OOC Entry 107 - Ok, that was hard.

It has been over a month since I managed to continue my latest story. I am not even sure how long exactly, but now I finally made it: I published the third chapter \o/

I would love to say it was only my daily life that kept me for so long, but if I'm honest, I have to admit I had a terribly hard time writing this. I wanted to have black-ops battleships and bombers and all kinds of other stuff in it. I never really did a hotdrop with black ops ships in-game, so I had to read about it and get some advice.

The credit goes to my fellow blogger Kamar Raimo for being an expert consultant and for providing a screenshot of a Widow. He tells me that one would rather use T3 ships than recons for such hotdrops, but I like Pilgrims and so I wanted to have Pilgrims in the story.

There needs to be some artistic license here!

I generally have little experience with the whole bridging business and cynos and all that. I have been in quite a few nullsec fights when I was with Noir and Black Legion, but nothing that I would call proper knowledge of all things involved in force projection through jump bridges. While this is a story and not everything has to reflect game mechanics 100%, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible.

All that made things complicated, and I find writing space battles difficult enough as it is. Then I also had to come up with some Rooks & Kings style elite PVP tactic that would actually make it possible for that smaller but more disciplined force to beat a much larger Hive fleet with a supercarrier as support. I developed new ideas all the time and then discarded them again.

I rewrote the whole thing from the ground up more than once, and I am still not sure whether it is really any good. I guess I let the readers judge. I just had to hit "publish" eventually or otherwise I'd go crazy with that story remaining unfinished in my head.

Originally I intended the battle to be just one chapter, but it turned out that it had to be two. Even as it is, this current episode is already four written pages long, and I always try to keep a single episode between two and three for ease of on-screen reading.

Well, at least you now get two episodes full of action. The second one will also feature some shipboard combat. I've never done that before, so I really wanted to give it a try.

I hope you have less of a hard time reading this chapter than I had writing it :D