Busting a Gate Camp

From flickr user andy castro

We took an open fleet on a roam last night, but all the usual hot-spots were quiet. We caught the odd small fry here and there, but whenever we found a large group on d-scan they inevitably turned out to be friendly.

Militia chat mentioned a five ship gate camp in Hevrice. They were snaring incoming ships from highsec. This posed a probably for our FC, Marcel, as he (and one of our interceptor pilots) cannot go to highsec. His solution was a clever piece of organizing and it all hinged on not spooking the gatecamp into running away from the large group of Enyos, Exequrors and interceptors that we were bringing.

The following plan was composed on the fly; you could almost hear the ideas coming to him as he realized what restrictions were placed on him by the game mechanics. He divided the fleet into four parts: a neutral "bait" ship, two (or more?) interceptors to apply tackle (2 of these were in low-sec, the rest in high-sec), and the DPS (Enyo) / logi (Exeqs) ships. We needed to approach this gate camp from the high-sec side: if we all went through low-sec and appeared in Hevrice local, we'd scare them away.

We divided into the four parts of the fleet and Marcel and Huard shepherded us to the right places. When we were all in place, we sprung the trap! The bait ship went in and drew aggro from the gate camp. Then the interceptors and tackle ships jumped in and pointed the gate campers. The DPS/logi ships were on their way too, and when we arrived we hit their Rapier (444M) first, then the Myrmidon (120M) and Gnosis (83M). They had a Devoter too, but it managed to get away through the jump gate.

We lost a couple of Atrons before logi arrived, but our four Exeqs kept everyone else alive. The loot was good; a 146M warp disruptor and a 28M skillbook they'd looted off someone, plus assorted other stuff.

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I heard a funny story on comms the other night. Our British FC was up at 4am his time and someone asked didn't he have to work in the morning. "I'm under house arrest." "WHAT?" The story goes that he committed a minor civil offense (nobody was hurt) and didn't show up to do community service. He was sentenced to house arrest from 7pm to 6am each day for a while.

You're thinking what I'm thinking, and his girlfriend said it too: "Don't they know that's NOT punishment for you?"