Alliance Tournament: Captain's report stardate 2015.06.23

A massive thank you to Agonist X and Wiros and the Propaganda team for their wonderful work in preparing material for the AT team. I love the stuff they've done and keep getting Wouldn't It Be Cool If ideas. I somehow doubt that my ideas based around England World Cup songs will ever be an actual thing. Still that doesn't stop me from imagining a Brave flag waving in the wind in synch with Three Lions.

We're into our practice routine now. We practice 4 times a week for two hours each. One of these is Test's open practice on Saturday which gives us the chance to test ourselves against other teams. About 6-12 people come to each practice from a squad of around 30.

We're testing different comps and different play situations. We're also discovering and figuring out lots of mistakes - burning out modules with thermodynamics, not noticing we're drifting too close to a big scary battleship because of paying attention to other stuff, boundary violations and so on. We're also seeing some really great piloting - some people on the squad have got some genuine moves, baby.

We've started working on nuances of ewar - that is ewar in the overall match context so that we can learn and practice situations where quite subtle ewar plays can be very effective.

A wild Lychton appeared at our Thursday practice to check everything was going ok -and promptly got roped in to fly a logi for one of the sides. Captain'sVerdict: he needs to come to more practices.

Saturday was the Test open practice but we only had 8 people so we didn't do very well against the other teams until the last match. In that match they brought brawler against our kiters and we flew rings round them. Even though we only had half a team we pushed them close and they complimented us on how hard we were to catch. And nobody boundary violated!

I've been doing a lot of reaching out to other teams to arrange practices. I'm really looking forward to practicing with other teams. Most of them, like us, are new to the tournament. They've all been really friendly - the tournament scene is a community within the community.

I also accidentally arranged us a practice with someone scarily good. What happened was this. I contacted an absolutely expert player and a leading light in the tournament community to ask him some beginner questions about captaining an AT team. He helped me a lot then casually asked if we'd like to practice with them. Not sure what to do, I immediately said yes. So we've got a practice against a really great team which you will read about in 2 weeks time. Welp.

Personnel matters: we've nearly finalised the squad. If you have been asked by me to complete the form and have done so you should hear in the next couple of days. If you haven't heard by Thursday evemail me.

Dojo stuff: we will start doing classes but it won't be this week.

Funding. We have a long way to go with our fundraising.

This is our fundraising site: http://fund.bravecollective.com

Donations can be made by using Give Money with reason "AT team" to the corporation BC Piggy. Check that the CEO is Lychton C Kondur and it's in our alliance before you send the cash, I'm sure this post will inspire some scammers.

We will be doing events to raise money for this project. The first of these will start this week. We will be running inty gangs to hunt ratters in hostile sov. All faction/dead-space/officer loot to the AT fund please from these gangs. Let's go gank stuff and bring back shinies we need the cash.