[Ingress/Historical] Operation: Machrovina (L6 HCF through L2 zerofield)
With the fall of G+, large portions of Ingress history was lost. I've manage to recovery from my old G+ backups few fragments, which are documenting our way to the L6 homogeneous field, 1st in Czech Republic.
December 28th, 2018, Frýdek-Místek, Moravia, Czech republic 🇨🇿
XM research - homogeneous field (L6 HCF) and zerofield (L2 ZF)
Prologue
It was a month ago that we verified that we could comfortably and without a hitch manage a 5th degree homogeneous field (report: Operation: Over the City 2). The plan for a 6th degree field was on the table and so I couldn’t resist and brought up the option of making it before the end of the year… I didn’t dare to hope much but I was pleasantly surprised. There was an interest, it seemed that we could put together our standard 3 teams between Christmas and New Year. All we were missing was farming about 100 keys, nothing too unreal. So, yeah. We’ll make it. There’s a lot more work this time but it looked there’d be somewhat less cleaning than last time… if we start at about the same time, we’ll be home by 3 AM easily… talk about wearing rose-coloured glasses! 😂
❓️ You can read a brief introduction of what the heck a homogeneous field is in the above report.
Preparations
In the last days before the operation, while surveying the area and verifying the plans, the operator registered a surprising activity of a Resistance agent who had been long considered “dead”. An immediate re-establishment of contact and communication renewal led to the verification of the resurrection of another dinosaur/veteran from the time when we built the first L5 HCF over Frýdek-Místek two years ago. And not only that, @nightSeva readily jumped into action and helped pre-clean up some portals. I’m happy we can count on his help in future operations again!
There had been several of us farming keys continually since the OverTheCity2 operation, however 2 days before the operation we were still missing over a hundred. So the operator made a trip and farmed the rest of what was needed. Putting everything in capsules, now that was a different story… capsuling keys for the teams was easy in the last operation but this time being overly thoroughness backfired on us. I would never believe it could happen, but it did, and when checking the capsuling work I accidentally emptied out the team capsules instead of the reserve ones… half an hour before the meeting of the teams hundreds of keys were all in one heap again and hours of meticulous work went up in smoke. The subsequent hectic effort to set things right led to a delay right at the start of the operation. It was still just a humorous episode however, something like: it’s all right, calm down, things could get worse. 😁 Yes, they could. And they did…
Last meeting
At 10:30PM, with a half an hour delay, the agents finally meet up with the operator for the meeting in the city. They get the last instructions based on the current situation in the field and printed materials on the building process individualized by teams and their respective sectors. At the same time the teams pick up their keys, this time unfortunately with significantly less self-confidence of the operator that everything is as it would be, which he tried to mask from the teams to a questionable degree of success. 😇 However, the good mood still stuck with the agents despite this first hiccup and so we reiterated who would go where to clear out what and we set out. There was less to do but in a larger area than a month ago, so even the operator contributed on his way to the headquarters with a few jarvises to freeing up the playfield for the coming tough fight against reality of big plans.
We begin
Cleaning, this first phase of the whole operation, was going swimmingly and the operator was already sitting over the intel and was preparing for phase two, thinking that the agents would set up the blocklinks without an issue, when suddenly… there’s a new crosslink… and there’s another. Operational elimination followed and lo and behold, a new one appeared, and another… all from one portal. We understood that this was not the way to go and the in🐸 question could play with us like this for a long time yet as he was **** from his couch into the link-cleared terrain where nothing was stopping him from finding enough green, fully deployed portals for a long time to come and stopping us from building the blocklinks. Thus the agents moved off to their positions and in a single moment we shot down his crosslink and at the same time set up at least the more distant eastern blocklink. Nevertheless it seemed that the 🐸 didn’t have enough carol singing this Christmas and kept squeaking for more. We therefore decided to saturate his need and he got a little present from us. As soon as another agent was ready on the western block portal, our dear 🐸 agent got an ADA virus as a gift from us right to his couch portal and before he could do anything about it, the second blocklink was standing. While everything calmed down and the area was secure, the delay against the plan was increasing. Still, that was not the end of obstacles of this challenging fight. Nevertheless it was 2:02 AM and we finally started building the zero fields.
Field building and first mistakes
The method through zero fields has its pros and cons, however, like before, there were no issues with the construction of the 2nd degree zero field this time around either and everything went quickly and without a hitch. Well, almost, and only after resolving an error on the operator’s part. 😡 In the instructions for the individual teams he had failed to assign one tiny little task to one of them… a trifle, really, a banally simple thing – without which, however, THIS FIELD REALLY CANNOT BE BUILT! The thing is, nobody had been instructed to build up the centre anchor during the cleaning phase! It didn’t really have a very encouraging effect of the team spirit when the closest agent had to go back into the city from his zero-field-building position and build the anchor at last. Not to mention another delay compared to the plan… 🤐
With this self-critical paragraph the operator does not really want to roast his own work as much as TO EMPHASIZE THE QUALITY AND DEDICATION OF THE TEAM! Nobody complained, nobody mocked or criticized the preparation works of the operator, nobody questioned that there would still be lots of remaining steps in the plan, nobody wanted to give up and go home angrily! In this situation, everybody unanimously supported the operator who himself was closer to scolding himself rather than focusing on the operation at hand. For this support I thank them very much. It is an honour and a dream come true and a great pleasure for any operator to be able to work with such a team of agents!
Encouraged by successfully overcoming the problems not only during cleaning out the terrain but also the error following it as mentioned above, as well as a smooth construction of the zero fields from then on, we, full of renewed energy, dove boldly into the longest and most complex phase of the operation, the building of nine 4th degree homogeneous subfields inside the zero fields. For a long time everything was going without issue, but then the probably inevitable happened, despite us not encountering such an issue in the preparation operations of the previous constructions of a lesser degree. We made the first linking error. But in this phase it was not very critical and, what’s more, it must be pointed out that the error was immediately spotted by the F team linkers themselves during self-control and immediately they alerted the operator to it! Excellent! The sense of success and team responsibility definitively triumphed over the previous difficulties and very quickly led, with the help of reserve keys, to fixing the issue. While this team worked with the operator to remedy the situation, the other two teams, which could not be affected at all by any errors made by other teams in this phase any more (an advantage of building with zero fields) carried on with the work in their sectors undisturbed.
Fun tidbit: the ‘undisturbed‘ part is not entirely true. It seems to be our fate that at almost every operation we are confronted with a ‘higher power’ intervention that no operator could have foreseen! This time the main cast was the R team and the Czech Republic Police Department. The operator had planned several activities near the city Post Office without knowing that the three-agent team in a car at 3:30 AM would draw the attention of a passing police patrol so much that the agents would have to defend themselves against a suspicion that they were about to rob the Post Office! 😂 The vigilant policemen were not very convinced by the explanation that the three dead tired adults are playing some sort of a game around here in a car and only after a demonstration of Ingress and Intel complete with additional commentary cleared them of the suspicion.
Fun tidbit 2: The following day we learned that on that afternoon in Příbram the police task force had pulled a guy with a gun from the local bank where he had been holding 9 hostages at gunpoint… and so now we are much less surprised at the suspicions of our vigilant lawmen… 😁
Three cars forming three teams in three sectors worked intently on setting up the exact sequence of link after link for more than 2 hours before they finished this challenging phase. We commenced the penultimate phase, subfield finalization, wrapped it up successfully and the teams set out for the anchors to prepare for the last phase when the operator discovered another error! There was a link missing in the R team’s web! Maybe it was partially due to the disturbance created by our watchful Police Department which broke the concentration of our team, maybe tiredness played a part… in short, they overlooked that one link had failed to be placed even though the team had been convinced that the link had been set up. This was a much worse situation… because the error had happened at the end of the third phase and the following phase had already been carried out. Fortunately it still only required to jarvis a single portal, take 13 keys, add the missing link and repeat the whole fourth finalizing phase in the whole given R sector. Again with a great help of the reserve keys and farming the 3 keys that were no longer in the reserves in the immediate surroundings we fixed the mistake and we could carry on to the last phase.
Finalization
The last phase of this kind of structure is the metamorphosis of nine neighbouring individual 4th degree homogeneous subfields built inside a 2nd degree zero field into a single whole – a 6th degree homogeneous field. The teams set out to their positions and took out two of the three anchors. We started setting up the final set of links and building the final fields: L1 HCF, L2 HCF, L3 HCF, L4 HCF… wait a moment… you’ve got to be joking! Not agaaain!
Yes again. The theorems about balance in the universe are apparently true as every single team and the operator as well each made their own blunder. This time, therefore, it was the third team, the M team. In checking the links upgrading our whole work to a 4th degree the operator found another missing link. However, this time around it was really serious. We couldn’t take down the anchor that had been jarvised only a few minutes ago and the missing link was from the previous set and building it additionally would not mend the situation during the metamorphosis any more… what now? The teams were nearing exhaustion, more than 8 hours in the field. The operator had been pacing from wall to wall at the headquarters for the past hour already to stop himself from falling asleep in the chair. Even the most pessimistic time estimated had already been surpassed to almost twice the original calculation. There weren’t even all the necessary keys at the anchor. Do we give up? Do we go home? Will there be another attempt after the New Year and we’ll just call this one off? Yes, we must openly admit, and it’s not really a surprise, that quite a few of us wished to do that at that moment. It was a lot to take for all of us.
The one who saved the day and who de facto deserves thanks for us making it all in the end was agent @KladivoNaZaby – the leader of the R team. Thanks to his determination and will to finish the operation one of the F team members joined the effort, though the other member, by now absolutely exhausted, had to say goodbye which we all understood and condoned, because an absolutely exhausted driver sleeping behind the wheel is a dead driver and safety is rule number one at our operations, the successful completion of the operation coming only second. And he was still about to drive 40 km in the dark to get home. One of the two M team members, rushing off for a work shift, also had to part with us. The operations simply wasn’t supposed to take this long! Well, not according to the plans… but what are plans… just the intent of the idea. The reality was rock-hard and very different this time and not even our experience from the previous three preparational 5th degree homogeneous field had prepared us for it.
Despite this, the remaining members converged on the city again from the surroundings, gathered the keys necessary for repeating the last phase on the M team’s anchor from the reserve capsules. Meanwhile the already sleeping agent of the R team @MiniNikka woke up again and so the remaining member of the M team, @Staineros, along with the already completely awake R team, moved out back to his anchor while the remaining member of the F team, agent @ExtraCop, returned to his one. The morning frogs began to appear in the field in the city area and things were starting to get tough. This whole last corrective effort and the discussion around it took us so long that the joint R and M team arrived to the anchor by the city almost exactly in the moment when its immunity expired. Blasting it and rebuilding the necessary links to the 4th degree followed. This time everything was as it should be and we successfully finished the metamorphosis at 7:08 AM.
How a dream is born…
The field was taken down by 🐸 @mrhonza at 8:29 AM at the Sedliště anchor.
Epilogue
I started the previous epilogue off by talking of veterans and our previous operations aimed at training the skills necessary for what we built today. I want to dedicate today’s epilogue to the team.
This operation is without the slightest doubt a tremendous success, despite all its flaws. But it means nothing compared to what we have achieved as a combined unit of three cooperating teams! This event has brought us a new level of the game. Something you cannot find in any Ingress manual, something no tutorial can teach you. The joint effort leading to overcoming all obstacles despite the complication in cleaning, operator’s mistakes, linking errors, despite exhaustion and even despite the vigilance of our Police force, was the decisive factor and we made it!
And what did we gain? MUs? APs? Medals? Not at all! We don’t give a damn about these after this operation! We have what nobody will ever see in the profiles of our agents. We have an experience together. We have the obstacles overcome together that didn’t crush us but made us stronger and led us to our goal. And we have a dream come true!
Because Ingress, my friends, is not a chase of points and badges in the profile. Of course, you can play it like that and it can be enough for you. But Ingress can be so much more! And we don’t just suspect it can, we know it can now! We experienced it ourselves and fought hard for it! We’re not afraid of obstacles, we know we’re only humans and we all make mistakes, any of us can run out of energy and any of us can find themselves in a position when their word decides whether we give up or make it. And this time, despite all his effort, it was not the operator but the leader of one of the teams who managed to push us towards the final victory! And if we were only starting to suspect as much so far, then now, well, now we know: we are not a bunch of agents led by an operator who are slogging to achieve a half incomprehensible goal:
WE – ARE – A – TEAM !!!
🧲 SUMMARY: During this operation 1068 fields have been built for a total of 286K MUs, which helped, using the method through 2nd degree zero fields, to create a 6th degree homogeneous field (L6 HCF through L2 ZF). This field alone over an area of 41,3km2 totalled to 124 portals on which 366 links created 364 component fields in the end for a total of 226,6K MUs. It arched over the city on Dec 29, 2018 at 7:08 AM. The field was destroyed by 🐸 @mrhonza at 8:29 AM. The whole construction took 7,5h and under the leadership of 1 operator it was carried out by 7 agents in the field. One other agent contributed to pre-cleaning the playfield for the operation.
Even though not everything went smoothly this time, we managed to pull off even this challenging construction. And maybe not even this is it, who knows. We always have a few other ideas brewing. 😉😈
Viva la Resistance!
💙 See you next time!
💪 Key farming:@Arweth, @bizicz, @KladivoNaZaby, @KLARISON, @Staineros
💪 Pre-cleaning: @nightSeva
💪 Linkers: @bizicz, @ExtraCop, @KladivoNaZaby, @MiniNikka, @Nairam1, @KLARISON, @Staineros
💪 Plan a operator: @Arweth
💪 Screens: @Arweth, @cowee
The World Timeline, as we knew it the day we did it.
Road to the success (related sitreps):
👉 2018/12/28 - L6 HCF through L2 ZF - Operation: Badasssery
👇 2018/11/11 - L5 HCF through L2 ZF - Operation: Over the City 2
👇 2016/05/15 - L5 HCF through core - Operation: Southerners4Southerners 3