Killed by Station Sentry Guns

It was another day and Starwalker was in yet another Rifter. Hopefully this one would last longer than the previous few, which hadn’t even been scratched before being destroyed. The roam started like any other, a few potential opportunities coming up on d-scan but not at a celestial, so in a mission, at a POS or deep safe. Next!
Local popped and a Crusader arrived along with an Inquisitor and it was not long before Starwalker was the hunted. Another Rebel, Kaeda Maxwell, arrived in system in her Merlin and a quick exchange over the channel established the situation. Joining forces, the Merlin was at belt 9-2 and soon called “x” – Starwalker was in bound.

The Crusader was there and alone with the Merlin. Starwalker burnt towards the Crusader and was soon target locked but out of scramble range at around 16km. The Crusader pilot was going into armour but was keeping distance from the Rifter. Starwalker noted that the Crusader was maintaining distance at around 13km and so was still out of scramble range, even if it was overheated. So Starwalker was just about to overheat the afterburner when the Crusader disappeared. Kaeda Maxwell exclaimed that her scramble had burnt out and that had allowed the Crusader a lucky escape.

The Crusader quickly disappeared but not long afterwards a Mammoth came in. We both immediately warped to various custom offices but the search was proving fruitless. Starwalker then had the “bright idea” to check the stations – completely forgetting about the red GCC. Whilst warping to the top station Starwalker noticed that the timer was still going and had less than a minute to run. Maybe it would be OK and the Rifter would dock before taking any real damage?

Over time Starwalker had only lost frigates to a POS and no sentry guns either on a stargate or at a station had ever destroyed a ship. That was about to change. Starwalker dropped out of warp and into the sentry guns that made short work of the shiny, new and unscratched Rifter and it exploded (http://r1fta.killmail.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=10332911) into a million pieces.

It was another stupid mistake and another expensive lesson. Starwalker headed back to base to reship and resolved to do better. Losing ships in fights was one thing but throwing them away to sentry guns was ridiculous.