For a lot of us, PVP is one of those things that you don't really participate in - it's more of a force of nature that happens to you. You mitigate the damage of it, try to avoid it where you can, and accept it as part of life, like an earthquake or celebrity twitter posts appearing on your feed at 4 AM. So it's with no small dose of humility that we decided to grab our prime time crew of ~15-20 industry-minded pilots and go and take on the challenge head on.
Suited up into our camelfleet caracals (affectionately named as such due to some typo someone had in our first days as a corp) and a few light tackle and scythe logistics, we threw ourselves into low sec down the Gallente chain in Evershore to see what we can find. We were temporarily upheld by some trolling on the Dodixie undock that resulted in our entire logistics wing getting CONCORD'd, but that's only a minor footnote in the annals of history, I say!
Our first stop took us to Elarel, where we met some friendly faces and waved in local. One even decided to jump in with us and help scout/tackle. Our death machine was growing. We were truly a force, no, THE force to be reckoned with. A thorax foolishly jumped a stargate right in front of us. He paid the ultimate price. People began to smell the blood in the water, and it took everything this author had to calm the rabid camels and their frothing mouths. We had to take this to the next level.
Scouting around for content, we saw a Thera hole not too far off. So off we went - a lot of us had never heard of Thera, nevermind been there. We get in, scout around for any camps, and launch ourselves at the Epicenter just to see a neat part of EVE. After a while, combat scanning probes started to blob the d-scan, so we went to another sig that looked promising - a wormhole leading almost directly to the Amarr trade hub. Once tackle landed on grid, we saw that we had actually landed in an Onyx's warp disruption field - there was about 7-8 ships there, a mix of HACs, T3 cruisers and tackle ships. We had a fight on our hands!
Or.. did we? As soon as we all landed, they jumped into high sec. Surely us, in our T1, low-sp fleet composition wasn't enough to spook away a well tanked hole camp. Especially when they can just jump out to high sec if they started to get low. They had us at range! But no, it wasn't meant to be - we had spooked off our first PVP gang. And that was a bit of a strange feeling. Oh well, back to low sec.
We jump through to Solitude, and land in another camp on the low-sec side of the Thera wormhole. A much smaller one that immediately pulls range to 100KM. We regroup, go to a nearby stargate, jump through, and wait on the other side. Sure enough, the gang sends a cynabal through to check. Big mistake. It's worth noting that the little bugger had my crow tackled once I pointed him, so I was forced to tank both him and gate guns. Our logi somehow kept me alive and I got out with 10% structure. Logistics pilots are the true heroes.
Heading back home, we thank our tackle-scout blue friend and leave low sec for the night. We got more than we expected, and with a fleet made up of mostly first-timers. That feeling started to linger a little - this was one of the first times people actually ran away. From us. Sure, we had twice the ships they did, but we had never been able to field numbers like that before in the first place, and with the ships they had, we would've suffered losses.
Maybe the camels are a more dangerous breed than we might have first suspected.