Sunday, March 16, 2014

A Day Full of Pews

I have no idea why I hadn't gotten into the Federation Navy Comet before.  I like fast frigates, I like blasters... it is a great little ship for me to play around in, and much cheaper than that Daredevil I lost earlier this month (although, granted, the Comet doesn't have 90% webs).  When the latest Rubicon patch landed and CCP re-introduced the Police Pursuit Comet, I thought the ship was so cute I had to have one - and, since I tend to make my ships blow up, I bought three.

Players who fly a Comet are encouraged to pull people over and make up reasons to fine them anything from 100 isk for 'Operating a Spacecraft With an Obscured Headlight' to several billion for excessive speeding in asthetically displeasing hulls.  Of course, this being Eve, suspects are free to open fire.

I was undocking one of my Comets, 'Officer Friendly', to move it into our C5 on Friday when I received a challenge to a duel.  I had a few other modules in my Comet for other ships still in w-space, buuuut... it had been a while since I had a good fight.  I checked my erstwhile opponent - another Comet.  I checked the local grid - nothing that looked suspicious, no logi floating nearby.  I accepted the duel.  Pews were to be had.

The fight went more or less perfectly for me, with Officer Friendly meeting all performance expectations.  Right at the start I floundered for a moment, launching drones but forgetting to set them to attack, trying to orbit at 10k without webbing, that kind of thing.  I regained my composure, though, and began operating how I was supposed to - I stuck my drones on the other Comet, changed my flight profile to 'keep at range', and began kiting the enemy Comet while my railguns and drones chewed through his armor.  We ended up flying in a straight line, about 8km apart: right in my optimal range, but based on the number of glancing hits, I was at the extreme end of his range.  I blew him up, and although I took damage I didn't have to kick on my armor repper.


Later that night, we began rolling our static for a high sec route - we had a pair of pilots that were moving into our C5, and we didn't want to escort them through low sec.  We went through a few C4's, rolling our static until we got a C4-C4-C2 chain.  C4a was an empty, unoccupied system, and C4b was inhabited but the pilots appeared to be AFK.  There were a few pilots from Neko Neko Honpo, but when my co-scout accidentally warped to an ESS that had been planted at the sun (that then announced to the entire system that he was there) we didn't get a response.  After stalking for a bit to make sure they weren't about to become active, we continued scouting - C4b turned out to have two C2's attached to it and we each took one.

My C2 was quiet, and had a high sec connection.  Talene's C2, though, had an open connection to an active C4 - occupied by Pegasus Unity.  The C2 also had a POS in it that looked like it had run out of fuel - anchored but offline, with a pair of SMA's and a corporate hangar array.  I finished scanning my system down and went to the other system to keep an eye on things, while the rest of the corp slowly mobilized a PvP fleet - hopefully the SMA's would be full of loot, and hopefully Pegasus Unity would fight us for them.
With everyone shipped up, we began moving.  A couple of us were coming down the chain, while another was bringing big guns in from high sec.

We got a fight - as the crew from Neko Neko Honpo jumped part of our fleet as it was exiting their system.  We lost a Harbinger, the rest of us made it through and gathered up for a counter assault, and Neko Neko retreated back to their system.  The dropped warp bubbles on the C4-C4 connection, retreated to their POS, and proceeded to not move for the rest of the night.  We spent a few hours trying to bait a fight out of them (or Pegasus, since we knew Pegasus was watching: we had seen their covops ships), including things like running my Stratios around in both holes uncloaked, flying two Tengus (including mine) into Neko's system and blowing up their ESS and all of the warp bubbles, and sending an orca through to the high sec hole.

No takers.

So, with about twenty minutes left before down time, we popped the SMA's, scooped the loot, and started getting settled for the night.  Pegasus Unity did show up at the end, popping the last of our Iteron's with a stealth bomber, but that night was a bit of a let down.

The next day, after my interview with Legacy of a Capsuleer, I saw the MOTD on the Bobisgreat channel flip.  Open fleet roam, amarr-themed ships, in half an hour.  Sold!  We were joining up with RvB's Ganked, and we had about two hundred pilots in fleet when we moved out.

We were a blob.  We had a big kitchen sink of a fleet, but it was effective and we scored a pile of kills.  We ran into a gang from RAZOR in Doril and stomped them (http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22473255, their fleet looks smaller because we took no losses - some of their guys got caught in their own bubble and didn't get in to the fight in time) caught a few T3's from the locals as they bounced about, hopped back and forth through some lowsec and null sec systems.  At one point the Goons mobilized a sniper tengu fleet, and we ran from that; they landed at extreme range and began volleying us one by one, so we fell back to a station to let people reship.  While we were there Provibloc moved in with a fleet of Harbingers and Guardians, and began skirmishing with the Goons; when Provi pulled back, we undocked and followed them through the gate to engage.  THAT turned into one heck of a giant brawl, and it was awesome.  Goons, Black Legion, Provi, Brave, the RvB+Wormholers fleet... there were many pew pews, and much destruction.  So many sides in the fight that the battlerep page is a mess, but it still shows the k-space pilots we sacrificed to Bob: http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22470369

I lost my Dragoon, went back to Sendaya and reshipped into an Atron, lost that, and began flying my cpasule back to Minmatar space to grab my nearest cruiser, a Caracal.  We had heard reports of tackled capitals, and a guy the FC knew was bringing a Titan in to bridge our fleet to the fight.  On my way back, though, one of our scouts in the C5 reported that he had been scanning down the new chain and had jumped into a C5/2 that looked like it was getting ready to fleet up for escalations, but that they had spotted him and he took off.  He linked a few pilots, and I recognized the Wormbros.

I hopped into the Wormbro's public chat channel and said hi.  We chatted a little, and they offered to fight a T1 cruiser brawl in the adjoining C2.  In addition to myself, I had two other active pilots on; a bit of poking and scrounging got us up to a strength of five, and we met for honorable combat at the sun.  We had four caracals and a shield thorax, up against a scythe, stabber, vexor, and two caracals.

Big shout out to Kast for agreeing to take over as FC; I kinda flubbed on the fleet comp for not insisting on getting us a pair of Osprey logis, but we had fun and the Wormbros were great.  Their Vexor warped in ahead of the rest of them and we tore it up pretty quickly, then the rest of their gang landed; instead of moving straight for the scythe we tried to chew through its reps and take out a caracal, then switched DPS to the stabber when we couldn't break it.  We were dropping steadily, and Kast made a dive for the Scythe (that had been sitting at 70k range).  His thorax evaporated it and he followed up by finishing off another Caracal before going down.  http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22472790

So, a great couple of days in Eve. o7

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