Warning, very geeky, Eve-Only post.
For those who have not read about Eve Online - or who have only read the ongoing trainwreck that is their internal improper conduct - "titans", as the name suggests, are the biggest ships in the game. In-game, they are hundreds of times the size of battleships. In meta-gaming terms, the hours they take, together with the expenditure in in-game currency (pricable at a pretty accurate exchange rate), makes them worth about fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars each, and means that they require the concentrated efforts of a large alliance in order to build. Less than ten have ever been built, and none have ever been killed while finished building and being piloted.
Until now.
This morning, between about 7.30am and 7.45am GMT, the Band of Brothers alliance (closely associated with CCP, the game developers) lost the first ever titan to be blown up in action, when its pilot (very possibly BoB leader SirMolle at that point) got cocky, and entered combat without a sufficient support fleet.
The closing stages of the combat can be heard on this Teamspeak recording, which is taken from our private server that we use for fleet communications (compressed to shorten it from several minutes to a listenable length). Most of the people you hear speaking there are fleet commanders and wing commanders: several hundred goons are also in the channel, but discipline is pretty good until the end. Particularly impressive is that TS discipline is maintained until the primary is killed and his capsule is dispatched (which it is, almost certainly at yet more vast cost to the account-holder, due to the implants in his character's head). Some explanation of the technical terms used include:
"He's going to cyno out" - he is going to have another character in another area open a "cyno gate", which is a sort of beacon that he can jump to almost immediately, thus rendering him safe. This was a major concern. Then Sesfan, our CEO and the finest FC in the game, asks for a cyno in order to jump in our terrifying Russian allies, Red Alliance.
"Bubble" - this is a sphere, several kilometres across, which prevents the target jumping away so long as he is caught within it. The interdictors who launch such items are high priority targets (the first time I lost a ship, facing 20-to-1 odds, I made sure to cripple the attacking gang by taking out their interdictor), and dropping a bubble has to be done quickly before virtually inevitable destruction.
"if anybody steals that can, I will kill you" - The wreck dropped by the titan turned out to contain more than enough value for us to afford the single biggest item we need right now, a new outpost (space station). This was a warning that if anyone ninja-looted it their ship would be blown up. This would be a goony thing to do, and a goony reaction.
"zero armour", "he's into structure" etc... - Ships have shields. Once those are gone, they have armour for protection. Finally, the ship's own structure is ground down.
"recall your fighters" - Expensive, hard-hitting but relatively fragile swarms of attack drones.
"Shrike's pod is primary" - By now, the titan is about to die and Sesfan is focussingthe attackers on the capsule containing the pilot, which survives the initial explosion of a ship and can warp away very quickly. It is often more valuable than the ship it is in (although not this time!)
"[various sounds as if from the abyss]" - This is what happens when an era of months of absolutely guaranteed losses at the hands of the huge developer mistakes which were BoB's invulnerable titans ends in a very large bang.
You can tell that this is very serious business because of the relative lack of profanity on a goon teamspeak channel. Until the job is done, at any rate.