Intergalactic Summit

Serpentis stole a Titan from the Federation couple years back.

An interesting array of possibilities. Causal connectives raise troubling cases. Suspect collusion, else an improbable institutional failure.

Wasn't it an Iapetan? Anyways, Serpentis isn't the Guristas. Looking at what the Rattlesnake is to the Scorpion, I imagine that whatever he creates with this will be a hell of a ship.

You act as if the Guristas are small-time thugs. Given how readily-available the schematics for Wyverns are and how much manpower the Guristas have, it's not like they couldn't build one themselves if they needed one. I'm sure they already have a dozen at least.

No, they didn't just want a supercarrier, and they didn't just want a Wyvern. They wanted the Antero, specifically. Either the ship had something on it that someone wanted, or someone wanted to embarass or weaken Wiyrkomi. It might have been the Guristas, or they might simply be working for someone else. It's not like Wiyrkomi has a shortage of enemies - it's a Caldari megacorporation.

Give that man a cigar.

Enqueue mandatory golfclap I suppose.

Kudos, Pirates.

I suppose we'll have to grab a Hel now. Karmic justice and all.

To be fair, a free ship is a free ship. Frigate or Supercarrier, if you can get a ship for free, why not go for it?

Del.
Upon the request the working people.

Yes. A shuttle that can hold a couple people.

For civilian class vessels easily found. I did find humor in them being designated I-815

Then just "minutes" to take several km of ship? Um. Nope. Even if fully fit for transport, four IBIS frigates could bring enough troops for maybe one person per square km of deck space.

Good luck securing it fast with that. Even with bare essentials crew. No, I fully expect that most of those essential crew members were gurista already on board. No doubt people related to or trained on other capital ship operations. Issues between populous and the navy over the years and a cetain high profile failure with much life lost is the perfect seed for insurgency indoctrination.

Yes, congratulations on ignoring the particulars of the situation.

The ship was undergoing refit - that means there was a skeleton crew aboard, mostly to maintain critical functions like life support, and otherwise, it's the refit crew - engineering personnel and construction crews. In addition, the ship was apparently 'changing crews' - which is probably a reference to the ship's compliment other than the command cadre having been largely reassigned at the beginning of the refit, and a new crew coming in, possibly a training crew, that wouldn't know one another well.

Under those circumstances, the outgoing crew wouldn't have questioned 'maintenance workers' they were unfamiliar with. Both because the refit would mean a large number of maintenance crew would be coming aboard, but also because the arrival of the new crew would've meant the advance elements of that crew (senior NCOs and maintenance staff to ensure the ship is kept operational during crew exchange) would've arrived ahead of the planned handoff timetable.

For a supercarrier with most of the combat systems shut down and navigational systems in automated mode for refit, you're probably looking at maybe two hundred people to run the environmental systems, docking bay, and emergency systems. Navigation would be slow to respond, shields would be online but no additional hardeners running, launch bays empty with Fighters and Fighter-Bombers already transferring to an active-duty ship...

Once you lock down the hangar and decompress it, you only need to keep the remaining crew aboard from linking up with one another while you re-pressurize the hangar, get your Ibises full of assault troops into the maintenance bay, and get your own emergency crew bringing the jump engines online while your assault troops go compartment-by-compartment, re-sealing everything behind them, to clear out what's left of the crew.

Most of the difficulty here is in the timing: you have to know when to hit, and you have to have access to the hangar in the first place. If you were going to try to gate it out, you'd never make it, but the jump drive gives you that escape option - if you can spin it up before the corpsec and Caldari Navy responders can breach your armor.

Honestly, this is a beautiful example of a nullsec pirate group knowing the primary weakness of one of the Empires' response techniques: there is nothing short of a Heavy Interdictor in State space that can hold a supercarrier in place... and how many Heavy Interdictors normally operate in theaters where their primary function... doesn't function?

The critical thing here, is the timing, as I've said - and it's probably critical for more than just 'when can we pull it off?'

Why hit Antero at all? Sure, this could be just an attempt to cost Wiyrkomi face, and I can make flippant comments about reverse-engineered Guristas carriers and supers, but there's easier ways to achieve the former, and the latter... if they wanted to, they could buy examples of both hulls in Venal. Heck, we might even sell them direct if Rabbit was willing to kick back with a set of plans for the resulting ships. What, exactly, was the refit she was undergoing? The timing of it is... interesting. The crew exchange would have been one of the last things going on with the refit - there's simply no need to bring the new crew aboard while they're just going to be in the way of the refitting team. That's actually the big reason the previous crew would get reassigned - it keeps them out of the way, and doesn't waste experienced manpower. So the refit was almost certainly in the 'clean up and swap the decks' stage. So what was it?

Supercarrier combat systems haven't seen any significant upgrades in some time from any of the Empires. Was this a routine maintenance refit? Is Wiyrkomi about to unveil something significant? Was Antero about to become the testbed for something new, similar to the still-unknown upgrades on the still-unveiled TES Auctoritas? If this was about experimental new equipment, was this a competitor's action, or a false-flag by Wiyrkomi to cover up technology that's just not ready for testing yet?

There's a lot of questions about 'why'. One of my only questions about 'how' is: 'Why wasn't she moored inside a tower?'

Mooring the ship outside a station just begs for this kind of thing to happen - you're leaving it completely open, and honestly, Wiyrkomi's lucky nobody happened to spot it there and 'happen' by with a new and unannounced 'Burn Wiyrkomi' event to throw endless hordes of tornadoes and catalysts at it, or something.

Not, you know, that I know anyone who might try that. Just sayin'. You know.

But it should've been behind the added protection of a tower's shields - if nothing else, it's one more password the thieves would've needed to get.