My first shot at Fleet Command

...albeit a bunch of Frigates, was quite good fun.

Readers will possibly recall a couple of months ago that I said that I would give FC'ing a go at some point in the future, well Kishin had pulled at my sleeves quite a bit about teaming up for a run down to my old haunts and I eventually caved. I posted up the Op on the corp forums and was fairly surprised at how popular it seemed. Some 9 pilots had signed up a ship to the cause, despite me stating that this run was estimated to take a helluva long time and cover over 80 jumps. As I was wary of my inexperience at being FC I decided after recommendation by a corp-mate to cap loss reimbursement at 5m isk to encourage T1 non-faction frigates, any "shinies" were bring at your own risk.

Looking at the roam in retrospect, I can see that it was too long and I was flagging at the end. It was however fun, and nice to breeze through gate camps in our bunch of Frigates. Targets were scarce unfortunately, though that's not a factor that I can influence. I imagine I will FC again, though I feel the preparation that I put in planning the route and setting up in & outbound safes paid off. Without the preparation I think my experience would have been very different. It was also nice not to be a Scout, sitting back in almost armchair mode. I made some effort to try and rotate the Scouting too so that no-one was unduly lumbered.

Below is the After Action Report I posted:
We departed on time from Hevrice with our Frigates and set course for Huola, encountering no targets we headed on towards Evati. In the system Hofjaldgund a Faction Warfare mission opened and Tsubutai went in with his Claw and swiftly despatched a Kestrel, no sooner had the Kestrel been dealt with than a Rifter landed. I called the fleet to warp to the mission but the Rifter was down before most of us landed. And so we continued onwards. We chased a few targets around in Hadozeko but alas they came to naught aside from bagging a few abandoned drones after Tsubutai managed to chase off an Arbitrator in another Faction Warfare Mission. We moved through Evati and in to Todifrauan where a neutral Rifter pilot had the gall to engage Kishin on a gate. Kishin having none of it killed him stone dead. After a short rest stop our fleet numbers diminished to six as some folks needed to log. We headed the back way towards Aralgrund but found nothing available to us. We did see a couple of large gangs but slipped by past them. Setting destination back to Hevrice we methodically scouted systems for targets as we downsized to five members as the roam had gone on for what must have been around 3 hours. Mr Snypes who was ably scouting for us at this point announced sight of a Brutix and tackled it as the rest of the gang were engaged by an Omen on the gate in Ingunn, giving the order to jump in rather than agress the Omen we warped Mr Snypes only to see our brave Incursus go "poof" :o, gladly though additional points had been applied to the Brutix. We took out his flight of Warrior II's and ECM drones before making short work of his pure gank shield buffer fit. Warping to a safe to wait out GCC so that we could dock up with the loot Mr Snypes searched the local markets for a new noble steed and found one in a neighbouring high-sec system. Once GCC was up he purchased the craft and rejoined the fleet as fortunately his incursus was very generous dropping 100% of the modules on to make fitting the new one a breeze. While we were waiting out our GCC we were probed out by the Omen pilot we encountered earlier. Seeing him land with us and being nicely pre-aligned we warped to another safe much to his chagrin. It went that smoothly that Kishin didn't realise that we had moved :!: Back in fighting form we continued our journey back to Hevrice. It was when we reached around 10 jumps from Hevrice Zombie, who was scouting announced four EVE Uni pilots in system in Interceptors & covops. We set up a bait for them which they took eventually and then dropped a fleet of around 25 ships onto poor Zombie who had no means of escape. I certainly was flagging by this point in the roam, some 5-6 hours after we had started and we make best speed for Hevrice.