Bhaalgorns Are Cool

Provibloc is not known for it's capital fleets, and there's a reason for that. We don't run them pretty much at all. Not that we don't have capitals, we do, but we don't run capital ops often, so we are not very good at using them in combat. So, one of our capital FCs decided to run a capital training op, apparently the second one we've done recently.
Now, my alt can fly an Archon, but by fly I really mean she can sit in it and jump and use fighters, and that's it. So as an actual carrier she's fairly useless, but I figured I should attend the training op for the information, even if I couldn't fly in the fleet.

Obviously the op was on Sisi, because if we were going to have major screwups we didn't want them to be on the actual server. Plus you can't duke it out with capitals on the normal server, so there's that.

I listened in on the op, and learned a fair bit about flying capitals and suchlike, all of this while my Sisi was patching--which took like an hour and a half because Sisi. My client finally finished patching right as they were calling for people to undock and get into the two different fleets to have a fight to get the feel of capital warfare. Given the mirror hadn't occurred recently enough to even let my alt sit in a carrier, I decided to fit up a Bhaalgorn on my main really quickly and join in that way, I figured that I'd never flown a Bhaalgorn, so I might as well try it out and die horribly on the test server instead of the main server.

This guy is pretty awesome.

I jumped online and grabbed a fit for a fleet Bhaalgorn, which means 7 full heavy neuts and armor tank. Wait, I can't use T2 armor tank on my main? Bah, okay, T1 it is. I fit up my ship and undock, and the FC of the 'armor' capital fleet (they started out by dividing up by armor/shield, but there weren't even numbers, so people just spread out until it was mostly even) sends me a fleet invite, apparently they were down a member and me joining was quite conveinent. The fleet was warping off as I accepted the invite, and I heard from the FC that some of the members of the opposing fleet had DCd--apparently this build of Sisi was quite unstable--so we were told to wait until they got back online and on grid. I landed, and started to try and figure out how to work my Bhaalgorn. I discovered why the fit called for a ship scanner: it shows me the cap of any ship I scan, which I didn't know. I always wondered how those Rooks and Kings guys knew what the enemy's cap level was at, and now I do.

After a few minutes all the opposing capital pilots had relogged and gotten back on field, and the call was given to start shooting at things. I probably would have been able to pay more attention to the actual tactics that were going on had I not been learning how to fly a Bhaalgorn on the fly. As it was, I had my hands full with the order my FC had given me: jam this Moros (who happened to be my CEO, ironically.) I had a cap booster fit, and very quickly realized why I had it. Those heavy neuts are very, very cap hungry. Thankfully, I got one of the carriers to put a capital capacitor transfer on me, which kept me full and able to run all 7 of my neuts with no cap problems. Apparently, had I joined earlier, I would have been included in the cap chain of capitals so I could be kept fed.

As it stood, I believed that our reps were holding fairly well, and I was finally capping out the Moros. I called it in comms when he hit empty, and the FC told me to keep just a few neuts on him to keep him capped out, and then told me to switch to a new target, a Revelation. My CEO's Moros was then called primary and he died fairly quickly, given that he could probably barely keep his hardeners on. He later said that I was an annoyance that eventually turned fatal, which made me quite happy. Around this time we had killed enough of the enemy dreads and carriers that the other fleet started warping off. Congratulations were had all around, and our fleet rejoined the other in comms.

I took away quite a bit from the training op. I learned quite a bit about capitals that I didn't know. For example, if you need 250 stront to go into triage, if you have a stack of 249 and a stack of 1 in your fuel bay, triage won't activate (that is what I understood it to mean, I could be wrong, and they might have been talking about having the fuel in two different hangers, but I don't think so.) Aside from capital knowledge, I also realized that flying a Bhaalgorn in a cap fight was a hell of a lot of fun. I had never really done ECM/neuting before and I quite enjoyed it. Of course, as I was looking into the Bhaalgorn after the fight I realized that my Amarr Battleships skill was at 1, which meant my neuts weren't doing nearly as much as they could have been, but something to fix for next time.

I'll probably be picking up a Bhaalgorn here before too long.