After Action Report, 4th of May 2009
Miaauu, said the cats, stretching and yawning. We're hungry, but we're lazy too. Lets just sit here the mousehole and wait for a mouthful to come out.
Peep said the mice, look at all those big cats. Let's just stay in here where it's warm and cozy.
Hum de dum said Dr D, lets try something different
Problem
Opfor knows everything about us.
They know who we are, where we are, what we fly, how we fly, what we think, how we think, the friggin colors of our socks. They know our modus operandi, our reason d'etre, our casus belli. Heck, if they grow tired of war, they might just as well set up shop as psycho-analysts for all of us.
They know this, not only because they have spies in corp chat, alliance chat, teamspeak, most fleets and probably quite a few command channels, but mostly because they're the ones that taught us almost everything we know. Fighting our former teachers is hard, because the element of surprise is more or less gone from our reportoire. They know everything we know, but we know only the subset they taught us.
Challenge
Change up. I have long wanted to fight them in a non standard way. Since we have only one standard way of fighting, almost any change would add something new.
Opportunity
Scouting throughout the war has shown many situations like this:
See that one guy down to the right? Far far away from anyone else? The sniper? The loner? The straggler? The one not in with the pack? The one all alone? Him I want for breakfast!
Tactical thoughts
Opfor is skilled, and flies skilled. Often in battleships, battlecruisers and T2 cruisers. Basically, they have us outgunned by a ratio I don't even want to compute.
So what to do when the other guy has the bigger gun? You duck, sidestep, hop around and make sure that even if he does hit you, he doesn't hit too hard. This calls for a frigate swarm.
Frigates (T1) are great in that everyone can fly them and they are cheap. A frigate loss doesn't matter at all. T2 frigs dish out decent DPS and support. All frigates are quick, fast, agile and nimble. A frigate can outfly the guns of a battleship, and missiles waste a lot of explosion power on a small sig-radius ship. However, expect to lose quite a few, because most frigs are not designed to tank.
What we did
A call out in alliance chat got a couple of wing & squad commanders, and we had a 30 man fleet. One by one, we undocked from the clear stations and gathered at the POS, which ofcourse is watched by opfor spies. We also got a remote repping Domi to POS in case we needed repairs in space.
Now starts the fun.
The wing commander is assigned the task of moving all pilots around through various positions in space. Just move, move, move. We expect opfor to have pilots in fleet, so pilots are basically being told "get ready to warp", and then suddenly they're ninja warping. Frigs can do this, because of their short align time, and when the whole fleet is in the same ship-class, the fleet moves as one.
School of Applied Knowledge (SAK) is still camped, but we start ping-ponging back and forth on grid. Bam, in at 200 below, out. Boom, in at 150 west, out. Zip, zoom, ping, pong. We have trusted eyes on SAK and soon the wartargets starts moving too. They warp out here and there, and at one point SAK is totally free. Hah! The rest of the fleet can undock.
The fleet is complete, from here on it's a story of warp-in points.
The new combat probing system is brilliant for this kind of work. Drop a probe-set around a station, and basically enjoy 60 minutes of warp-in points of all war-targets.
So we continue zooming around Korsiki while the scouts go for warp-ins. A couple of times, the scout get's too close to station and is decloaked. At other times, the warp-in is set up but aborted in the last second as the WT moves away. But two times we had an enemy sniper Eagle warp in and cloak, but we still managed to fix his position. The fleet is brought in close, and we hope to decloak him. Being so close with 30 bloodthirsty frigs was a true opportunity. However, other WTs were on grid, so we couldn't really spread out and search as much as we would have liked. So we warp out to a planet, get's followed by the enemy, but warp out once more.
The second time we go for the sniper Eagle the scenario basically repeats itself.
At this point, we see WTs are being much more active. They don't sit still for long, but instead warp around when camping. They bring in more and faster ships, to counter us. So we decide to call it the day.
Anyways, it was nice to get some vacuum under the wings again. Cheers to all involved, and warm thanks to WC & SCs for top notch execution.
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