Flight of the Condor

Starwalker had not tried out the new Condor and Slasher yet but he had just fitted out a Condor for some flight time and experimentation. He liked the idea of the speed, strong capacitor and four mid and high slots. It would be interesting to see how it performed in the wild.

Starwalker undocked in Covryn and noticed an Incursus on scan. They were good combat frigates and it would be a real test to see how the Condor would do against one. The scan revealed that it was at the deadspace complex and Starwalker warped in.

The Incursus was more than 50km away but continued to stay in the area and so Starwalker burnt towards it in his Condor. It was likely to run away but even at just over 1.3km/s it seemed to take a long time to get there. It didn't run.

Starwalker engaged with his rockets and applied his scram, neutraliser and tracking disruptor and the dance started. It was soon apparent that the Incursus was active tanked and the Condor was struggling to break that tank. And so the dance went on and on with Starwalker reloading his rockets and having to turn off the overheat to avoid burn out.

And it went on and on. Starwalker wondered whether he would run out of ammunition before getting the kill and then suddenly the Incursus armour stripped away into structure and it was all over - the Incursus was now a wreck. The pilot said that he had hit the wrong button and the killmail would show that it had taken nearly 10k of damage. Starwalker was so surprised that it had finished that he missed the pod but at least he could still loot the wreck.

As he went to the wreck he saw a Tristan arrive over 100km away and considered whether he should go for it immediately. However, he needed to let his shields recharge and repair the heat damage to his rockets and neutraliser, and so he warped to a safe.

As the shields returned to full health Starwalker decided that he would not wait out GCC to repair the overheat damage and warped back in. The Tristan was now 300km away and so he burnt towards it. The Tristan wanted to fight and Starwalker set his orbit to 5km and went in with rockets blazing. The Tristan was weak and very soon it was struggling for survival.

Starwalker approached as the Tristan burst into flames to get the pod. The pod appeared and he quickly tried to lock it - he got it. This was the first time Starwalker had caught the pod in a long time and he savoured the kill and scooped the corpse into his cargohold, a grisly momento of the kill.

The maiden flight of the Condor had been good and resulted in two kills. Perhaps the targets were not that tough but frankly Starwalker didn't care. He was pleased to have the kills and to have got the pod. He liked the Condor's speed, neutralising capability and damage projection with rockets but he also wanted to try out the Slasher.

Starwalker now had very few fitted ships at stations and no Slashers. So the first task was to define the Slasher fit and then buy and get a couple of those ships and fittings to a station. The recent spike in PLEX prices had netted a cool 1.3 billion ISK for two PLEX and so Starwalker could buy a lot of fitted T1 frigates with that.