17 March 2012

Maiden Flight of the Crow

Starwalker had completed his frigate training and was now the proud owner of a brand new Crow - Interceptor class frigate. The Crow was undocked and slipped out into space with the engines whisper quiet. It then shot away to a safe.


The asymmetric hull shape was not to everyone's taste but Starwalker was more interested in what it could do than how it looked and set off around Molden Heath. After setting the default orbit distance it was time to test the top speed and see just what a Caldari interceptor class frigate could do.

It was fast and agile but no test would be complete without some action to test the weaponry as well. Starwalker moved from system to system but it seemed pretty quiet and then at the next star gate an NPC Angel Legionnaire was lurking. It seemed an ideal opportunity to test the weaponry and so he moved in, whilst keeping an eye on d-scan.

The first surprise was the overshoot on the approach. It seemed like the Crow simply came in too fast and the orbit of 16km was quickly reduced to 12km. Against a real pilot that might have resulted in being webbed and then scrammed. However, before long the Crow was in a 16km orbit spitting out Javelin rockets. 

The second surprise was how slow the battlecruiser went down or how little damage the rockets were actually doing. Perhaps the problem was the size of target engaged or more likely unrealistic expectations but whatever, many rockets were consumed, including after the switch to Rage.

The final surprise was how the capacitor worked it's way down and whilst it seemed to pause around the 30% mark it still dropped through that too. Starwalker had assumed that any fight would be long finished before the capacitor became an issue but that was not true against this bigger target. 

The good news was that the battlecruiser was completely ineffective and the Crow received very little damage at all. The only time that any real happened was when the speed dropped as the Crow got tangled with the gate. Eventually, the Angel Legionnaire succumbed to the inevitable.

Starwalker didn't usually shoot rats but he considered that it was useful from time to time to test a ship. He also considered whether he should move his security status back to less than 5 so that he could move through high security space. If he did that, then shooting rats would perhaps be a simple way to do it.

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