Sunday, February 10, 2013

Fly cheap, explode often.

There's something to be said for sheer determination, or at least I hope there is.

One of my favourite fleet roles to fill is initial tackle, a job that nets me a lot of deaths. That said, I'd die less if I was able to follow instructions properly. Once I jump out of the last high-sec gate, I get a little point-happy. I've put more Condors and Atrons into an early grave by doing that than any other ship. That's the beauty of those things: lots of flying (and dying) for very little ISK.

As everyone knows, initial tackle is not the place to be if you want to get kills. I've been on plenty of kill-mails, but I always seem to end up as a capsule, with my weapon of choice being my point. It got to the point where I got asked why I bothered to bring a ship if my capsule's going to be doing all of the fighting. I got tired of the jokes after a few fleets, and I had myself a bright idea: I was going to fly a scram and web fit Rifter and tackle in that. I fit my beautiful new babies with love and care, then joined up with the next corp fleet all excited to finally get a kill.

Once again, I had a little trouble following orders on what to tackle. The Fleet Stabber I found was a web/autocannon combo that murdered my precious brand-new Rifter. He also murdered the five other tacklers that followed me out. I reshipped and caught back up to my buddies, only to find that we were sitting around looking for something easier to fight. Well, I managed to find us a Hurricane that warped to a safe 150km from the gate we were holding on. I tackled the heck out of that Hurricane, until the Warrior IIs he had put out wrecked my day.

Determined to finally get some kills, I tried some solo roaming with my remaining Rifters. By now, I'm sure you have an idea of how that turned out. For some reason, I insisted on charging at things that would have no trouble killing me. Say, a Thrasher. Or another Fleet Stabber. I even displayed my brilliance by attempting to solo a Sleipneir. Yeah, I'm just that confident in my own abilities.

After my last Rifter died to a gate-camp during my corp's weekly meander through the low-sec systems around our home base, I went back to flying cheap full time. I somehow managed to get my first and only kill in one of them. For some reason, a Retribution pilot decided he'd risk his Assault Frigate on a low-sec gate by taking a pot-shot at me. Having died tackling for my fleet earlier, I was heading back out to the fight in another Condor that might have cost a million at the most.

Why he used an AF to shoot a cheap tackler on a gate was confusing enough, but the fact that he was stationary when he started shooting confused me even more. Must have been one heck of a bright idea. Needless to say, gate guns aren't known for missing stationary targets all that often. According to the kill-mail, I managed to do about 5% of total damage, but since it was just myself and the gate guns shooting, I managed to land the final blow. Thanks to this kind soul, my ISK killed to ISK lost ratio was positive for quite some time, right up to when I lost myself a battlecruiser. That story deserves a blog post of its own, though.

Oh, almost forgot to mention my favorite part. My victorious Condor caught back up to my fleet just in time for the FC to whelp all of our frigate/destroyers instead of flying the 23 jumps home. I guess our corporation killboard didn't already have enough of my ships on it. Talk about a bright idea.

- Sam.

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