Merlin Meets Incursus at Sun

Starwalker now had his new neo-console in both desktop and laptop form but it had been a pain resetting everything yet again. Over time Starwalker had focused on a few things that were needed in his overview and tended to use one setting most of the time when solo:

• Sun - place to cruise in system and look for targets as well as to be easily found
• Ships - for obvious reasons
• Wrecks - never an issue in solo or small gang fights to show wrecks for looting
• Corpses - like to collect the odd corpse to add to the collection
• NPC - useful when going to a belt to see what is there and not be surprised
• Stargates - to travel between systems easily
• Deadspace complexes - might be targets around
• Beacons - great temptation to kill cyno-ships

Drones and fleet were relegated to a separate tabs but Starwalker was ambivalent about drones and sometimes set them with everything else in the main solo settings. Starwalker had a tab for scanning that showed player owned structures but since he rarely went to a POS and it seemed somewhat redundant.

It was whilst Starwalker was enjoying the delights of setting up his overview that an Incursus arrived at the sun, around 50km away. The pilot, Yip Mei, did not engage but simply warped away again. The pilot was new so perhaps discretion had been the better part of valour? At least that might have been the case until the Incursus warped in again around 35km away.

Starwalker turned his Merlin and burnt towards Yip Mei for the second time but around 30km away it simply warped away again. Starwalker was puzzled as to what this pilot was doing but he decided to forget it and returned to completing the setup of his overview - until the Incursus arrived for the third time.

Wondering if the fight would be on this time - Starwalker started to burn towards the Incursus yet again and as the distance closed to less than 20km he started to target it. The distance closed to less than 10km and he applied the web and scram - it was on. The Merlin's guns were already overheated and spewed the void ammunition.

The Incursus was now in point blank range and it was taking a terrible beating, its armour was being ripped away and exposing structure even before the Merlin's shield was removed. It was inevitable that the Incursus would explode before the Merlin and it shattered under the heavy onslaught.

Starwalker collected the loot as Yip Mei initiated a conversation and asked for some tips. Good attitude. Yip Mei had known that he was unlikely to win but he had engaged anyway and then after the fight he had looked to learn some lessons. Whilst Starwalker felt that he was not really good enough to offer tips he probably knew a little more by virtue of having been in New Eden for over a year now and could pass on some of that knowledge.

In the ensuing conversation there were the usual comments such as flying only what you could afford to lose, to keep fighting, to use the right ammunition and gain skills for T2 tanks and overheating. The additional item that Starwalker considered extra useful was to check the log file for hits and misses, with turrets tracking was really important and Yip had used void but would probably have done a little better with faction ammunition.