SyNgeN-Z is still a new corp (only having been created on the 30th of December 2011) but we seem to have a knack of annoying people and being wardecced. I can't understand why myself, but we must be doing something right (I remember in the first week of the corps existence we operated without a war in place... those halcyon days of yore... but ever since we've been permanently at war with one or two (or three) other corps. It's another good learning exercise as far as I am concerned and I need as many of those as I can get. Fortunately as skills are trained the wars get easier. I think in another six months time or so we might be doing ok at them :)
We had a new war start yesterday ("Breaking Ambitions" decced us), so I thought I'd introduce myself to our opponents - another new corp (looking at their roster it looks like they have half a dozen experienced pilots with the rest being nubs like us). There's only one corp member online, so I run a locator and skillfully (sarcasm) track Tony Anthony's (for 'twas his name) location down to Gallente space near Alentene. On the arrival of my hopefully-soon-to-be-Orca-capable alt it turns out he's flying a catalyst. Thinking he might be bait I decide to take a more powerful ship than is needed (a Wolf) to see if I can draw blood.
Even taking the shortcut through lowsec, it's still quite a lot of jumping from Reisen to Alentene and whilst I'm en route another wt (from an older, ongoing war with "OP Wolf Pack") mysteriously ends up in the same system with the new target. I guess they're working together (we think the last couple of corps to dec us have done so because of OP Wolf Pack connections)).
Tony moves to Clellinon, so I follow and wait at the station undock for him to appear whilst checking local for the appearance of other war targets - none showed prior to Tony undocking in a Navitas and being popped along with his pod. Meh, shooting fish in a barrel isn't particularly rewarding but then I am easily amused.
Then soulreaper27 (an OP Wolf Pack member) appears in system in a Thorax. I'm not to worried by him (error #1: complacency). I've spent a lot of time playing station games with him and generally he refuses to shoot in order that he can redock without timer issues. After popping in and out of the station a couple of times (yawn) he finally approaches and puts a scram on me (error #2: fitting a Wolf to work outside of web/scram range and being dumb enough to get scrammed). Finally, an aggressive act! I open fire and tear through his shields and half his armour before the drones appear. With a 50m3 drone bay capacity on a Thorax I was expecting this. No problem, my mwd fit Wolf is way faster than the drones, I should be able to outrange and pop them without any issue... oh. *Pop*
[aside: the idea of this fit is to orbit out at falloff range (15+km with phased plasma/20+km with barrage) with a high enough transversal that cruisers can't track with their medium guns. I have no idea if it works since this was its first outing and it singularly failed to work but that's my fault not the Wolf's.
Even with the fitting mod the neut is offline and just acting as a heat sink (error #3: don't fit best named mods just for heat sinks, haha). Hopefully it'll fit better when my skills are up (electonics 5 coming real soon now). That's Tony's corpse in the hold, and what the hell I'm doing flying around with skillbooks... I fail at Eve.]
I've mentioned before that I tend to be hard on myself when I screw up; and really there's no point fitting a ship to work outside scrambler range and then starting the fight already scrammed. D'oh. It's another one to chalk up to experience, and hopefully an error I'll not be repeating any time soon (I don't generally count losing ships during combat as big errors unless they're lost due to stupidity. So far I can count two acts of real stupidity; orbiting a gate at default orbit range not remembering that I'd set it outside of jump range, and this one).
After a visit (i.e. being station camped - dumb Gallente kick out stations) from one of Breaking Ambition's more experienced pilots in a Rapier where my manhood was, in effect, questioned (hey, I didn't enjoy killing a Navitas in something so overpowered, but it was you guys that decced us so stfu :) I clone jumped to Tash-Murkon where soulreaper had appeared to hassle some other corpies. The only ship I had that was close was my ratting Thrasher so I took that (it actually works surprisingly well for ratting in null sec, although I suspect now I'm trained for it an AF might be better). After more station games (yawn) he finally agreed to a fight at a planet. Out come his drones (five hammerhead IIs) which I start popping. With two remaining he pulls them back in and warps off. If only I'd had some tackle I'd have killed the Wolf-killer in an autocannon fit Thrasher (there's something that's just wrong there! Error #4: fit some damn tackle). At least the subsequent smack talk in local was entertaining (I love it when other people in local join in on your side).
So all in all a rather disappointing evening, although possibly one of the most educational I've had recently. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I have absorbed all the lessons and the errors will be avoided in future.
If you fit an arty thrasher, you may not need the tackle :)
ReplyDeleteI think you may find kil2's podcast (bringing solo back) interesting and helpful, since you seem to be doing alot of solo-ish combat.
An active armor wolf is pretty good for ratting! The BS can still take a while to melt, but otherwise it's pretty decent. If you can find a Faction spawn though, it's well worth the grind to kill it usually, as you may end up with something particularly valuable, like say a True Sansha Warp Scrambler.