends, the irksome if not persistent MAVs. I will see you soon, you little bastards.