2018.04.30
So being the ex-carebear, weird photography girl I am, I had an idea. I wanted to see Titanomachy for myself, having never been in my years playing EVE, but wanted to gather some like minds and see if we couldn't make an excursion of it.
Enter Horde Space Tours, a made-up safari/tour group company. In hindsight, I'm sad that I couldn't make it even cheesier.
We departed with about 13 Hordelings, most of them Newbeans, to our intermediary destination, a shattered planet in SL-YBS. Galsborne Risolo was my +1 scout. It was a fairly quiet fleet, but a smattering of questions about EVE in general, some folks learning fleet mechanics, and some banter. I made bad safari jokes, vamping to keep 10+ beans entertained for the mostly uneventful trip there. Thankfully, the view when we got to our waypoint was a sight to see.
We took a brief bio break, and a neut Imperial Navy Slicer passed through system. I took this as a sign to get the caravan back on the road. 27 more jumps to B-R. We started encountering more pockets of neutral players, and Galsborne kept us on our toes by calling out when gates were clear. We ran into some drag bubbles. There was a Scorpion and Loki that attempted to camp our outgate, but a quick ping to a structure and some patience meant we passed unscathed. Suddenly, we were passing through TEST's U-QVWD. We jumped the gate and were staring at a Ragnarok anchored on a Keepstar. After some local spam to agitate the wildlife, we quickly jumped out of system towards B-R. Well, except for one brave soul (Charlotte Ayo) who decided to go scram a Titan. It didn't end well for them.
Finally, we were in B-R, and a quick fleet warp pulled this into view.
I gathered the beans around the proverbial campfire and told them the story of B-R. I'm not nearly as veteran as my time in EVE would seem to say, so I wasn't there in person, but I did the best I could... stressing the scope, scale and length of one of the first megabattles in EVE. The fleet swapped stories about our roles in the more recent 9-4, while we scattered and each kind of picked a wreck to inspect, like campers playing in the river.
Slowly, some neuts started entering system. An Ares and a Cerberus landed on the distant Fortizar, and, resigned to our fates this far from home, we started trying to bump them off tether. No avail. I put it to a vote, and we decided that the pod express was the best way to get home, and were going to forcibly enlist TEST for the trip. All except our ceptor pilots, god bless them.
As we made the trek back to U-Q, we started noticing a trail of neuts, spread out across the gates. In RF6T-8, we stopped on gate and made a stand against a small gang of Evictus pilots, managing to kill one Griffin. Fauna in this biome can be fierce and territorial, and a Hecate in a tall tree and an angry mother Cerberus was all it took to take down us city folk.
Next stop for Horde Space Tours: the first stargate in the system of New Eden, the birth place of modern history!