Had a solid turnout with about 60 in fleet initially (possibly a few more, I didn't actually check). Form up was reasonably fast and I think we left at just after 21:10.
First fights
We headed out from Stacmon towards Ostingele via Dastryns to pick up any pirates. While we were heading towards Vestouve we had some intel on a couple of fleets moving around Eastern Syndicate but also had eyes on a small Battlecruiser gang with a couple of T1 Logi of Suddenly Spaceships sat on a Titan. We found their bait Brutix which hopped through into Aunsou from Alperaute and then lit a cyno when it was clear he was going to be caught. I was slightly confused knowing what they had on the Titan but they did indeed come into us and we just slaughtered them, even under gate guns.
The Battlereport is a bit malformed as it shows the Ishtars that turned up towards the end as friendly (they weren't) and shows the Machariels as involved in the fight (they weren't, we ran from them afterwards). Anyway it was pretty fun and a nice start to the gang! We headed back to Stacmon to get some reships and have a brief break.
Into Syndicate
We headed back towards TXW and got all the way to Vestouve this time. We had quite a lot of intel of various ships - a small camp on the 5-F gate in TXW, a few flashy Ishtars and a Huginn hanging around. Species then tackled a Nightmare off the TXW gate in Vestouve and we tried to take it down - we got very close but a few too many people got out of range and it warped off in low armour.
We immediately headed into TXW and ended up between a Caracal gang with Scythe support and an Ishtar gang with a couple of Scimis, a Lachesis, Huginn and Flycatcher. We hopped into 5-F and burned off the gate but the Caracals started picking a couple of us off. We then burned towards them and as soon as our dps started coming to bear they died pretty quickly before the survivors warped off.
I thought about engaging the Ishtar gang but they were set up 50-70km off the 5-F gate in TXW with the Scimis further away. It felt like we'd have simply had to burn into them while constantly losing ships to their DPS with the Huginn making life even more difficult. We headed over to 8V- hoping they'd follow (so I could get the fight at closer range) but they turned around and left.
Through Highsec, to Tama
We continued heading 'north' through Syndicate to PF- and tried to grab a Sleipnir and some other stuff on the Orvolle gate. We had a couple of things tackled but they managed to either make it back to the highsec gate or kill Species and warp off. We rushed through Orvolle to Oulley to avoid the low sec people getting ganked by Faction police or whatever and took another bio in Oulley.
After this we headed up to Black Rise and then around to Tama. Unfortunately, there wasn't much going on along the route with the exception of a small dessie camp a few systems out of Tama. Both times we went through the dessies just warped up to tacs when we went through and only managed to grab one on the way back through.
When we got to Tama, there was a mid sized Proteus / Guardian gang (5 Guardians) hanging around. We nearly lost Species again (must try harder) but there was no point charging through them. We would almost certainly have lost a few people and that didn't sound like a fun thing to do, just to see if anything more interesting was happening on the other side of Tama.
Homeward
The trip home was equally uneventful but we weren't that far out so it was at least fairly quick. Scouts checked Syndicate again but there wasn't anything going on so we called it a night after about 2 and a half hours.
Thoughts
I really enjoyed it and it's nice to use destroyers. They're fast, have surprising DPS and are super cheap. People often underestimate them and take fights they perhaps shouldn't. Hopefully everyone that came out had a good time too and sorry that it was a bit quiet towards the end. It never really felt like we had any long periods of dullness though (even just dodging the Proteus gang and trying to catch the dessie camp was kinda fun) so I'm pretty happy with how it went overall.
Thanks to all for coming out, particularly the Agony skirmishers who did a solid job.
