Crow versus Stilletto

Starwalker was enjoying the nebulae in The Citadel when a Stilletto came up on scan. At first, he thought it was a recon ship but then realised it was an interceptor. In either case he expected to be kited to death in his Merlin and so decided to reship to a Crow.

Before he had warped away from the Sun the Stilletto was there, piloted by RogueCorsair. It was a bit more information to know who the pilot was and so, looking him up on Battleclinic, Starwalker could see that his killboard looked impressive and it would probably be an easy win for RogueCorsair. Of course, that was no reason to run from a fight and it would be good experience to see how things actually turned out.

Starwalker returned in his Crow and waited patiently at the Sun, very confident the Stilletto would be there soon. RogueCorsair was still in system and it was not long before the Stilletto was at the Sun too. The Crow closed the 300km very quickly, one of the joys of an interceptor - sheer speed - and set orbit at 20km. The Stilletto had a completely different idea and closed in to 1km.

It was a complete surprise and Starwalker started firing his rockets but he had preloaded Javelin. It seemed that they had no effect and Starwalker paid the ten seconds reload time and changed to Rage rockets. His launchers were already over heated and he tried to overheat his MWD to get some range, knowing that his damage was affected by ship speed and not range. However, he wanted to try manual piloting and doing it under fire.

The manual piloting had no success as the few manoeuvres tried only temporarily increased the range to 6km but the Stilletto went right back to 1km. Worse still Starwalker had not paid enough attention to his modules and burnt out everything. Helpless, he then had to wait as the Stilletto finally destroyed the Crow.

Starwalker had been surprised by the Stilletto tactic and that had turned out to be an excellent decision by RogueCorsair as he was not ready for it psychologically and his ship ammunition was pre-selected for range. 

More importantly, it had solidified for Starwalker that whilst he liked the speed of the interceptor he was not really a kiter. He liked to get up close and personal and kill or be killed. Dancing on the edge of point range and doing less than 100 DPS was not really his idea of fun.