It is time once more to jump into the sordid world of Low Sec Piracy and learn a few things from recent fights that the Pirate Lord has been involved with. Please note that these accounts are pure honesty and nothing will be withheld. Also know that I tend to make things up for a better story. Both of these things can be true at the same time. Which is why this feature exists in the first place. Happy now? I have no idea what I just wrote. Let's get on with it.
The Ugly - Asleep at the Wheel
Never play Eve when you are distracted by real life activities. Never play Eve when your mind is elsewhere. These are core pieces of knowledge that I know like the back of my hand, and yet I often find myself breaking them. Mostly because I happen to be human and prone to mistakes, just like everyone else. So yes, I warped into an Open Plex to see what was happening. There I saw a Hecate fighting another ship, both of them far enough away to pose no immediate danger. I aligned out and pushed the hotkey to warp away... and then became distracted by something. And then heard the scream of my armor warnings. Apparently I never pushed that hotkey. Or Eve lagged. Or something else happened. I dunno. I told Val I must have fallen asleep and even he was wondering what had happened. Sigh.
This is one of those killmails that doesn't look like much until you know the story. An Incursus kills a Punisher isn't immediately a great PvP story, slightly unusual maybe, but you'd be forgiven if your first thought was the Punisher must have been poorly fitted. It wasn't. But then I'm going to tell you that the entire time I'm fighting the Punisher his buddy in an Imperial Navy Slicer is also shooting me - ah, now I've got your attention. But wait, there's more. Not only did this fight take forever, all while being pew pewed by two ships - I only had two guns on my Incursus!!
Some explanation. So lately I've been trying to work out a new fit for an Incursus worthy of using in Low Sec. I enjoy finding ways of using ships you don't see much around, I've been doing the same thing with the Tormentor as well, and I rarely see any Incursus around these days. That morning I realized I didn't have one fitted up and decided to take a left-over FFA version and bring it up to speed. What I didn't realize was that I only had two guns available in my regular hangar. I keep my guns in a container generally, but sometimes loose ones will be floating around in the general hangar. The ship has now been fitted with the normal three guns and it remains alive despite almost dying yesterday.
The Good - The Tackle Without Fear
A few of us were out yesterday in a frigate gang looking for fights and we had chased off a larger group of frigates that decided they were playing Eve to practice running away from fights. It happens. That's when we noticed a Jackdaw on scan over by a small plex. Interesting. I say that because Jackdaws are usually in groups of 3-5 running sites and being pretty much immune from counters. (Grrrr!) So seeing a solo Jackdaw is a weird thing. I landed pretty far from him in my Daredevil and then he did something truly weird, he didn't run away. Oh baby. So my hero tackle instincts kicked in and I burned into him from about 80k away to start with. I fully expected to be bombarded my light missiles from that distance, but that didn't happen. Twist, turn, manage heat on the faction AB and try to get close enough for those 90% webs to grab a hold of him. And then rockets!! So that's why he didn't run off. What he didn't realize is that he was caught and already dead when my web landed. That was a pretty piece of flying and very satisfying. I don't get to do that very often anymore.
And kudos to that guy for trying.
We spotted the Algos and quickly realized it was running a site. No'Vac was kind enough to bring out the probes and get a lock on his position. We all docked up and traded our frigates in for Cruisers. I want to say up-front that we didn't do that for the Algos, although we fully expected it to be fully tanked and hard to kill, we did it because he was in a site and we'd have to deal with whatever NPCs might be left around. Obviously two Orthrus, a Punisher, and a Lachesis are a bit of overkill for an Algos. Especially when we killed him and realized he was so young. I will say we were going to let his pod go in good faith until he decided to not warp away and yell at us in local. So we podded him.
We repeated the same thing again a few minutes later in another system. Although this time I brought that Incursus with me and we brought down a Caracal.
I forced myself not to mention the continuing saga of completely empty ships running FW sites. And I barely mentioned to plague of Jackdaw fleets that are essentially immune to counters in this post. I'm growing increasingly angry over these issues, but I think it is best if I keep that anger inside and let it fester for awhile longer. That seems healthy.
Until next time, I'll see you in local.