Thursday, July 28, 2011

It is called a 0,0 lagfest for a reason...

Last night we participated in the defence of 46DP in southern Tenerifis as part of the -A- block. The station was coming out of reinforced at about 2300 suiting late Euro/ early American tz. With 2 hours to go various fleets had accumulated round the area, an -A- BS fleet, a carrier triage fleet to rep the station and a sub-capital fleet made up of associated coalition alliances.
With 30 minutes to go local spiked from 600 to 1200 and the fight was on. Red Alliance entered 46DP-0(Tenerifis) from 77S8-E(Detorid), bubbles went up, defense warped to the gate, the overview loaded and for the next 30minutes it was very hard to ascertain what had happened. Brackets are off, overview is limited to enemy logistics targets and still it is hard to make out what is happening. Your modules appear to cycle, from time to time apparently random damage registers, your ship keeps going in whatever direction it was going when you entered grid. I am fortunate to have a second computer with another client running in the home station and kept expecting to see my main appear in the clone bay.
After an hour I logged off to see if it made a difference and on re logging I found my stealth bomber off station, apparently I had warped there sometime in the last hour. The fleet is a mess, wing commander slots are mainly empty, fleet bonuses are apparently not being passed on. I warp back to the engagement by warping to a fleet member that is cosying up to Red Avatar. As local begins to drop from 1300 towards 1100 things begin to move again. Overview appears to be more 'correct' than the visual however you still get plenty of messages saying that so and so is no longer on grid when he is still in overview. Trying to find a target on grid becomes the priority. Unfortunately for the titan pilot, he is the biggest thing reliably rendered on everyones screen, he is called primary, various reports of how far he is in shields/ armour/ structure are called then he is no longer there.
An anxious wait later and he appears on the killboards! First titan on our killboard, though I doubt my railguns did more then scratch his paintwork... then again maybe a hybrid antimatter shot penetrated the backup reactor through an emergency exhaust at the end of a trench...
A bit of chasing ensued as the remnants of White Noise and Red sub capital fleets made for adjacent systems, SBUs dropped last Monday by the invaders popped in quick succession. Yours truly ended up in the wrong system and while admiring the titan killmail (read: trying to find how much damage I had done :-) I get popped by a small gang. It is 2 in the morning, time to call it a night.

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