What may have seemed like a fairly routine “Rorqual-damsel-in-distress” situation wound up being a bit of a disaster as the rescuing parties lost ships to the tune of 379b to a Pandemic Horde / WE FORM V0LTA dreadbomb.
Though Fountain is a lucrative place to be for many Goonswarm pilots, it’s generally not recommended to be mining there with a Rorqual. Without being nice and cozy tucked away in Delve, mining in a Rorqual can be a risky proposition. Funny enough, a Rorqual killmail doesn’t seem to have found its way to the battle report, so it may have actually survived.
Rorqual saved! Titans down!
Unfortunately for said Rorqual’s intrepid rescue squad, their losses were pretty devastating, and came quickly. Judging by the battle report, it appears that the rescue Titans warped in and took a small chunk out of the attacking party’s Dread squad…but that was only a hint of what was to come. Within minutes, 4 Finnish Space Jaegers (F-S-J) Titans had been destroyed by the attacking force’s dreadbomb, making up the brunt of the ISK losses for this battle.
Not too long after that, the cavalry showed up for the defence force, and wiped out most of the dreadnoughts that were left. The battle continued for the better part of an hour, but the damage had already been done on the defending side. Though they were able to chase off their attackers with the help of INIT and Bastion, F-S-J had suffered some fairly significant losses.
Word from boots on the ground
We were put in touch with Init. FC Dark Shines, whose rescue team made as much of an effort as they could to get there quickly. “…we only got wind of it when the first Titan loss showed up on Zkill. Due to the jump divide in fountain we had to do a mid but the last titan died about a minute before we landed on grid” said the Init. FC. There wasn’t much more that they could’ve done to change the outcome, as Dark Shines mentions that the Titan losses may have been accelerated by pilot inexperience, and some poor fits. They added that “Its interesting that this is the second dreadbomb by V0lta and co in the last 24 hours, we killed a smaller dreadbomb last night as well, so things seem to be heating up in Fountain as far as capital drops go.” Does this speak to a possible push in the Fountain region? War-hungry Goonswarm pilots are likely chomping at the bit, hoping so.
We also contacted the F-S-J Titan pilots to hear their side of the story. At the time of writing, we have not yet received any reply.
