Thursday, December 25, 2014

Escape!

Thera local comment of the day: “Pubie McPuberton > wow there is a retriever on the market, I'm going to do some mining”. Totally not bait.

Ha! Zappity’s first Thera kill! It wasn’t particularly exciting to be honest. I noticed a new exit to Heydiddles pop up on www.eve-scout.com so I jumped into my Stratios and sat 5 km off the hole, waiting for something to kill. I was busy on Innocent Scout’s screen when I was startled to hear myself being locked up. Someone must have decloaked me. Yes - a Nemesis stealth bomber! How rude. He launched a volley which wiped out most of my shield but wasn’t quick enough with his MWD top escape my scram and webs:

Manticore: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=24332694

My work in Thera done, I decided to take a little holiday in Catch via a convenient wormhole. I had heard there were hordes of pilots swarming around Catch (some of them new, others not so new) and figured it would be a nice playground for my Stratios. It certainly was - after about 30 seconds I had found what was obviously a baiting Slicer sitting 200 off a gate. Zappity knows no fear! Which means she was shortly relieved of her Stratios at the unacceptably low price of the enemy Slicer plus a Sabre:

Slicer: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=24416723
Sabre: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=24416724

Stratios, the aptly-named Skir’s Folly: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=24416725

Pod: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=24416769

Sigh. I really need to start thinking about which ships to engage. Oh well, plenty more where that came from. And I DID promise to lose that particular hull stupidly. Mission accomplished.

I woke up in the Cal/Gal zone. The Thorax was next on the to-do list so I hitched up a dual-rep electron (the fit is in the vid link below) and set off for a circuit of the map. In Hevrice, I noticed a Tusker in a Moa. While in warp to the medium plex I isolated him to a belt on d-scan, but before I could warp to him I spotted him on short scan. These guys are good!

Overheat all the things, scram, web, guns, forget to launch drones (it's been a while between drinks so I'm back to my usual tricks), repper on, drones (what a noob). I’m tanking him alright but then my dps suddenly drops. What? Oh, I’ve burnt out my guns. Bugger. I'm out of practice!

Can I escape? I should have a reasonable chance, him being in a fat Moa and me being in a nimble afterburner Thorax.

I align to a plex and rapidly pull away. He is clearly microwarp drive fit because I pull range easily. But when I hit 10km his scram icon only disappears for a second and my warp attempt fails. That sneaky Tusker activated his MWD as soon as I out-ranged my own scram. So I try again, this time getting the site up on my overview and ready to spam the warp hotkey.

Same result! So this time I overheat my scram and web to buy an extra bit of range and finally pull away safely, much to the relief of my ominously red modules. I even saw one of them smoking. Well, almost.

I should have won that. But what a great fight, and that escape was nearly as satisfying as a kill.

Video: http://youtu.be/1DHJknaCnmE

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