9 January 2013

Mistake on Gate

Since Starwalker had a MWD Merlin fit from the TESF roam he decided to go into Syndicate with it and to see what fights he could find. He went to TXW-EI as it seemed it was not camped or at least had very few pilots in it from the map. He got to Vestouve and found a Malediction and Tornado on scan, they appeared to be together so Starwalker ignored them and jumped in to TXW-EI.

The system was camped and he had landed in a bubble with multiple ships but in particular a Sabre and two Vagabonds were close by. Close enough to get the scramble and kill. Starwalker did not panic and looked at his position and theirs relative to the gate and decided to run back to the gate.

He set his MWD to overheat, waited a little longer and then hit align and the MWD to get to the gate before he lost his propulsion module. The Sabre and Vagabond reacted quickly and he was locked and fired on but he was not scrambled and it was clear that he would make it to the gate as he had only lost 25% of his shield. He jumped.


The Malediction and Tornado were around 20km off the gate and Starwalker decided he needed to make a run for it so he aligned to a planet to the right and hit warp. There was no point in waiting as he could not go back into TXW-EI. The longer he waited the worse it might become as other gang members in TXW-EI jumped through. 

The Malediction was too far away to get the scramble and Starwalker felt that he had a good chance of either escaping or getting some distance and possibly killing the Malediction. The warp engaged and he was gone before either ship even targeted him. As he landed at the planet he warped immediately again to the sun - just as the Malediction came in. Local started to increase and Starwalker decided to get out of Dodge before he left in his pod.

Starwalker was pleased with himself for escaping and reshipped in Covryn to a Tristan, he was going to roam low-sec and wanted to be in an afterburner fit frigate. There were a number of gate camps around, especially in Heydieles and Old Man Star but they simply let his frigate go through. Presumably they were looking for bigger prey.


Starwalker scanned down an Atron who seemed to be ratting but when Starwalker jumped in it was nearly 300km away. The same thing with the same Atron happened at another asteroid belt and this time he burnt towards it hoping he was looking for a fight. He was. The Tristan released its drones and engaged. The Atron was held at 5km as the Tristan started to take damage. The repairer could not keep up as the armour melted and the first slivers of structure were exposed. But the Atron was suffering much worse under the relentless drone fire and it exploded first.

Starwalker was feeling very happy with himself and felt that he was really starting to improve. It was at moments like these that fate then plays it tricks - Starwalker was about to make a stupid mistake on a low-sec gate. The Incursus at gate was not red and he knew that he had to wait to be fired on before engaging it, however, Starwalker managed to convince himself that he had been fired on and engaged with his drones. The gate guns opened up and Starwalker knew that he had made a mistake and he aligned out and hit warp. He might just make it in time - if he was lucky.

The Incursus pilot could not believe his good luck and simply applied a scram and started firing but really just to hold the Tristan there. Starwalker could not warp away and the ship exploded within seconds from the gate gunfire. Baali Tekitsu asked why he had been aggressed, Starwalker had no good answer he had simply made a mistake.

If that mistake was using drones too early the next fight was using drones too late. He had arrived at the acceleration gate and warped through into the waiting Coercer. It was going to be a difficult fight anyway but Starwalker made it harder by launching his drones too soon i.e. not out of warp yet and of course the command was then simply ignored. Starwalker only realised that his drones were not fighting when his shield were gone - that was far too late for this Tristan.


No comments:

Post a Comment