I rarely fly the Retribution. As of today zKill says I have 39 total kills with the Assault Frigate. So the other day I saw one in my hangar that had been there for a long time. The fit wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible either. I suspect it had been fitted up as part of a gang a few years back. I did recently fly the ship in a AF gang that I FC'd a few weeks ago and it performed fine as part of a small gang. So I decided to take it out for a spin.
Somehow I did manage to get eight kills in the ship over the past week, but I suspect most of those must have been garbage kills since I can't remember any of those fights. And before I go any further let me explain what a "garbage" kill is. Sometimes good fights are hard to come by, in my line of work I may only get one or two of those a week. Everything else tends to be background clutter, or garbage. I don't know ahead of time if the next fight will be a good one or not. (See my last post) Or if there is a cloaked Loki sitting next to that ship. But those are garbage kills. I wish it wasn't like this, but there it is.
So yesterday I didn't have a lot of time to play and didn't feel like figuring out a new ship to fly, so I jumped into the Retribution and headed off to find a fight. That's when I spotted the Taranis in the small plex. Now we don't see a lot of Taranis in low sec normally. They are usually on their way somewhere or someone has realized that they make great Super Atrons. Which they do. If you can get a fight. In addition, these days, they are probably using polarized blasters. More than likely. So I anticipated this fight correctly and slid in anyway. Polarized ships hurt. But they are pretty much paper - if you remember to load the proper ammo first. Which I didn't. I corrected that mistake after the fight started, but by then it was too late. This was a super close fight, but I exploded knowing I had lost this one because of my own error.
I went back to station and grabbed another Retribution. This time I'd fit it up properly and see what it could do. A few jumps out and I found an Omen ratting in a belt. Now this wasn't just any belt, because the system is an Edencom system. So I'd have to be careful. I have no idea what my standings are to Edencom, mostly because I don't care. Now here's the trick with Omens. I needed to land on him. If I could do that I felt pretty confident I could take him. But that proved to be harder than it sounds. Over and over again I'd land at 40k, or 69k, or 39k, or some variant. He wasn't sitting still and he kept warping to different belts. And shooting me. Which is when I noticed the Procurer on scan.
Now I figured I couldn't take a Proc on my own if it was fit decently. So Jorrien was headed over to help. Unfortunately our timing, and his standings, messed us up and he ended up exploding just as I landed. And I exploded shortly afterwards.
Fair enough. Nothing wrong with that fight. You take risks and sometimes it doesn't work out.
Ok so I lost two Retributions back to back. My day was looking pretty sucky at this point. I went back to station and jumped in an Omen and flew back to see if I could get a fight with the Omen pilot. Sadly he wanted nothing to do with that idea and left system, went next door and docked up. Ok fine.
But then Richard Masseri was in local chat with me and decided to bring something out to fight my Omen. I really wasn't looking forward to losing yet another ship, but the idea of a good cruiser on cruiser brawl was too tempting to pass up. He brought a Caracal and it was a good fight, but those Rapids take forever to reload and that was just the opening I needed to align into him and end it. Good fight.
And a good way to end a short session. Thanks for the fight as always Richard.