Merlin found in Plex

Starwalker had located another Merlin in a minor plex and decided to investigate further in his own Merlin. There was nothing at the acceleration gate and so Starwalker went in to find the Merlin around 50km away engaging the local NPCs.

It seemed unlikely that the Merlin would hang around now that it was in danger from a real pilot but Starwalker started burning towards it fully expecting to see it warp away. At 35km away he started to wonder if it would warp away or was it too busy with the NPCs, so he delayed targeting to avoid alerting the target to his presence.

At around 20km away Starwalker started to target the Merlin and overheat his modules in preparation for the battle. It seemed incredible that the pilot had not noticed or maybe he wanted to fight. In any case, the distance closed and with lock and scramble applied the blasters started to do their thing.

Some return fire from Sekhmete Udan had a modest effect but nothing that was worrying and Starwalker watched the distance close to 1km with his web applied. The target Merlin was melting fast and it was clear that unless a miracle happened it would go down. No miracle, it went down. Starwalker tried to collect the pod too but was too slow, having forgotten to approach the exploding ship to get the pod and apply a scramble immediately, however, he did collect the rather modest loot and moved on.

The target was not a top pilot, his ship was not fit that well and in the end it was an easy fight, however, none of that mattered - it was another solo kill. Starwalker had used a blaster fit and liked the DPS, the Merlin was now faster than before the recent ship upgrade and it had four mid slots that gave it a lot of fitting flexibility. Indeed it would now give the ubiquitous Rifter a run for its money as the favourite T1 frigate.

The Merlin was a nice ship to be flying around whilst Starwalker's training was continuing for drone and various other skills.