10 February 2012

Dances with Wolf

John Valentine was cruising Heild in his Wolf looking for a duel and spied Starwalker in his shiny Hawk. He initiated a challenge and Starwalker accepted. Very quickly they were in fleet and Starwalker warped into a random location at 70km, just to avoid any tricks like warping to a POS or a gang location.


The Wolf was there alone - so it was a straight up duel. Starwalker moved towards the Wolf but did not engage his micro warp-drive. John Valentine effectively did the same thing so it remained unclear whether he was afterburner fit or not.

At 25km Starwalker engaged the targeting and micro warp-drive and tried to close into scramble range. The Wolf danced away and started plinking from around 18km. Despite a few attempts Starwalker was unable to close the distance. The plinking was not high damage but it was relentless small damage and continually depleted the buffer tank.

Starwalker had tried a few times to get closer with overheating of the micro warp-drive but it didn’t seem to work. By this time the shield was down to 25% and Starwalker decided that it might be time leave as he still had not opened fire and had never been closer than 16km.

So Starwalker aligned out and started to overheat, before long the distance was increasing and then he was warping away. He apparently had warped away just as the capacitor for the Wolf was giving out. Of course, just because the ship might have lost its mobility and point that did not mean it would be destroyed, as that would not stop its auto-cannons from firing.

In retrospect, Starwalker considered what he had not done as soon as he realized that the Wolf would not fight in scramble range:
  • Switch to Javelin rockets that could hit out to around 20km
  • Slingshot immediately rather than start by overheating the propulsion module and trying that a couple of times

Similarly, whilst buffer tanks were simple and effective their weakness was that they could not be replenished during the fight and would simply drain away over time even with only minor damage. Perhaps it was time to add another module to actively tank, even if Starwalker struggled with all the module management.

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