Destroyer Destroys Hawk in Bosena

Starwalker was heading back to Heild from Uemon and it had been very uneventful. His Hawk was moving through the systems scanning for targets but nothing of interest had appeared to be flying in space.

Entering Bosena Starwalker went to the Sun looking for a fight with a local. Given the number of pilots in local it seemed that someone would arrive soon and so he waited. A Retribution appeared and as the Hawk closed to around 40km the Retribution started firing its lasers. However, apart from the light show they were not having any effect.

The Retribution was still well outside point range when it disappeared. Starwalker assumed it was because another R1FTA pilot had arrived in local. It was pure coincidence and it was certainly not a trap, if Starwalker was in fleet then he would have at least established point first.

Starwalker waited as the R1FTA pilot moved on and then the Retribution pilot, Arasul, came back in a Thrasher. It seemed that Arasul did not like his chances against the Hawk in a Retribution and had returned in something that was scarier but not too scary. Starwalker decided to engage – that was what he was here for.

The Hawk was quickly in orbit at around 5km and the Thrasher was firing away with 200mm auto-cannons. The Thrasher’s orbit closed in to around 2km from the Hawk and then back out to 5km.  The damage was coming in hard for both and as the shields started to give way on the Hawk Starwalker activated the shield booster.

The Thrasher's shield was going down as well and it was becoming a DPS race. The Thrasher was into low armour as Starwalker heard the capacitor give out and was no longer providing any shield boost. The Hawk entered armour but the Thrasher was entering structure and Starwalker turned back to watch the Thrasher die.

It didn’t die fast enough and the Hawk exploded. Starwalker was so surprised that he had not aligned out to save the pod and that was caught too for another 70m ISK loss of the last +4 implants.

In hindsight Starwalker knew that he could have improved:

• Noticed that he was being neutralised and so he could have used range to break that
• Used a better range to fight at, 5km was probably too close but he had been fooled to some extent by the Thrasher starting to fire at range and so Starwalker went in a little bit closer
• Starwalker had overheated the rockets but should have overheated the auto-cannon too. That little extra might have made the difference, assuming he did not burn them out
• Used the combat booster, that was there and unused in the cargo bay – it had simply been forgotten
• Used the shield booster earlier and it should have been overheated earlier rather than wait until when the shields were already down to 25%