Black Drake Down

Starwalker had been ratting in the Great Wildlands with his Drake and with decidedly mixed results. On the one hand it was easy to go and kill rats but on the other it was boring and the rewards were not great. Starwalker was there to improve his security status from 8.7, ideally to around zero.

Starwalker had entered the Great Wildlands via Khabi and 7Q-8Z2 and had noticed the two bubbles there but also no other pilots in space. He had thought nothing further about it and ratted along the pipe from there to UMDQ-6 in two separate sessions, and docking in E02-IK between sessions.

The basic approach was to go from belt to belt killing those rats with battleships, if the group had battleships he killed everything and then moved on to the next system. Those two ratting sessions totalled around 2.5 hours and netted around 27 million ISK in bounties, however, the worst part of it was that the security status only went from 8.7 to 8.4. Starwalker was hugely disappointed with the progress and considered whether he should simply ignore his security status.

Kadea Maxwell noted that the best way to raise the security status was to simply kill one battleship in each system and not return to any of those systems within 15 minutes, so perhaps do a large circuit. He reckoned it would take around 24 hours to go from -10 to 0.

Starwalker was finished ratting and then he made a mistake - he decided to return to Heild via Khabi and assumed that any likely gate camp there would not stop him as he was going out. This completely forgot or ignored the fact that it was bubbled and that fact landed him in that bubble, 70km away from the gate with a Tornado moving in for the kill.

The second mistake was to stop and fight the Tornado rather than make a run for the gate because within seconds it was a Tornado and a Hurricane and then the screen filled with lots of ships hoping to get in on the now certain kill. Starwalker had overheated the missiles and was trying to take someone down with him but he was not breaking the Tornado anywhere near fast enough as it was active shield tanked. However, the incoming damage was piling up and more firepower was arriving on the field and soon his Drake exploded.

Starwalker warped his pod away to safety but then came a third mistake. He decided that he could still exit via the same gate - if he warped to a nearby celestial and then warped down to the gate, bypassing the bubble. At least that was the theory, it was wrong or the celestial chosen was not the right choice and Starwalker re-awakened in his new medical clone in Covryn, with his other jump clone in the same station. He had also forgotten to reset his home clone station when he had jump cloned to Heild.

Two Drakes lost in two days - not good. The only good news was that during the roam that night there was some modest excitement avoiding larger gangs, chasing some targets around and playing catch me if you can with an Ishkur and Wolf at the Sun. Well there was one other piece of good news and that was killing this Condor, although unfortunately Starwalker had not got into real blaster range before it died.

Recent experience was again highlighting for Starwalker the need for speed to both get into range or to get away and that was probably the area that he had spent the least time considering beyond thinking about kiters or brawlers. What he wanted was a fast brawler with great gank and adequate tank, that was capacitor stable with good damage projection and range control...