Operation: Ausawm Dare ( [CZ] Betelné Hec )

Arweth · November 2019

November 3rd, 2019, Brno, Moravia, Czech republic 🇨🇿

XM research - equilateral homogeneous field (L6 HCF) through core

The Dresden anomaly. Victory is ours and we know it. The mood is excellent and we are celebrating. We meet up with Resistance players from neighboring countries in the after party area. Upstairs we have a CZRES base and we are being seen. We wait for the official announcement, convinced of our victory. And here it comes! It’s official! We did it! Dresden is ours!

Prologue

… euphoria, thrill, the feeling of proud confidence. It was in this atmosphere that a bold challenge was born. And why not? Do all our operations and all plans be the result of meticulous long term terrain mapping and considering the alternatives? No, they don’t! And this operation is the proof of that. We were enjoying our victory and speaking with bravado as you do on such occasions. I won’t deny that the feeling that we could do anything was deepened by a not insignificant amount of firewater circulating in the veins of the whole CZRES team, but there came a moment when an absolutely cheeky idea emerged in my head. Its cheekiness was so great that I didn’t even voice the idea out loud. I’m positive (almost) that I didn’t. I’m sure it wasn’t me… I hope… I don’t remember… aaaaaaargh!

“Well, let’s go build the bloody L6 HCF in the center of Brno!”

And out it was. I would have probably been startled by these words myself had I been sober, but here they were, boldly lying on the table. Who will pick them up? Who will rise to the challenge?

Well, who indeed. Sitting at my table there happened to be @atsepicnu and @Freakstern representing Brno. They didn’t hesitate. Let’s do this!

… well, that will be a hell of a morning. Wishing the earth would **** me whole I’ll have to explain that drunken promises can’t be taken seriously by anyone…

The morning was demanding. I set out with my colleague and friend @Bizicz to quickly fulfill 6+6 missions (6 for MD and another 6 just for fun) before having to show up at the OCF meeting, and the calm city was nice to walk through. A brisk pace, because the tough partner wasn’t under easy sail either, cleared my head and under the haze of yesterday’s celebrations the crazy idea peeked at me once again. Jeez, what kind of a moron could have come up with this, it’s total ****! Or… hmm… or is it? Could we really?

Preparations

The anomaly weekend was ending on Sunday Oct 13th and I got home really late at night. But on Oct 15th I was already meeting up with the lads from Brno on Telegram for the first war council. We started to quickly map out the terrain and I started working on the initial outline of the link plan. We agreed that linking and operator work would be my job and they, agents knowledgeable in the local affairs, would fulfill the role of the ORGA by supplying essential local info, prepare pre-cleaning and cleaning of the terrain, they would farm the keys, and recruit local agents. And eventually they would of course also participate in building in the streets of their city.

Right from the start it was clear to me that if we were to do this, it cannot be just a repetition of the operation that was the first L6 HCF in this country. That first field was a Operation: Machrovina. This has to be something better still. Something new. If there is to be a challenge, make it a good one! … no, not good. How do they say it down there? Ausawm! Well, this ‘ere will be an ausawm dare! Yes, Ausawm Dare. The operation name was born. Only one detail remained – to live up to the name.

And thus I added five goals not just to escalate the challenge, but also out of sheer mischief.

👉 First, we will build the field a different way than the first L6 HCF, this time we’ll build it through core.

👉 Second, we will keep the whole core in the historical center of Brno, all the portals nice and easy to reach on foot.

👉 Third, we simply have to erect the field at the famous modern cultural landmark of the city of Brno, a place so predestined for erecting even just by its many folk nicknames, at the Brno “Astronomical C(l)ock”! 🙈😇

👉 To that, fourth, we will add the delegation of operator authority, and everything regarding cleaning will be dealt with independently by a second operator just for cleaning. The first offer went to the north Bohemia and the homogeneous field enthusiast @TajnejHajnej accepted it.

👉 Well, and fifth, apart from the primary cheekiness of choosing the center of the Moravian metropolis as our playground, I added another audaciousness: equilaterality.

This field will simply be more than just an L6 HCF, it will be an equilateral L6 HCF! Hmm, and now go find the portals for this, Mr. Daredevil. 🙈😅

Okay, searching… searching… Oct 15th at 23:47 the second iteration was finished. Yes, we will be equilateral!

And meanwhile, the date. We have to do it soon and announce it fast, because otherwise people will cool down too much. Around October 25th? No, that’s too soon and there is another operation lined up for the date. So the week after. I supply the final link plan in the meantime and farming can begin.

Mapping the risks, editing link plans, recruiting, more link plan edits to accommodate the available and final number of linker teams and cleaners, withdrawals of promised participations, more link plan iterations. And then everything was ready, the methodology in versions for 6, 9, and 12 teams was prepared.

Final key amounts were handed over on Oct 25th to @atsepicnu, who along with @Freakstern, @TrishCZ, and @Blazska amassed the almost 700 needed keys with some to spare. Well, except for the detail that the key farming took significantly longer than the farmers had anticipated, and so did capsuling for the teams. Nevertheless, eventually everything had been successfully dealt with.

On October 29th it was clear that there would be enough people for these shenanigans. And so we gave them a chance to compete at our operation once more – this time they were guessing how long it would take us to build from the first cleaning shot to the last link. You can find the results at the end of this report.

Core

The start was announced roughly for Nov 2nd “around midnight”. Ha! An All Souls’ Day field! 😅

The linkers received their capsules and link plans. While checking the written link plans the linkers discovered some minor errors and doing so they proved their understanding of the tasks ahead of them. There was nowhere and no time to print any more, but an online fix of sending edited PDF files plus making handwritten notes in one’s own papers solved it all. Everyone knew what was expected of them and what they would be doing. And so we only waited. What for? For the frogs to crawl into their holes. Because 🐸@Elanius98 was sitting tight on Freeland and he was making himself known a bit by tapping the portals around the pub. However a brief check after midnight and the subsequent **** test around 0:30AM showed that he had better things to do than watch the scanner, and so we launched it 20 minutes later.

Ladies and gentlemen, it was spectacular. When the linking of the core began, it went smoothly exactly according to plan. 6 linkers, two for each branch of the core, carved their way through the streets like a scalpel, and with the skill of an experienced surgeon they built the core. Granted, our work got disrupted for a little while by 🐸@Jul13tt3, but this was not a problem either thanks to a careful choice of portals in the planning phase already. We knew her couch portals and our portals passed them comfortably and safely by. When she captured her couch portals and filled them up, she stopped disturbing us and the teams wrapped up the core undisturbedly. In 1 hour and 7 minutes it was finished.

Meanwhile, under the leadership of the talented cleaning operator @TajnejHajnej, the cleaning teams were busy as bees. The walking team was taking care of the vicinity of the core and three cleaning cars were fighting through a tangle of links along the future borders of the field, each towards their respective vertex anchor. Not only did they complete their work in time, but even with time to spare. As the last links of the core were being finished, the ex-cleaners, now linkers, were ready at their vertex portals.

Finalization

A few minutes before 2AM the finalization from the vertices began. Three links and the level one homogeneous control field was created. Three more links and the second level field was smiling at us contentedly. And just as contentedly we linked the L3 and then L4. Done. Now 8 links per each vertex for an L5. One, two, three… six, seven, eight. Ooops… nope. Seven. Only seven coming out of the western anchor, the eighth one refusing to come up.

Here we go. A mistake. A brief check quickly revealed the mistake, the core had one small border field incorrectly linked. And soon it was also clear why. Instructions were clear, names of portals listed correctly. No space for mistakes. Unless… yeah, you’d have to see it to believe it, but it happened.

I was staring at that network of portals for days. Two local ORGAs were staring at it as well. And nobody saw it, none of the locals mentioned it either. Two portals near each other with a nearly identical name. Had we used them both, we would see it too, but we bypassed one of them as it didn’t fit our portal network. It was clear what had happened. A linker found the first of them, unfortunately the wrong one, and linked the whole sequence which even passed through and therefore not even the theoretical impossibility of linking warned us. The linker cannot really be blamed, the fault was with the quick and not exactly perfect preparation that missed this detail, and with inconsistent core link check by the linking operator, therefore my fault.

Luckily this was an easily fixable mistake and the link plan had been made with possible error fixed in mind. The vertex had to go down, core linkers ran to take down the bad portal and linked the field from its correct namesake. Bring the vertex back up and using the spare keys we soon caught both the remaining vertices up and successfully upgraded the field to an L5.

Only the last phase was left, we started to throw links out for the L6… and… another hitch. They are reporting from the eastern vertex that they’re one necessary key short. Probably an error of capsuling, but what to do now. The situation was once again saved by searching through the spare and personal keys of the present linkers. The correct key was found and the link was sent. It was done. We’d painted it blue and in six homogeneous layers that were arching over the historical core of the city.

Core detail

Whole field

Group photo of the participating agents on the center anchor.

Epilogue

When I had built the first L4 HCF with a few guys three and a half years ago, a few days after discovering a Japanese report on G+ which informed us of the first L6 HCF in the works, we were content in knowing that we understand it and that it works. The idea of our own L6 field was seemed remote and in our wildest dreams we wouldn’t think that one day we would build our own L6 HCF in the middle of Moravia’s most populated city.

Making a dream come true, that is surely a beautiful thing and we experienced that with Operation Machrovina. We experienced that wonderful feeling brought on by the joint effort of a team on their way to fulfill a dream. We’re good! We’re the best around, far and wide, that’s what resonated in our hearts.

After dreams fulfilled, there sometimes comes a feeling of emptiness. What now? What’s next? Where do we go from here? What do we do? But that doesn’t worry us. This area, for which we’re using the working title XM Research, offers many more challenges not only in the HCF department, but also includes xLinks, zero fields and other phenomena. Some of us dove right into them after the first huge success. Each in their own way. Some focus on xLinks, others develop the homogeneous field theory. In theory there are still many ways of building such a field, but we haven’t tried it in practice yet.

However, compared to all the theoretical plans for the future, nobody could have expected that our second field would be something like this.

A dare. Hastily devised. Foolishly bold. Equilateral.

And one more thing can be said about it. It was and still is infectious. More and more CZRES agents are interested in what a homogeneous field is. And they are beginning to think about this challenge. And they are putting together fields of fourth level and some of them are already planning where to carry out their first attempts. It is a very pleasant feeling, watching what sprouted from that seed of a foolish attempt to imitate the Japanese agents three and a half years ago.

Thank you for your interest. For us it means encouragement to do more work so that we can bring you more, perhaps sometime next year already, and who knows, maybe even more demanding challenges. And to invite you to attempts to conquer them along with us. To invite you on a journey to fulfill not only ours, but perhaps your dreams as well, and to discover new hidden corners and possibilities on a game that can be much, much more than just a hunt for MUs, APs and little circles in profiles.

🧲SUMMARY: During the operation there were (including the errors and fixes) almost 400 fields built for a total of 63K MUs, which helped, via the method through core, create a homogeneous field of 6th degree (L6 HCF through core). This field was equilateral with the length of sides 4,2 km and the variance at each vertex less than 0,5 degree! Over an area of 7,64km2 the field itself consisted of a total of 124 portals on which 366 links eventually formed 364 sub fields for a total of 50K MUs (error fixes deducted). It was erected over the city on November 3rd 2019 at 2:43AM. The field was taken down through the destruction of the northern anchor by 🐸Spajdik at 5:21AM, and without it being planned it passed as an unexpected bonus through the 4AM CP. Building the whole field took 2:12 hours and under the leadership of 2 operators it was carried out by 14 agents in the field.