Fountain ratting setup

Although we're still intensely fighting it's starting to look as though there's a better than 50% chance of TEST keeping Fountain so I've been thinking about how I want to rat.

Here's the armada of ships I intend to use, all of them cheap and non-faction. The relative lack of bling is a big safety factor as blinged out ships, particularly carriers, attract gankers.

2 Dominix:

The basic idea is just to drop sentries and run a remote armour repper. The new NPC rat AI is such that they particularly hate "healers" so this should keep all the aggro focused on the Domis. The offline cloak is for when I want to go plexing rather than run anomalies.

The Garde IIs have an optimal of 68.4 km and tracking of 0.082 both of which are really good for a battleship ratter. By keeping them 20km apart it should mean one can easily pick off frigates attacking the other one.

If one ship is getting hit hard then the other Domi(s) can rep it.

I'm considering dropping one of the reppers for a heavy nos. One of these Domi pilots is also my main pvp character so he won't always be there as I'm prioritising pvp.

My third ship is going to be a Typhoon:

This demands a much more active playstyle than the Domis but is very high dps and can merrily chase down the battleships, letting the Domis wipe out the smaller stuff. Its painter helps the whole fleet do more damage.

This guy is also my explorer so instead of ratting with him I can have him in a cov ops scanning for sites while the Domis rat.

Damnation:

This guy's only job is to sit afk in a POS running gang links. It's armour tanked just in case it somehow finds itself in pvp. It adds armour resists, reduces sig radius, reduces armour repper cap cost and duration for the whole gang.

No ratting gang would be complete without one of these:

It's based around the new salvage drones. They can be a bit finnicky - you have to launch them with no targets selected and tell them to salvage to get them to work properly. Still it's pretty awesome to drop your noctis in a sea of wrecks, set the drones off, alt tab for half an hour and come back to see just cans.

This pilot also flies a pretty mean Heron for those minigame sites.

Our well-drilled war machine in action

Nullsec is famous for large fleets of skilled veteran pvp pilots coordinating together in machine-like precision.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Actually flying with us is more like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo-pRnDMH2E

Amazingly we're actually beating the goons despite managing later in the op to let them kill undefended haulers when we had 500 in system and noone to shoot.

The Great War: the plan emerges

How much is planning manipulation and forethought and how much is happenstance luck or impulse we'll never know but the war for Fountain has mushroomed into a well balanced war which will last for months rather than the rofflestomp that it seemed at first.

Pandemic Legion, NC., Nulli, SCRAP have all weighed in on Test's side creating a conflict that is actually more heavily weighted against the CFC than Montolio's plan for a HBC-CFC was 5 months ago.

The conflict also rather elegantly matches the personalities of the principle characters involved - DaBigRedBoat, who famously loves to grind structures, gets to grind structures which will generate the reinforcement timers for the good fights that the rest of Eve's leading FCs prefer.

The conflict is poised on a knife edge where small and unpredictable events in real life could prove cataclysmic. Imagine if DBRB were to get married and stop playing...

The initiative is firmly with the CFC who are winning most of the fights and grinding many structures unopposed. However the forces against them are slowly wielding themselves into an effective fighting force although with considerable problems along the way.

For TEST it's taken us some time to react and get deployed. The alliance that regularly put 1000+ in fleets to defend its Delve heartlands is struggling to get half into ops on the far edge of its empire.

Coordination has been a problem. Pandemic Legion got bombed by TEST bombers, a mistake by the FC (and incidentally just about the first time he's landed a perfect bombing run).