Don’t fly what you don’t have the balls to die in?

I've been flying with the Gallente militia for over 2 years and in that time I’ve seen a lot of lame stuff. Fail FC's, smacking, back stabbing, exploit abuse, childish behaviour of all shapes and sizes. We're not golden and I have no deluded desire to put us on a pedestal above anyone else. The bad eggs and failures here are the same as in any other militia or indeed any other part of Eve.

But one thing I've never ever had the shame to witness is a Gallente Fleet Commander ordering his fleet to dock up and pod home. If only the same could be said for our Caldari war-targets.

Now this is something that used to happen fairly frequently, but it was almost understandable six months or so ago. Severely outnumbered and out gunned with absolutely no hope of survival or even a few kills Caldari fleets would often find themselves pinned down by several Gallente fleets leaving them with the option to sit in a station all night, die or pod home. To run home in this instance I can understand. This I can make some sense of.

But things have changed a lot since then. The Caldari have been stomping their way around Blackrise for months. The Gallente do not have the constant upper hand that they used to and have had their fair share of being trounced. So why oh why did this gawd awful "tactic" make a resurgence last night?

We'd been roaming around in a BC and below fleet, had a little skirmish or 2 with some dirty pies out near Ostingele before getting news of a Caldari fleet of similar numbers and ship types in Heydieles. We headed back in the hope of a scrap and ended up jumping after the target fleet into the Ladistier system.

There are 3 low-sec exits from Lad, one leads to Gallente High-Sec but the Aeschee and Old Man Star gates are both in low-sec pipes. We warped to and from the Aeschee and OMS gates, fully expecting to be in combat with the war targets at any moment, why wouldn’t we? We played no games and made no attempt to hide ourselves - we were about as obvious as a lady of the night sat in an Amsterdam window with her baps on display, come get some! But for some reason there was no bite...

The Caldari warped to on grid and off grid safes and we wasted 20mins playing kiss catch between gates before bringing in some probers when the targets flew to a safe spot. Whilst we had eyes on all gates were certainly were not covering them very well, the Caldari could easily have left the system in their entirety, perhaps losing one or 2 pilots snagged by our tackle. But they made no attempt to leave and so we were still optimistic on the chances of a fight.

But as time ticked on news of the war targets and our active fleet attracted more friendly attention and our fleet numbers started to grow. Chances of a skirmish started to drop.

Probers were brought in to try and find the enemy safe spot but the Caldari, probably seeing probes on scan, docked up in the station. Bleh. So now it was station games; a few of our fleet tried to entice them into a scrap. But no, instead they start warping through us in interceptors, stabbed Dramials and... PODS... WAT TEH FUDGE?

Why? Why? Why? They came all this way for a fight and there it was on a plate? Sure they would have lost ships, but so would we and if they'd allowed it to kick off when they first entered Lad (where they could also have been set up at range waiting for us) then the two sides would have been fairly evenly matched. Loosing ships in a "gf" and getting a bunch of kills in the process is surely far less shameful than running home in pods? That kind of demoralising action is more reminiscent of the "old squids" not the "new squids" surely.

This makes me sad. What a waste of two good fleets and a potentially good scrap for both sides. Why go all that way if you don't want a fight when one comes along?

I thought the confidence of the Caldari was high, I thought our War Targets were turning the tables around. Perhaps I was wrong.

/end rant