Losing my first capital. RIP Large rigs Moros

It's funny how things sometimes turn out. Just the other day I wrote a piece of me being lucky and almost getting rolled out with my dread, but making it back. It looks like universe, or should I say BOB, had other plans in mind.

Evacuating assets

We had a corp meeting recently. The topic was to discuss the future of USYSC. Since activity has dropped significantly, a lot of people leaving the corp and some busy in RL, it's been very quiet in the corp, thus some course of action was necessary. Decision was taken to merge with another WH corp that was run by one of our ex members. It takes a great deal of time and effort to run a corp. If you do not have such dedicated people, corp will go into inactivity mode as it happened to us.

When I moved in, it was my first real WH corp experience. I was very excited and a bit overkilled with the moving in part. I brought in more than 15bil of assets to the wormhole on my first days. Ships for every situation, replacement ships, all assortment of rigs and mods, minerals to build backup ships, blueprints. In other words, I moved my lowsec station to wormhole. A stupid decisions, but I did not know any better. I knew I could lose it all, but never took it seriously and thankfully, it never came to that.

Lately I have been exporting some of my stuff out. Whenever I had good or goodish connection, I would haul my assets to highsec. Repackage everything, ship it off to Jita and stock it or sell it. I've been doing this for a week until I got left with very few ships that I pilot. One ship that I still needed to get out was my first and only dread - Moros. I've been scanning like crazy and with little luck, I got a c5 connection 3 jumps out that had 2 lowsec connections, of which one I chose to park my dread at.

Solo flying out dread like a boss

Connecting systems seems to be fairly inactive. I get into my dread and my remaining 3 alts into covert ops ships with webs. My target is as follows: HOME -> C5s -> C5a -> C5b -> LS. There are only few guys in corp on comms and they are somewhat afk. Screw it. I'm taking it out. What could go wrong with scouts on every entry. Right?

I go ahead with my plan. Warp to c5s, jump, warp to c5a, web. Ok, first stage complete. I jump to c5a, warp to c5b, web and dread is in warp. So far so good. Suddenly I see a proteus decloak on c5b. Holy shit. I start shouting for support on comms. Calling in jammers and anything that can come to aid. There are few guys alive in the corp that are shipping up and starting to head out to assist me. Meanwhile my dread lands on a c5b. I do not jump and instead, try to warp back to c5a. Proteus is not jumping, however Stratios decloaks, jumps in and tackles my dread on the other side before I can warp out. Ok, shit is about to go down.

I run through my options. I could stall time and wait for my corp jammers to arrive, but seeing only few ships on scan I assume my run to another corp is opportunity based and they are not prepared to kill my dread. Yet. I jump Moros through the wormhole while decloaking my tackle Proteus on the other side. Now there is Proteus and Loki. Both of them tackle my Proteus and start shooting. Getting aggro from everyone, I overheat my web and initiate warp with dread which turns out to be 18.200 meters away from me.

Overheated faction web has only 18km range. I desperately try burn to my dread while tackled to oblivion. At 30m/s I slowly approach into range. I am surprised how my dread is not tackled during this time, but I finally land a web and Moros is in warp to lowsec. I get a small relief. Meanwhile my corpmates came and small fight started. I still had to get to Lowsec and get to station so day was not over yet. Once I land on lowsec wormhole I nervously jump in and initiate warp to station. Have they not scanned lowsec entrance yet? Have they been tackled by my team and unable to follow? I raise questions in surprise that my dread warps off safely and is at the station. I shout on comms that Moros is safe and we should bail, however our FC has other thoughts in mind. We are having a pretty good small gang fight so we stick around and try to kill anything.

A small gang brawl

A fight drags on. Both sides unable to kill anyone do to few dps and logi present. Once more and more of our corp members joins in the fight we start to outnumber them. Seeing things going south, Nocturnal Predators Rus decide to upgrade ships. They bring an Archon and a Vindicator.

We can't break anything and they can't break us. Fight came to a stall and only reasonable thing would be to do is to try and get everyone out safely. Instead, my killer instinct remembers a Moros parked in at the lowsec entrance of the wormhole. It still should have enough mass for IN and OUT jumps. A perfect counter for the Archon. I volunteer and FC agrees. Fight continues, while I try to get my dread back.

Pesky Machariel

Getting dread back was it's own adventure. I undock from station with -10 pirate sitting there. I don't think much of him and initiate warp back to wormhole. Except that this pirate quickly swaps for a bumping Machariel. Station is a kickout and soon I find my self 1km out of docking range. You have to be kidding me. Unable to warp, I try to go back to undock. Machariel desperately tries to keep me out of range while I desperately try to get back in safe arms of the station. Local is increasing and from 2 neuts I now have 5.

This is not good. I report this to the fleet and ask if I can get support, meanwhile burning with my Poteus to tackle Machariel and shut his mwd off. While on the way, somehow my Moros manages to dock back up. Sensing an opportunity I try to convo a Machariel pilot. I tell him about fight next door and offer him and his gang to come to assistance. He refuses and tells me he will just let me go. I am not sure if I can trust him, but with my proteus now on grid, I can web warp so it doesn't matter much. I go back.

A glorious death

Finally, after what seemed like eternity, my dread is in warp to the battle. Fight is still on going. Once I land my Moros, I start dishing out pain, that Archon seems to tank without big problem. We try to keep the pressure so he goes low on cap, but events take unexpected turn. One reason my dread and fleet had such hard time killing anybody was that system turned out to be Wolf-Rayet. A system, that gives massive bonuses to armor HP + 86% more and -43% to sig radius. Something that noone happened to notice when fight happened. The unexpected turn of event was that we saw a Moros and a Naglafar on scan. 

I was keeping pressure on the Archon, but he wouldn't drop below 30%. My biggest mistake was not to turn off siege cycle in time. When we spotted enemy dreads, cycle was about to finish and me hesitating for 5 seconds resulted in starting 2nd cycle. After a minute, we had 2 dreads on grid with 3rd one on scan. They made short work of my dread.

We knew Moros was gone. While I was busy dying, fleet was busy slowboating to wormhole for evac. Fast forward a minute and my dread was nothing but a wreck with fleet at the wormhole ready for jump out with exception of Armageddon that was quickly popped after Moros went down. In the end, we managed to kill noone, but did not welp as many ships as could have.

This is EVE

This experience is exactly why I play EVE. What started with transporting dreadnought out of W-Space, turned into ambush, that escalated in to small gang fight, that escalated in small cap fight. Both corps brought what they could and did their best with numbers they had. I was very happy to see my first Moros, that I bought long time ago in my lowsec days, did not end up as a gank victim, but instead, it died in the glorious fire of the battlefield. I could have just kept it at the station, but seeing an opportunity and seizing it is what makes a great story in this unique game.