Return Journey from Rebel Roam

Starwalker had lost his Merlin during the Rebel roam and Johann West had kindly provided a blaster Incursus as a replacement. It was a good ship and the resistance, armour repairer based fit seemed perfectly reasonable. The only change that he would have made was to sport a Hobgoblin II instead of the Hobgoblin I. The Hobgoblin I choice was probably due to lack of drone skills and Starwalker remembered that these were some of the skills that he had trained later rather than earlier.

As he headed back to base he spied a Republic Fleet Firetail in a small complex and warped in. The Firetail was around 40km away and as Starwalker's afterburner fit Incursus burnt towards it the Firetail easily evaded capture with its MWD. Its artillery rained fire on the Incursus as the range oscillated between 15km and 24km. After multiple attempts to slingshot the Firetail into scramble range Starwalker gave up and looked for an opportunity to escape point.

A short while later he managed to escape and warped to the sun with Kaiirii in hot pursuit and also complaining in local that Starwalker was running from a fight. Starwalker evaded him again at the sun and docked up to repair the heat damage. Kaiirii followed up his initial complaint with an accusation of cowardice and Starwalker followed his standard practice... and ignored it.

What Starwalker took from the engagement was that he was not able to manually pilot an afterburner fit brawling frigate into scram range against a MWD fit kiting frigate. It was not just this fight but many engagements where he had not been able to achieve that. Perhaps it was weak manual piloting skills or perhaps it was not possible if the target paid attention to slingshot manoeuvres and took evasive action. In any case, Starwalker needed to rethink his approach to catching fast ships and what he would fly.

However, that would have to wait as he spotted a Heron in another complex and warped in. It was waiting for the fight and immediately locked up the Incursus and started to apply damage. Starwalker engaged, setting a close orbit and overheating the blasters. The Heron was tanking really well with what was clearly an ancillary shield booster but that would only last for twenty or so seconds.

The Heron piled on the hurt as it dropped its drones into the fight as well. The Heron was applying its damage against the Incursus armour and the small armour repairer was overheated to keep up with the incoming damage. It was a losing race. The range started to increase again to 4km as the Heron tried to mitigate incoming damage, even though it was tracking disrupting the Incursus.

The Incursus was in structure and the capacitor was dropping fast but the Heron was also in armour and had started to only pulse its shield booster. The afterburner was nearly burnt out but Starwalker had to close that distance and so he set the overheat on again knowing that within seconds the afterburner would be finished. But those seconds counted and now both ships were in structure.

The Heron suddenly exploded and it was over, the Incursus had just 35% of its structure left, lots of heat damage and the afterburner was burnt to a crisp. Good fight was exchanged in local but before Starwalker could loot the wreck a Caldari Navy Hookbill jumped in and it was an easy decision to leave immediately.

Back at base, Starwalker switched ships to the Caracal. It had been fit as a frigate killer and he wanted to get in a fight with a small number of frigates. Instead he found this cyno-ship and another cyno-ship. The extra tank on the cruiser made it very easy to kill these with no danger of dying to sentry guns.

However, the Caracal was about to meet its demise and it started with an Anathema in a medium complex. That ship died very quickly to the missile fire and the pilot must have been AFK as he could have escaped at 35km away when the shooting started. The danger though came from the Hawk that jumped in, piloted by Vivien Sureflight.

It immediately engaged just as the Anathema exploded and Starwalker opened fire with his Caldari Navy Inferno Light missiles. He would have preferred to be using the Mjolnir missiles but he didn't feel he had time to change them. In retrospect he should have taken the ten seconds to reload as thermal were the Hawk's highest resists. What Starwalker hadn't expected was how well the Hawk would tank and for how long it would continue to tank the incoming damage.

It became clear that the Caracal buffer was disappearing but the Hawk shields were still at full strength. Starwalker looked at the heat damage on the light missile launchers and noticed that they were showing around two-thirds of heat damage. So he decided to cut the heat immediately, except that it was at the start of the firing cycle and by the time the cycle finished so were the missile launchers.

It had been a long time since he had burnt out his weapons as he tended to stop overheating when they were about 50% cooked. It seemed to Starwalker that the last 50% went faster than the first 50%, although that could have been his imagination. He now had no offensive capability, all that remained was for the Hawk to chew through the rest of the shield buffer and so he waited for the inevitable end to arrive, which it did. Given how well the Hawk had tanked, Starwalker checked out the pilot and noted that she was top ranked and the last Hawk she had lost was using faction modules for a total cost of around 250m ISK.