The fight itself actually wasn’t all that lopsided for the first… 3-4 hours I guess? Their support fleet was about 1/3 again the size of ours while our cap fleet was a bit bigger. The numbers on the final killboard list are a bit deceptive, because both sides were continuing to bring in reinforcements for pretty much the entire six hour fight. I know that the NC had several cyno chains set up to get new cap ships down (and, I suppose, bridge in new support). I checked on the battle around the fifth hour and asked how it was going and got a response of “I’ve just killed the same guy for the third time, that’s how it’s going.”
It also seemed, for where I sat, that the enemy fleets were perhaps not communicating properly, as they had two separate support fleets who seemed to merge into one once the battle got going. Whether or not they got into one fleet and/or TS I simply don’t know, but I do know that 100% of our support fleet was in my fleet and that we were on the same TS as our cap fleet so that I could talk to our cap FC’s and coordinate. One of the reasons we killed so many of them, at least while I was FC’ing (I don’t have an accurate picture of exactly what happened once I left) was that we coordinated specific targets with our cap fleet, getting our fast tackle onto cap ships and then shifting our dreads’ fire onto the pointed bastards while our support fleet continued to pick off enemy BS’s.
And, well, popping depends. We petitioned CCP to reinforce the node since we knew it would be a major fight over a dyspro moon, but CCP didn’t do it properly. Lag was really, really horrible. The cap FC’s kept asking me how we were doing during the first hour or so, and I kept having to tell them that I had no idea, but we seemed to be working our way through the enemy BS fleet well enough. The cap fleet was in much the same situation. Module lag was very bad and folks who didn’t know enough to take their guns off of auto-repeat and start manually cycling them were ending up with stuck guns.
But even with that, their support fleet seemed to be concentrating on our caps, and perhaps not even primarying them. But with the lag and the number of carriers we had on the field, their fire really wasn’t all that effective against our dreads and those that we lost were largely those that were tackled after warping out to planets, those who got separated from the pack, or what have you. And that allowed us to whittle down their BS’s with very little return fire. I’m not sure exactly how things would’ve gone if we weren’t lagged out for most of the fight, but yes, in a fleet fight with the numbers we saw we’d pretty much be alphaing many targets, or popping them in a few volleys at most. Both of our fleets were dealing with a number of noobs though, so that would’ve made a difference. Another fact which makes me think that they were lacking coordination is that the PL support fleet was routinely aligned out and had their anti-support ships hassling our tacklers, while the non-PL BS’s tended to be sitting at zero velocity (I primaried them a lot) and didn’t have any concentrated force dealing with our tacklers.
I still haven’t seen a battle report for the last 3 hours of the battle, only what I saw FC’ing the support fleet for the first 3 1/2 hours, but I’ll update this later if possible.
