I remember my first big battle.

One Friday afternoon as we started fleet operations, the subcap fleet was being aligned on a non-reinforced POS. This is normally a really bad idea considering the POS can blow subcaps out of the water in a cycle or two.

As it turns out they were staging their capital ships at a new, unarmed, POS who's password was leaked due to a GIA agent who had an undercover Jump Freighter alt in the BoB alliance.

Just before we landed on grid the fleet commander posted the POS's password in chat. This doesn't let you shoot into the POS, but you could bump ships out of the POS shields by flying into them. This is (was?) even more effective against capital ships who have terrible turning radius and acceleration. We interdicted the shit out of the PoS, lit a cyno for a around 50 dreadnoughts and played bumper cars with a few Nyx while the seiged dreadnoughts chewed them up.

After about an hour, and 2 and a half Nyx later, they brought in their subcap fleet through the gate, dropped an Avatar on us, dd'd our entire subcap fleet, and then jumped in and bubbled our dreadnoughts.

We were reforming at a station 2 systems away and fleet command sent out an alert over Jabber (this was before Discord so we had an entire array of goonfleet hosted services) for cap pilots to login.

We ended up with an Erebus, another 20 dreadnoughts and some carriers and motherships for the 2nd wave. The Erebus DD'd their subcap fleet, our subcaps jumped on grid and tackled the Avatar. Our Dreadnoughts had it about halfway through armor and the motherships in the POS were logging/not coming out to try to save it.

They managed to get their subcapital fleet, 2 motherships and a few carriers back into the fight as the Avatar went into structure and by that time it was taking upwards of 10 minutes to get a lock (this was also pre-time dialation). We were chewing through their hictors so our dreads could jump out after the Avatar died.... the the node crashed.

The Avatar pilot didn't log back in immediately so we camped that POS location for nearly 2 weeks straight. I think it got away by logging in right after maintenance and immediately getting cyno'd out.

Technically a win, isk-wise, but losing the Avatar kill hurt (it died a few weeks later in another large engagement but I wasn't there).

I don't think I managed to land a single attack between getting DDd and the lag but it definitely hooked me on the fleet combat side of things.

Anyway, Rho Squad, bests quad