The Breacher was a good frigate that had a bonus to shield repair making for a very strong tank for a brawler. This shield tank could also be combined with either a small ancillary armour repairer or armour buffer to add a little extra staying power for difficult fights. This was the fit that Starwalker used:
[Breacher, ABSAARMASB]
Damage Control II
Ballistic Control System II
Small Ancillary Armor Repairer
1MN Afterburner II
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
Medium Ancillary Shield Booster
Rocket Launcher II, Inferno Javelin Rocket
Rocket Launcher II, Inferno Javelin Rocket
Rocket Launcher II, Inferno Javelin Rocket
Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Small Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I
Hobgoblin II x1
Hobgoblin II x1
It died to a kiting light missile Condor because it had no way to hit the target at around 22km (Javelin only reached out to around 15km) and despite a strong tank it could be worn down and eventually destroyed. The Condor's applied DPS with Caldari Navy Scourge Light Missiles could be seen as around 40 DPS:
Whilst that average might be a little high it also gave an indication of why the Breacher died, it could not sustain its tank indefinitely:
- Medium Ancillary Shield Booster had charges and once those charges were exhausted then the remaining shield (and ship) would be destroyed very quickly
- Small Ancillary Armour Repairer could temporarily repair (52 HP x 3 Boost / 4.5 Second Cycle Time) 34 HP/S for 36 seconds (8 Charges x 4.5 Repair Cycle) and then would stop for 60 seconds whilst it reloaded its Nanite Paste
- Heat would increase the repair amount but would also only provide temporary relief until the module was either burnt out or returned to its normal level of operation
To survive a kiter wearing down a tank required the repair cycle being sustained indefinitely above the level of incoming damage. (It was generally useless to expect the kiter to run out of ammunition as those pilots were prepared to wear down the target and knew that they needed plenty of ammunition.) Replacing the Small Ancillary Armour Repairer with the best of the best - a Corpii A-Type Small Armour Repairer - would not help because:
- Corpii repaired 135 HP every 4.5 seconds for a sustained tank of 30 HP/S - it too would die to the light missiles it would just take a little longer
To try and improve the Breacher tank was difficult:
- More buffer (armour plates) would have no significant impact to the outcome
- Second armour repairer might help but would completely change the fit
- More resistance, in this case kinetic and thermal resistance would again completely change the fit
- Increased speed would mitigate some damage, requiring either implants, boosters or faction modules
- Reduced signature would help and could be most easily achieved with boosters or implants
Since improving the tank would be difficult and improving the range was impractical it left only two options
- Avoid engaging kiting ships in a brawler
- Exploit a tactical advantage such as when a kiter landed at a warp-in point and was potentially in scramble range, even if only temporarily
Starwalker was out and about in his shiny Wolf. It had been fitted out with auto-cannons, in line with his preference to fly brawling ships and fitted with brawling in mind. This particular Wolf also took advantage of the extra CPU that came with the implant set of Genolution Core Augmentation CA-1 and CA-2. For Level V skills only, then the Tracking Enhancer would be downgraded to the meta level 4 version:
[Wolf, MWDEVSAAR]
Damage Control II
Explosive Plating II
Gyrostabilizer II
Tracking Enhancer II
Small Ancillary Armor Repairer, Nanite Repair Paste
Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet Phased Plasma S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet Phased Plasma S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet Phased Plasma S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet Phased Plasma S
Small Diminishing Power System Drain I
Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I
Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
The demise of this Wolf was unfortunately not a glorious death in a fireball of destruction after a close battle. It was foolishly caught by a light missile Condor. Starwalker had been distracted by picking up some drones and his drone overview did not show any ships. In short, he had not seen the Condor arrive - until it had established its lock, and then started to fire. Those were potentially very expensive drones.
Whilst the Condor started to peck at the Wolf's shield it also applied a tracking disruptor and Starwalker knew that his only chance was to escape, if possible. With the tracking disruptor applied he was applying no appreciable damage and whilst the incoming damage was modest it was working its way through the defences. It would only be a matter of time before the tank was overwhelmed.
The first slingshot failed and his small ancillary armour repairer was running low on charges, the second sling shot failed and his armour repairer was exhausted and it had started its reload cycle. It didn't matter, that reload cycle would never finish as the proud Wolf was going down and it died with a whimper.
That was EVE with its Rock Paper Scissors philosophy at work. The Wolf had met an asymmetric opponent, where the Wolf was designed to brawl the Condor was designed to kite. In theory the Wolf could strike the Condor at any range up to 30km away but the tracking disruptor stopped that. If the Wolf could scramble the Condor it would die but if it could maintain its range control then the Wolf would die.
It was a similar story to how Starwalker's Daredevil was killed. He had moved in towards a Tristan without taking a simple precaution - what guns were fitted. The Look At function would have shown a Tristan with no guns fitted and therefore almost guaranteed that it was fitted with a trio of energy neutralisers.
The Daredevil found out the hard way that its on paper over-heated damage of around 450 DPS (and nearly 500 DPS with a couple of implants) is zero when it has no capacitor. Like the Wolf this Daredevil exited EVE with a whimper too.
Starwalker was cruising in his Hawk and looking for trouble. He had refit his Hawk away from the previous MWD fit to an afterburner, two webs and to have slightly more tank. The basic rationale was that he needed range control when brawling and the Javelins could keep kiters away.
Recently he seemed to have run into more kiters and generally fast ships in lowsec, although perhaps that was also because he had been chasing faction warfare pilots. It seemed to Starwalker that he was far more likely to find a fight at a complex than anywhere else currently. He did scan the belts from time to time but he had found zero ratters or anything else for that matter.
He spied a Slasher at a small complex and warped in to find a... Tristan. Starwalker wasted no time wondering about the Slasher and immediately locked up the Tristan, it was soon scrambled, double webbed and taking heavy damage from the rockets. But it wasn't alone and a Rifter, Condor and a Griffin landed close by. Before they could really help the Tristan went down.
Starwalker was firing close range Rage rockets and so attacked the Rifter next, which had come in to 2km, whist the Griffin and Condor were around 15km away. This proved fruitless as the Griffin jammed the Hawk and Starwalker tried to align out to make a desperate run for it. In hindsight, he should have moved in towards the Griffin as he had one more brief window of attack but wasted those shots on the Rifter rather than the real problem - the Griffin. The Hawk was jammed again and then was finally destroyed.
Starwalker jump cloned to Gultratren and undocked his Tristan, using the fit with the web and small armour repairer. Before long he saw a Condor, piloted by Malfyrion, in a complex and warped in. The target was 20km away and so he launched his drones and tried to get closer but the Condor was going at 4.6km/s. That was so fast that the Hobgoblin IIs could not catch up and hit it. Starwalker tried to slingshot in but unsuccessfully and then after some manual flying managed to breakout of range. He succeeded but suspected that Malfyrion had burnt out his long point with all of the manoeuvers. It was a lucky escape as the Tristan was about to run out of capacitor and the ship was already in structure.
A short while later, after getting fully repaired, Starwalker's Tristan warped in to a Kestrel at a complex. The Kestrel again maintained range and Starwalker was again unable to close the distance but this time the Hobgoblin's were inflicting their thermal damage. The Kestrel called for support and an Atron arrived on the scene and started to target the Tristan and so Starwalker decided it was time to head away rather than try to slingshot the Kestrel again.
The Kestrel was deep in armour and decided to beat retreat but the Atron continued to hold point. The drones attacked the Atron and after receiving some damage it decided to leave. Starwalker had now had a second escape from a kiter but luckily got this killmail later when that Atron must have run into a Heron whilst still damaged and was then killed.
Starwalker decided it was time to return to base before one of these kiters destroyed his Tristan when he saw another Tristan when scanning from the sun. He waited at the sun and before long the Tristan, piloted by Destru Kaneda, arrived only 40 km away. Starwalker moved in with his Hobgoblins first and then tried to close into point blank range. Destru had other ideas and the distance was held around 7 to 8km and Destru had also released his Warrior IIs.
Starwalker was slightly surprised to see Warrior IIs as he had assumed that Hobgoblins were the best general choice but on later examining the Tristan's resistance profile - explosive damage was better for armour tanked Tristans. Given that Starwalker's electron blasters were out of range of the target Tristan he set to work on the drones and killed five drones. Initially, he used his web on the enemy drones but in retrospect he should have left it on the Tristan.
In the meantime, both ships were going into structure and it was going to be very, very close. Destru moved in to 5km and Starwalker switched from the remaining three drones to Destru's Tristan and also applied the web. Both ships marched towards zero structure and it looked like Starwalker's Tristan would explode first but a final lucky hit saw Destru's Tristan explode into a fiery ball of flames and his remaining warriors hung limply in space. Good fights were exchanged and Destru noted that it was the closest fight he had been in for a long time. It was the closest fight ever for Starwalker - he had just 4% of structure left.
Peri Simone started the Target Everyone Somebody Fire (TESF) R1FTA roam a long time ago and when the R1DER alliance was started the invitation was extended to all alliance members. This had become a regular roam where usually Peri would FC but anyone could volunteer to FC and The Strabusiness stepped up to the plate last Tuesday.
Kane the Black and Zodiac Black performed sterling service as the scouts and The Strabusiness did a good job as the FC. The Rebels would take down any larger ships that they could find or engage other gangs but on this occasion despite the odd shenanigans there was no big fight. A couple of Coercers were the fleet victims:
- Coercer piloted by Yoyomommy was sitting in a complex and got tackled. He died extremely quickly, so much so that a number of the gang were not able to get in on the kill
- Coercer piloted by Dante Vicari was playing station games and had a battlecruiser with him but when the Rebels arrived they scarpered - to the sun. This was such a common escape point that it was not a good escape location and the Coercer was caught there and then left to its fate by the battlecruiser
Starwalker had docked up in Ishomilken after the TESF roam and the following day he was returning to base when he was caught by two Condors. He tried unsuccessfully to slingshot into range but the distance never closed to less than 16km and he was unable to escape the long point so his trusty Merlin was gone. Some small compensation was had by killing this Slasher with a Tristan but as Starwalker flew the Tristan he considered whether he needed to fly a frigate with a micro-warp-drive (MWD), scram and web combination to catch those pesky kiters.
The problem with using a MWD fit frigate in lowsec was that it sacrificed range control to a frigate with an afterburner, scram, web combination. Starwalker had nearly always flown with an afterburner brawler fit in lowsec and had only really used a MWD in nullsec on the rare occasions he flew in that space. He had learned the hard way that burning out of a bubble with an afterburner was painful and getting to a target fast was needed in nullsec. In short, almost everyone used a MWD in nullsec, except perhaps for surprise value or due to ignorance of nullsec bubbles.
Using a MWD frigate within a TESF roam would be no problem and indeed Starwalker had already used one to act as fast tackle if needed. Generally in a TESF roam Starwalker had always flown with a ship that he would use solo, which seemed to be generally accepted practice. The TESF roam had always been popular within R1DER and it was largely composed of solo (frigate) pilots who came together sometimes for small gangs, so these fleets tended to be simply a collection of solo pilots looking for action together. An FC and scout/tackle would be identified and then the gang, usually composed of various frigates would head out into space.
Employing fleet doctrines, roles, ships and fits based around combining logistics, scouting (beyond +1), fleet tackle and damage dealers was largely alien to R1DER. Similarly alien was using fleet tactics such as hot drops, bombing runs, black ops or capital ship engagement. Indeed Starwalker had not actually seen a RIDER or R1FTA fleet that actually had a battleship and Starwalker was fine with that. If he wanted that experience then he would join a nullsec alliance and respond to the Call to Arms (CTA) at whatever time needed.
Starwalker liked being solo with very few real rules and with like minded people. He enjoyed the small gang culture and sometimes combining with other Rebels if they happened to be in the same area or going on a TESF roam. The composition of R1FTA and R1DER had changed over time and in particular core R1FTA members like Miura Bull, Kaeda Maxwell and Lhorenzho have recently moved on. But Starwalker felt that the core principles had remained the same
- Fly what you want, where you want, when you want and how you want
- Honor 1v1 and ransoms
Starwalker wished all ex-Rebels well and hoped to see them back in R1DER in the future.
Starwalker had been wandering around Placid for a while and had terrorised a few plexers but some of those ships had not even been armed, reducing the fun factor. Most of the time they simply ran away as soon as they were aware that they were not alone. On occasion, some waited until the last minute to warp away - a sort of FU.
The really clever ones would wait until they were engaged and fired on and then warp away courtesy of their warp stabilisers. The beauty of this last method meant that the aggressor had GCC and had to wait it out - the best FU, as the aggressor didn't even have a kill to show for the wait.
Of course, some plexers were acting as bait, waiting for an aggressor to arrive and that was the equivalent of waiting at the sun or the top belt for them. A chance to turn the tables where the hunter becomes the hunted, especially if the hunter has fit the ship specifically to catch plexers or overcome a single warp stabiliser.
Starwalker had killed this Incursus but there wasn't a huge satisfaction in it as it wasn't even armed and could not fight back. The problem was that these easy kills had lulled Starwalker into a false sense of security as he rarely ever encountered someone looking to kill the hunter. Indeed, he had modified his overview to show the NPCs as he was in more danger from them rather than the plexer.
It was with this overconfidence that Starwalker entered a plex and saw a Rifter 60km away. He started the burn towards it and decided that he would wait until the last moment to target it and use his scrambler first. There was no real reason to do that - just a different way of locking up the target and scrambling it, an experiment with a different method. The one notable difference being that targeting happened at the last moment or within 10km rather than 20km or 30km away.
The trouble was - it all went horribly wrong. The Rifter may have been looking for a fight but Starwalker wasn't 100% sure and as his Condor got close he got locked up by NPCs and his auto-target locked them back. This setting worked well in PvP but it was not so useful with NPCs in close proximity.
Unfortunately everything was in close proximity and just as Starwalker was targeting the Rifter with his scrambler the position of the ships changed in the overview and Starwalker had started to lock an NPC instead. These precious few seconds lost was not good. Worse the targeting had to be started again adding more seconds of delay.
The damage was coming in thick and fast and Starwalker set the ancillary shield boosters going. As the wasted seconds ticked by Starwalker had to waste some more time to select the Rifter to fire on. And by this stage the Condor was nearly running out of shields and the booster was running low but he opened fire anyway and started to neut the Rifter.
Starwalker realised that it was all too little too late, you simply could not waste 7-10 seconds in a 20-30 second fight and his Condor burst into flames whilst the Rifter was still in armour. Disappointed at his lack of dexterity and over-confidence Starwalker's pod streaked away to safety.
In retrospect, Starwalker should have:
- Targeted the Rifter much earlier, there was no special reason to wait. This was especially important if NPCs were in the overview and close by
- Recognised immediately that he was at a disadvantage with the targeting error and align out to get some distance and possibly escape as needed. Instead Starwalker had continued to orbit at 500m, which was unnecessary in a rocket ship and benefited the Rifter
- Rifters with autocannons should have been engaged at around 5km anyway to reduce the effectiveness of their autocannons. He should not have been lazy and left the orbit set to 500m. He had 500m set to reduce ability for targets to run away but in reality that rarely ever happened once plexers had been engaged
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.
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...
Starwalker had been planet-side for a couple of weeks and had missed the excitement of the war declaration with Eve University, although he had contributed to the war effort with ISK. He found his trusty little Merlin still docked with the burn marks from its last dance with death. It was good to be back.
Undocking in the Merlin Starwalker slipped into the black of space looking for his next fight. He wandered over to Eugales and then down to Agoze and Ouelletta. The controls seemed sluggish and he made a mental note to have the ship serviced when it was docked, perhaps the last fight had left more than a few burn marks.
A cynosaural beacon suddenly appeared on scan and the temptation to go and blast it was too much, Starwalker warped in to zero and found a Condor along with an Archon. Starwalker decided to engage immediately and overheated his blasters but forgot to get his damage control unit cycling. The Condor went down fast but without any protection from the sentry guns the Merlin was having new holes added to its hull.
Starwalker had aligned out quickly but it was too late, with the next shot the Merlin exploded just before it could warp to safety. If the DCU had been cycling Starwalker knew that he would have survived as his blaster boat put out some horrendous DPS but as a glass canon it was very vulnerable to being shattered. These were the perils of stupidity - it could result in silly losses.
It was not all bad as Starwalker knew that the ship was lost, it was only a question of when but clearly it would be better to lose it in a fight than to stupidity. However, he did remember that Lhorenzho had commented that shooting cyno ships was dicey in T1 frigates as sentries could easily spoil the getaway. That was not the lesson here, the lesson here was to turn on the tank before engaging the cyno ship. Since sentry guns could easily destroy a frigate - speed was of the essence.
Starwalker also needed some more T1 frigates as that was his last one in station. Before making that new purchase it was also worth considering whether his next Merlin should use a more standard shield extender fit or perhaps try a new module - an ancillary shield booster. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
