Hookbill Lost by All Kinds of Fail

Starwalker was in Heild looking for trouble and a couple of other Rebels were doing the same. So, they joined forces and scanned down a Jaguar to the Angel deadspace complex. Starwalker warped in at 50km and saw that the Jaguar was around 300km away. He started his Hookbill towards the Jaguar, piloted by Nergalion, but assumed that Nergalion would not stay and fight as one of the other Rebels had also warped in and disappeared again.

However, Starwalker continued towards the Jaguar and was sending messages to the other Rebels. Unfortunately, he was not paying attention to their messages and missed the caution that they could not warp to Starwalker in the complex, instead, they would end up warping to the acceleration gate. This was vital information that Starwalker had simply not read and if he had, it would have changed what happened next.

Indeed, it was the first fail of the upcoming fight. Starwalker was closing in to establish point and expected the Rebels to warp in to the fight; he was about to find out that this would not happen but one mistake was not enough to call it a fail cascade. The fail cascade really started when Starwalker made his second error and set the Hookbill to orbit at 15km from the previous 9km. It was a good distance to stay out of danger and establish a point but overlooked the fact that the short range rockets had a maximum range of 12km and probably an effective range of about 10.5km. He should have either switched to long range rockets or stay at 9km.

The Hookbill and Jaguar engaged and very quickly the Hookbill established point with an orbit of 15km, however, the Jaguar decided to reduce that to around 2km. Starwalker realised the danger and made his next mistake - overheating the mid-rack rather than just the afterburner. No fail casade would be complete without some completely random or stupid act that takes attention away from the main action.

For Starwalker, that was being distracted by checking whether the overheat could be set by using shift-click (it could) but worse than that, he then inadvertently left the afterburner and everything else on overheat. The only good news was that the Hookbill had re-established a range of around 11km and the damage had slowed. It was past the time to bring in the Rebels. 

Starwalker was not a fast typist and simply used "xx" to call in the Rebels and after that distraction he returned to the fight to be greeted with the result that the point had burnt out and the webs were close to burning out. Things were rapidly going downhill.

Starwalker decided to leave the webs on even though the point was now burnt to a crisp and the Jaguar could escape. The idea was to distract Nergalion with the applied modules and to hope that he had not noticed the point drop. Relying on hope is not a great idea. Starwalker wondered where his fleet mates were but decided to type again to let them know that his point had burnt out. The intent was that the Rebels would hurry up and arrive. One did - 432km away.

Starwalker did a double-take on the distance and thought that he had mis-read it, no, it really was that far away. Starwalker was then brought sharply back to reality by the Hookbill sirens warning that the ship was close to destruction. It was going to be all over very soon and the Jaguar was still only in shields, there was no way the Hookbill would survive unless it could warp away. The Jaguar sensing the kill was close - moved in and re-established the scramble just in time to prevent the warp. The Hookbill died - the victim of a series of horrific pilot errors.

The fail cascade was nearly complete with the Hookbill lost but Starwalker had one more loss to come - his ignorance. Starwalker warped his pod to safety and asked why the Rebels hadn't warped in to the fight. The answer - Starwalker was in deadspace and any warp in would go the acceleration gate. They also noted that they had warned Starwalker of this, and checking the log that was true.

This was the first time Starwalker had been in a fleet at a complex and in his ignorance had thought that the warp to the gate mechanic applied only after entering the first acceleration gate. Clearly he was wrong but worse than that, he had also missed the warning that he was wrong and now the fail cascade was complete.