Laziness

The two biggest killers in w-space are ignorance, and laziness.  When someone doesn't know how to protect themselves, or just doesn't put in the effort... that is when you leave yourself open to wandering hunters.

I had one of those weekends these last few days, where I was kind of out of it and didn't take proper precautions.  Whoops.

Let's see... Saturday, I lost a Crane.  I had planned to get my industrial alt corp set up in a wormhole, making and exporting goods (I've settled on T2 frigates/ammo/some modules as a decent compromise between profit, and assets at risk in the hole) and because my friend had had some people haunting her system, I decided to plant my tower in there with her.  I anchored my control tower, put the fuel and stront it, set it to online... then cloaked up next to it and wandered off to make dinner, assuming that the cloak would protect me until the force field came up, and that the force field would take care of me after.

I came back just as my Crane exploded.  It looked like a cheetah had spotted the tower onlining, brought a friend for backup, and either swung by and managed to decloak me, or the forcefield going up killed the cloak module but not before the friend could blap me.  Either way, I really should have safe spotted instead.  Whoops!

Sunday my favorite ship, my Stratios, went kaboom; we were breaking down POCO's in our new system so we could land our own, and the static we had opened the night before was inhabited by One Percent.  It opened pretty late at night and there were only four of us online, so we had started rolling the hole; they spotted us part way through, so we called it off and called it night.  Earlier today we also had a C2 open into our system, and a few systems down that chain we saw some members of Ixstab running ships in from high sec.

Mistake 1: I brought a Stratios to a POCO bash because it was the ship I was already in, when a Vexor Navy would have done the job just as well and would have put 400 million isk less on the field.
Mistake 2: when the POCO came out of reinforced, only one of us logged in a dual-boxed scout.  We decided a potential T3/guardian fleet from Ixstab was a bigger threat, so that scout was watching the C2 connection.
Mistake 3: we had seen no activity from One Percent., and although we were moving into the EU prime time, we assumed things would stay fairly quiet - that even if they jumped us, it'd be a group we could brawl with.
Mistake 4: when the gank came, it was sudden - nobody caught them on d-scan in warp, and the tengu and huginn were joined on grid quickly enough that we should have spotted the inbound fleet earlier.  I know I wasn't watching d-scan close enough, and it seems we were all being a bit slow on it.

I was the first ship scrammed and taken down; I reshipped immediately and was ready to get back to the fight, but the FC was already calling for a disengage.  The One Percent gang was large enough, with enough logi, that he didn't think we could take them.  We ended up losing my Stratios, a Vexor Navy, and an Ishtar in the initial skirmish, without getting enough fire focused on their side to take anyone down.

Still, it is only a matter of time before we connect to them again, and next time I'll give a better showing.  Until then, the expensive lesson has been taught again: when you're flying in w-space, don't be lazy.

o7
-K