Live Events Discussion

I think you have misunderstood the situation. Many of us do not support Heth, and I, in fact, would pod myself back to highsec if I thought I had the chance to kill him. We do, however stand with the Caldari State. That was a State owned titan in orbit of a State owned planet and the Federal forces were violating that sovereignty under what their own rhetoric demonstrated to be a somewhat thinly veiled excuse to attack Caldari naval assets.

In short we were defending our nation rather than just our leader.

Well, that's an assumption... but all will be revealed in good time.

There was only one time she mentioned supporting the ground troops, and that was when she said the oblivion was spooling down because the ground forces had the upper hand.

the rest of the time she merely mentioned having target co-ordinates, or that she had lost communication with the planet and was going to bombard it anyway.

anyway, even if she fired in a 'support capacity' had she fired the oblivion at the planet she'd have made a big-ol supervolcano... consider that 2/3rds of the titan, without the most devastating parts left attached, caused a hole in the planet and major tectonic instability...

bad things would have happened.

It was only right at the end that they discussed actually firing the DD at the planet, the rest of the time the references were to conventional weapon fire on the planet. That said.... A Titans conventional weapons bombarding a planet are a significant threat, and had to be taken seriously given Heths claims that any attacks on the planet would result in the Titan killing the millions & millions of Gallente civilians.
Sitting back and going 'Oh maybe she's bluffing' when she had been moved there a week before specifically by Heth as the situation had started to heat up would have been criminal had she then carried through and bombarded the planet, and we have no real idea of what a titans conventional weapons do to a planet, since we don't have missile bombardment or titan sized bombardment available to capsuleers.

All reasonable indications were that the threats were serious regarding planetary bombardment and the use of the titan to commit ethnic cleansing when it came down to the wire, a form of scorched earth policy so to speak. So pilots had to regard them as such, and that it didn't happen due to the technical limitations of planetary bombardment.

Its not unreasonable to assume that she was bringing all weapon systems online in preparation for a worst case scenario (not that I support nuking Caldari Prime into Oblivion) but it isn't a threat. Given her stated intentions to support the ground troops (which was the reason for moving into low orbit in the first place) its more like wishful thinking that she'd do something so unreasonable as to DD the planet to justify the Federations attack.

It appears to me most people had inferred her intention via what was spoken on the public comms, which doesn't even make sense that she'd be broadcasting on in the first place. Given our factional sides I doubt we're all gonna come to an agreement as to the intention one way or the other.

I'd be more interested in what wasn't broadcasted live rather than what was.

The titans bombardment orbit was quoted as 325km. Difficult for tactical bombardment against individual troops like a dust map, but then again, any titans weapons would be overkill and wipe a dust map.
So if we assume something like 10km/s, achievable by some of the missile ships out there, as special OB ammo for missiles speeds, it's a 30sec flight time. Still reasonable.

Yes, and the reasonable guess for a TITAN is that you erase a dust map. I would expect any Titans firepower to basically do that from orbit. Not just missiles. A titan isn't going to be fired to nuke a single tank, it's going to be fired to take out the entire army camp or city block.

Heth had threatened that the Titan was going to be fired at the Gallente city blocks.

We had no idea what the Titans 'co-ordinates' they were recieving from the ground troops were, nor if they had pre-recorded firing patterns for said city blocks.

There were significant indications that she intended to fire some kind of orbital bombardment at several points, but backed off again for various reasons.

She had destroyed a Concord battleship that had challenged her over the fact that bombarding the planet would break the Yulai convention, rather than simply advising the battleship they were not going to initiate any kind of bombardment.

So, to a logical perspective at the time, it seemed reasonable to assume she was going to not back down at some point soon, and begin firing the conventional weapons. At unknown and possibly civilian targets.

Except the only reason the CONCORD battleship was there was because CONCORD believed that she was about to break the Yulai convention by bombarding the planet. So if she had said 'We aren't going to bombard the planet'. Then the CONCORD battleship no longer had any need to be there. I also disagree that it was because of the no fly zone, as she was not engaging any of the hundred odd capsuleers present at that time in the 'No Fly zone' either. You don't get to selectivly apply no fly zones as a legit excuse to shoot someone. Especially shooting CONCORD being pretty serious.
Given the lack of engaging any of the other capsuleers present & the dialog at the time, the most likely apparant cause is that she intended to violate the bombardment clause in the Yulai convention, & didn't want CONCORD interference if she did. So took it out before it came up.

There are other possibilities, but it's the old Occams Razor deal (think I'm using the right principle....), simplest explanation. Hindsight provides us other possibilities, but at the time, the simplest explanation seemed like she intended to bombard the planet.