A Gallente Militia Erebus worth at least 108 billion ISK met its doom Saturday in Ostingele at the hands of the infamous Shadow Cartel. It was flown by Meequals ChucksALT, who as the name suggests was an alt of MrChuckNorris of The Bastard Cartel [TBC]. Chuck was using it as a bridge to move ships to a station, but in a fatal mistake unsafely jumped off the bridge himself, dropping his titan onto the station. Shadow Cartel members lead by lord xavier, who had noticed the move operation, were waiting and ready with a full ambush.
To deepen the tragicomedy of the situation, it’s possible this titan was originally crowdfunded. This is strongly suggested by a screenshot showing MrChuckNorris soliciting donations from Gallente Militia members for the purchase of a titan, but in an interview with themittani.com MrChuckNorris denied this, saying “most of the isk made for it was myself and an ingame/ RL friend of mine Arcturus. Although some donations were made from galmil, but that was not the main source of income for it.”
Whether donations or not, the billions of ISK purchased a remarkably poorly fit Titan, with a T2 loadout optimized for capacitor and four empty high slots, which the pilot said “was due to no intentions of it seeing combat. Was purely a bridging titan.”
For his part, the titan pilot feels that the operation was a backstab by Shadow Cartel:
Tldr on the backstab was I was put in contact with individuals in SC from higher leadership to start workong/ flying together. But it just lead up to killing the erebus…
We’ve done some ops previously and we used the erebus to bridge on some dudes in the past. They know what system it was in and they knew what system it would eventually be moved in. Just not the time. From my perspective, I believe it was an actual camp.
However, the Shadow Cartel member who organized the attack, lord xavier, suggested that he noticed the titan while just passing by in a detailed account on the failheap-challenge.com forums:
While positioning an alt back into Placid. I was passing by some systems I have on my watch list. The original system the Erebus was in just happened to be in the middle of the waypoints. I saw that the pilot was online, so warped over to check out if they were planning to bridge onto something. I noticed that people were offloading ships into the titan. So, I immediately headed over to the most likely destination. Not having a clue where the POS was at I started to look through the system. Assuming they were going safespot warp I was looking at a 5% chance of actually getting it. This is where the wait game came into play while positioning dreads and HICs.
Finally a cyno went up, I warped to it at 10 and landed directly on the station but everything either docked or didnt jump through yet. Bouncing off the station and spamming my warp to a ping off station. I made it off and cloaked back up. A couple minutes go by, I thought it was blown. Ships bridged in finally, and an archon jumped in. From what I understand it was called the in-cyno was good and a ninja cyno wouldnt be necessary. Before I got to finish saying what jumped in followed the line “HOLY FUCK IT JUMPED TO STATION!” as I spammed warped, decloaked, clicking in space and hitting my cyno button. Bridge went up, hics got point. It went down hill from there.
As we were jumping to main lobby while jumping in the caps. Chuck came onto our comms and someone dragged him in. Appearently the “Dreads go here. Hics get on titan.” was not enough of a clue we were doing something. Anyways, when he was in the TS he was calm and collective. Especially for his titan being in 10% armor at that moment. It kind of hit me at that moment in the feels, as I am sure you understand why Cap, but at that point. The call was on the FC to decide if we would let it go or not. Which as you can tell the decision was made to kill it. There was no “Fuck you guys.” or “I fucking hate you.” He handled himself quite well and I personally have no hard feelings towards him. Though I am aware that this definitely ended any work or fleets we may have had together in the future.
Chuck actually didn’t rage quit. He was quite angry, as one would expect when you just lost your titan. But he was on for a bit afterwords. Today he seemed pretty chill. Though, I am sure I made his permanent red list. It is a shame it happened. Chuck is a pretty cool guy. A mistake was made, as we have all done. He just happened to get caught.
MrChuckNorris’ stoicism is indeed admirable; his final comment on the matter was “It wasent as tragic as i thought it would be tbh. I thought id rage quit eve after losing it, but its really not that bad. Was a good run, and im excited to get another.” However, the key lesson of this ALOD remains clear: don’t jump your poorly-fit titan onto a station you haven’t scouted very well and expect to keep it.
