Black Ops and choosing your target…

So last night we were running a black ops fleet which consisted of main fleet - 3 Redeemer’s, 2 Sin’s, a Widow, 2 Falcon’s, 2 Rapier’s, a Manticore and a scout fleet of aprox 4 recon’s. Our first engagement of the night was a huge success where we insta-popped a GoonWaffe Machariel in EC-P8R. I want to say that this was a good example of choosing the correct target getting him pointed and dropping the fleet on him.

Sadly we made some poor choices in our next two selections of targets, the word came down Cyno is up we jump to 0-N8XZ and kill the target on the gate, I believe it was a Myrmidon and a  Blackbird, but then we chase his gangmate to another gate and when we land we kill him, but instead of warping off and safeing up we lingered at the gate for a bit too long and a fleet of 15 warp on top of us that consist of 3 drakes a cynibal 2 cains 2 Hughins an Onyx an Arazu and several other ships. Most of us had warped off by this point or were cloaked and aligning. The fleet uncloaked a Sin and it went down very fast with no support. I myself was almost at the edge of the dictor bubble and was doing some very evasive maneuvering to keep from being decloaked by the 15 arseholes that just dropped out of warp on us when a cyno was lit and I decloaked and jumped away. But that was a very costly mistake to trade a Sin for a Myrmidon  and a Blackbird.

Sadly this didn’t make us choose our fights any better because the next fight we were involved in when the cyno was lit we jumped into P-33KR on top of 2 Drakes, a Rapier, Hurricaine and 6 rifters, now I know hindsight is 20/20 but I am thinking this over in my mind this morning and essentially we just dropped a 5+billion isk fleet onto a 200m isk fleet and I feel this was very poor choice of targets. And while we killed a Rapier, Hurricaine, Drake, and 4 of the Rifters, we lost our Manticore, Rapier, Arazu and a Falcon and this engagement and could have lost the entire fleet if the enemy Rapier had been able to light his cyno before he popped.  

I am hoping that we all have a polite discussion this evening we can make some sense of how to choose targets for the black ops fleets or that we change the fleet composition a bit on the next op that we have. If we had been using more support ships ie.. T3 cov ops boats and more bombers and less Black ops boats then I would have felt more comfortable dropping on the BC and frig-fleet. Being in mostly BS with a few recons I don’t think we had what was needed to eliminate the light tackle that was involved with this third fleet.

I think that one of the problems I am having here is I feel I let my corpmates down as I could not hit the drake that came in at range and popped our recon's, and I could not target the tiny rifters as my lock time on each was over 30 seconds. I had no remote rep fit, I was fitted with a neut, and that was useless in this fight, and I was stock full of garde II drones so while I was fit to handle large targets I could not hit a frigate realistically and hellp my recon friends who's ships were popping all around me.

Zandramus