Yesterday Rixx scored his 550th kill, a slight milestone on the slow path of enlightenment perhaps, but one worthy of note. (The link is to Eve-Kill, which only shows RJ with 530 kills -which is wrong. The only accurate killboard for RJ is BattleClinic - not because of anything special with BattleClinic - but because it is the one I try to keep accurate. With all my moving around, I try to keep at least one kb up-to-date.) The 550th kill wasn't extremely special on its own, but what led up to it was.
I haven't had a lot of dedicated Eve time lately and my roams of the past few days through low-sec had reaped zero rewards. I even tried fitting up a Jaguar yesterday with the same results, nadda. So I decided to pick up my Dramiel and head back to the place where people actually like to fight each other - zero space. (First kill of the day.) That was my only goal for the day, just to get back and drop off a few supplies I needed. When I arrived I found a Red in our home system, which just angers me to no end. I quickly found out that he was in a cloakie Loki and undocked my Nighthawk to kill him. Despite warping around and trying to lure him out I had no bait ship and he was apparently either afk or (rightly) afraid to engage me Loki killing NH. So I docked. Bummed about it, but still alive.
At that moment someone in Corp chat asked if anyone was interested in a quick roam. Well duh. We needed an FC to get things going so I decided to reluctantly take on the responsibility. (NOTE ON FC'ing: While I am a trained Fleet Commander, having FC'd many, many times in Providence, I generally shy away from doing so for several reasons. Primarily it comes down to the reality of how and where I play Eve. At any moment it is possible that I may have to leave the game, there is not much that I can do about that. I have had to drop fleet deep within enemy territory many times. This makes it difficult on the fleet when it happens. And so I try to help in other ways, but tend to shy away from being the FC.)
We formed up a quick little gang and decided to camp one of the entry gates from low-sec. If you check out the kill links you'll know which one I'm talking about. Initially we had a Sabre, a Stabber, a Falcon and my Nighthawk. But we also picked up a Harbinger along the way. Not a bad little gang, we had bubbles, ecm, and some nice dps along to handle just about anything. The only thing we were missing was a fast point, which meant we'd probably miss the smaller stuff. That proved to be true initially as a few Rifters and Jags managed to elude us. Soon a Drake, a Brutix and another Rifter jumped through and decided to play. Initially I called the Drake primary and all dps started on him, but it quickly became apparent that he was heavily tanked, so we switched all dps onto the Brutix. The Brutix melted away under our attack and as you can see from the killmail, RJ managed to pound 39k into him! Yeah Nighthawk. My fellow gang members also managed to get the Rifter, but the Drake jumped back through the gate.
At this point several more DION members had managed to fly up and join our gang, another Harbi, a dps Vexor and a Pilgrim. We were ready for anything, and very shortly we'd get anything. A solo Apoc jumped through and managed to land outside the bubble. In his panic, while he did manage to warp away, he failed to realize that the other gates are also bubbled. Not only that, but our Vexor pilot was already sitting in that bubble waiting. We all aligned out and waited for the call. My NH isn't the fastest warping ship in the universe (3au) so I arrived a bit late, but we managed to pummel the poorly fitted Apoc into dust. (What are people thinking?)
Our scout on the other side reported that Mr. Tank Drake now had some friends and they looked to be coming back for more. Normally this might be cause for some concern, as they know what we have, but our numbers had changed since they fought us. We now had three new ships that they didn't know about. So we hung tight and got ready. The Drake jumped back in with a Megathron this time. Having learned our lesson with the Drake earlier we concentrated fire on the Mega. At some point our ECM mistakenly warped away from the fight and Angor lost his Pilgrim, but the Mega exploded nicely.
At this point we decided to head home and not press our luck. We did manage a few kills and a loss along the way that I failed to mention, mostly because they didn't fit into the story-line. When we entered the system our Harbi pilot warped to a Moon instead of a Planet (we all warped to Planets first to avoid the drags on the outgoing gate) and was killed by the POS guns. Ouch. A tough lesson, but never warp to a Moon in hostile territory. He was a good sport and went into Empire and quickly re-fitted and returned to the camp. Even managed to one-shot a poor Incursus right after getting back!
As you can see from the battle report we ended the camp 9-2. 2x Rifters, 3x Pods, Incursus, Megathron, Apoc and a Brutix in exchange for a Pilgrim. (The Harbi is on the report but really shouldn't be counted.) All-in-all a successful and bloody fun time was had by all of us. The great thing was that this was entirely a Corp gang. While our Alliance continues to suck hard our Corp remains the bright shining light of non-suckage. And that is something that I am proud of.