23 February 2013

Dont Shoot Back in Anger

Starwalker had one of those nights when he wished that he had not undocked. It would have been less expensive and embarrassing. A previous night he had undocked in a Hawk to the sight of a cyno-ship and decided that he would collect both the cyno-ship and the pod. This night he undocked in a Moa and noticed a Thorax on scan and shortly afterwards that Thorax was at the station only 30 km away.

Starwalker knew not to engage the yellow target - he needed to be fired on first so he contined to slowly move forward without the MWD wondering if the Thorax would engage. It started to close the distance and Starwalker overheated his guns and set his Adapative Invulnerability Field going. He wanted to conserve as much capacitor as possible before the fight and so he left his MWD off.


The Thorax engaged and Starwalker opened up the awesome firepower of the Moa's blasters. The distance closed to point blank and it was soon clear that Starwalker was winning the DPS race... until his friends joined in the form of two Tornados. Within seconds Starwalker's Moa was simply a wreck and he was racing away in his pod.

The silly thing was that Starwalker had previously seen the corporation I hope you were insured on a killmail in Covryn after they were talking some smack with a pilot that had not enjoyed being ganked by them. Starwalker had not taken the simple precaution of checking the corporation of the Thorax pilot. He could have easily done so and then seeing that his corp mates were in local, he could have guessed what would happen next and simply left.

Mildly annoyed with himself, Starwalker undocked in a Hawk and a few jumps later amused himself chasing a Maulus. It was something of a stalemate. The Maulus was far faster than the Hawk but the range of the Javelin rockets put the Maulus at risk of being destroyed and the Maulus's drones were too vulnerable to being destroyed to get a kill. Starwalker tried but was unable to slingshot him into range so eventually he gave up and moved on, especially when a bunch of frigates arrived on the scene.

Starwalker had been so busy with the Maulus that he hadn't noticed Johann West wave in local and noted that he was in an Incursus - Starwalker decided to keep a closer eye on communications. He also had some heat damage to repair so in the next system he docked to repair. Afterwards, he undocked to see Patrick Kasper in a Caldari Navy Hookbill shooting towards a Novice complex. Starwalker's Hawk could not go into that and so he headed away to the sun and thought about offering to fleet up with Patrick since they were in local.


However, before he had decided, he had started scanning from the sun as usual and noticed two Caldari Navy Hookbills at the Small complex. He immediately warped in. To his complete surprise when he arrived one of the two was Patrick Kasper. He attempted to target the other Hookbill but as he did so he realised it would be poor form to interfere with a kill. Worse, as he selected the target in his overview it switched to Patrick and so he ended up firing on a fellow Rebel. Starwalker had not made that type of mistake in over a year.

Starwalker was mortified and Patrick in the communication channel sent a message. Starwalker was even more surprised to see that Patrick's Hookbill had no damage when he had accidentally started firing. The Hookbills didn't appear to be fighting so he wasn't sure what was going on, until he read that these two Hookbills were apparently fleeted. Starwalker stopped firing as soon as possible on Patrick and simply wanted to leave. He wasn't sure if he had started firing on the other Hookbill but it was 10km away and was apparently a friendly too. He aligned back to the sun and hit warp - he had no intention of fighting friendlies.

His attention turned to the communication channel where he started to write an apology when he realised that he was still being fired on. He hadn't warped and either one or both of the friendlies had scrambled him. He was about to turn on his ancillary shield booster when his ship exploded. He should have paid more attention to getting out first and then apologising - that would have potentially saved his ship but in any case he would not destroy a friendly. Starwalker was hugely embarrassed at having fired on a fellow Rebel, the loss of the Hawk was incidental.

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