Carebear evolution

On reflection, even the most naive of mining carebears find Thrashers and Wolf assault frigates a little intimidating. This might be because they show info on the pilot and find he's both wanted and with a negative security status but on the off-chance that it is indeed to do with the ships I changed over to a Rifter, hoping people would be more likely to engage.

It wasn't long before I found a likely target or two, a Hulk and a Retriever jetcan mining in a belt. I flip one of the cans and one of the targets warps off for a combat ship. Back comes a Myrmidon. Now usually I wouldn't attempt a Myrmidon in a Rifter but after my previous success in a Wolf I was interested to find out how the Rifter would fare.

The answer was surprisingly well, actually. This was a pretty tough fight from my point of view since the pilot obviously knows how to fly Myrmidons and manage their drones (I'd not been on the receiving end of a pilot pulling their drones in and sending them back out again over and over, and it's a tactic that works pretty well I think. I hope I have the focus to remember to try it after I've trained drones up :). I managed to pop a few drones before the inevitable fiery explosion. T2 drones were too much for this ship, although I was happy not to take too much damage from the Myrmidons guns.

Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure I managed to pop a fair few drones. I did better than I should have done because I wasn't webbed I don't think, and no small drones appeared on the field. In the end my single repper couldn't keep up with the incoming damage. In addition, this was clearly a pilot who knew what they were doing and wasn't afraid to engage a Rifter, which maybe is something that would be useful in the future.

The next day, in the same system, the same two pilots are in local and I scan them down to a belt, jetcan mining again. Knowing that my Rifter wasn't a match for the expected Myrmidon as it was fitted previously, I figured I'd see if I could do better with a different fit, so I swapped my cookie cutter plate + single rep + nos fit for a dual rep cap boosted variant. Hopefully this one would repair the damage fast enough for all the drones to die and I could vapourise the battlecruiser afterwards. As expected the Myrmidon pilot warped off after the flip, returning quickly with the battlecruiser.
It went better than the previous day, for a while at least. More drones were popped, the pilot again managing them effectively - and the dual rep tank was holding up quite well against the medium drones. Then out comes a flight of Hobgoblin IIs. These are far better able to hit my frigate, and the reppers can't keep up. I'm pretty sure there were no smalls the day before, so obviously I'm not the only person that can change their ship fittings (are drones even classified as fittings?). Again, the expected explosion but I found it to be an interesting fight.

I think the lesson for me here is Rifters don't like t2 small drones :)

Still no tears extracted yet, but plenty of fun had.