Contract Recaps

I just realized on the way home from work tonight that I had skipped a contract recap! That means you'll be getting two in one post this time! We'll just jump right in:

Contract Type: POCO Destruction

Our employer wanted us to destroy some POCOs in a wormhole. Some of these were NPC POCOs and others were player POCOs. We didn't expect much resistence, but there was a decent chance of a response fleet.

This was a pretty straightforward contract except for one thing: the timeline required that we launch the contract at a fairly bad time. It landed a few hours before the EU timezone really kicked in and way before the US timezone was active. I wasn't sure if we were going to have enough pilots for the initial push to make headway early so we could wrap it up quickly. Luckily we had some allstar EU and US players who weren't at work that handled it all very quickly. They reinforced or destroyed every POCO in the wormhole back to back, and by the time reinforcements came to relieve them, there weren't many left to hit.

Two days later they came out and we re-emerged to destroy them all in pretty quick succession. We had to wait a few minutes in between some of the POCOs, but that was nice since the wait was just long enough for a bio break and some food, but not so long that you got bored.

The contract itself was completely successful, but obviously it would have been nice to have a fight too. We ended up with six player POCOs and two NPC pocos destroyed.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/44934290/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/44936008/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/44936304/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/44936683/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/44936847/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/44937139/

Our second contract was very last minute, and pretty late US timezone. Once again, our heros in the allaince stayed up way past a sensible hour to help make this contract successful as well.

Contract Type: POS Defense

Our employer had a POS that had been reinforced by a kitchen sink: Tornadoes, Ishtars, Dominixes, and a handful of stealth bombers. We expected a similar fleet composition for the destruction attempt with the possibility of Dreadnoughts so we fielded an Ishtar fleet with Lachesis, Scimitar, and Maulus as support. The plan was to time our arrival with the enemy fleet - to let them get into position and begin their assault and have our employer and his corp grab tackle as we swooped in.

Things moved according to plan: we were moving a dozen or so jumps to get into position and were four jumps out when the employer announced the enemy fleet was on grid. He was in the POS shields ready to nab tackle when given the order. There were a few other members of his corporation online, but to our dismay they weren't capable of participating due to lack of combat-allocated SP or understanding of mechanics that weren't realized until too late. We had to make due with one tackle and hope for the best.

Once we got two jumps out the employer was told to go ahead and start making his approach for tackle. Unfortunately that attempt failed and as we were landing, no one was tackled so they just warped away.

We found their POS and kept eyes on them while our Scimitars began repping the tower. The employer brought in his Thanatos to hep rep but he didn't have any triage. He was strongly encouraged to go fit triage and instructed on how to position his Thanatos so it wouldn't be in any real danger if things went down after all. That took probably 15 minutes before he was fit out properly and in position though. Our scimitars did some serious work.

Eventually the enemy fleet began to log off, realizing there wasn't much they could do here and we left the employer to finish repairing his POS after about 45 minutes or so of our logistics helping in that regard.

So again, a nice, clean, successful contract but kind of a bummer that there wasn't a fight. Our employer clearly wasn't experienced, but I can't blame him. That's what we came for. It's unfortunate that it was such short notice or I think we could have helped prep him a bit better. I always like doing that, helping the employers that want to get involved to be useful. Often it's a new experience for them and is out of their comfort zone, but they always have a ton of fun. In the end he was still very happy with the result, and as a mercenary I certainly can't complain about a paycheck.