Merlin Tracking a Rifter

Starwalker was roaming around The Citadel in his Merlin and noticed on warping to an out gate that there was a Gila on scan. The pilot was new and the opportunity seemed to good to pass by. So Starwalker started burning off the gate in a random direction and tried to narrow down the Gila location.

Jev North landed on the same gate in his Merlin about 10km away and immediately locked up Starwalker and started firing - lazors. Maybe he had been reading Azual and some of his alternate options for fitting a Merlin. In any event, Starwalker returned fire and closed in applying web and scramble. However, before the fight really got going Jev North headed away again and when out of range he simply warped off and did not return. Strange, presumably some experiment.

Starwalker returned to scanning down the Gila and it seemed to be in the direction of an asteroid belt. Starwalker warped in to 20km on the basis that the Gila was ratting and had pulled away from the belt a little. There was nothing there. The Gila must have been at a POS or safe and Starwalker did not have any probing ships near by.

Moving on to a new system Starwalker was challenged to a T1 frigate duel by BillyBulb. Whenever Starwalker had been challenged it was usually a good pilot looking for another kill and this seemed to be no exception. BillyBulb was a Battleclinic top ranked pilot but that was no reason to refuse the offer, and so Starwalker accepted it and waited at a random planet.

BillyBulb arrived 60km away in a Rifter and Starwalker was concerned that he would be kited to death at around 6-7km or possibly even an artillery fit from outside scram range. In any event, he would find out soon.

The two frigates engaged with range closing to point blank around 1km. Pleased that it was a straight brawl, Starwalker overheated everything immediately and set orbit to 2km. After a short while he remembered to use keep at range instead and the Rifter shields collapsed under the fire but its armour held. It was active tanked with a huge amount of repair taking place each cycle. Unfortunately, Starwalker did not have a neutraliser to destroy its capacitor, he would have to rely on time for it to cap out.

The Rifter dipped into structure and back out again but the Merlin shields were nearly gone. Starwalker noticed that his guns were nearly burnt out and tried to stop the over heat. Too late, the rockets were gone and one of the two blasters. It was over. Starwalker aligned out and spammed warp, as usual, not to save the ship but to save the pod. The Merlin ignited into a bright burst of flames as its last sliver of structure was blown away.

It turned out that the Rifter was dual repair fit with a capacitor booster so it was never going to cap out before the Merlin died. Starwalker checked the log files after the fight and noticed the part that transversal and tracking had played in the fight. 

When orbiting - the blasters missed more than half of the time, and when using keep at range they missed less than 10% of the time. The Caldari Navy Antimatter S and reducing transversal made a big difference to effective damage applied. Starwalker would need to pay more attention to tracking and transversal.