Surviving Gate Camps

There was a time that Starwalker was almost guaranteed to have his ship destroyed by a gate camp and he had lost various frigates and cruisers over time. His flashy red status or security status of lower than -5 meant that anyone could engage him in sight of sentry (gate or station) guns without any CONCORD repercussion. Brilliant for a gate camp - it could simply wait and pounce on the flashy pilot.

Long experience, including a more recent Daredevil, had burned in some lessons and he now seemed to be generally surviving the simpler or more ad-hoc gate camps. His general approach was:

• On entry to a system with a gate camp or ships at the gate - hold cloak
• Just because ships were on the star gate it was not always a gate camp. It could be a fleet waiting at a gate or ships about to jump through or warp away
• Take time to check the type and position of the gate camp ships
• Usually it would be 12km back to the star gate
• One or more ships would be less than 20km away
• After about twenty seconds align to the entry star gate and burn back, using overheated propulsion
• One key reason to wait is to let the session timer expire to be able to jump back through the gate
• If locked, turn on defensive modules (damage control, boosters or repairers...)
• It might be a gate camp but they want a bigger or shinier ship.
• If not locked, when at the gate, align to the out gate and warp away
• Watch distance to gate and hit jump when less than 2.5km from it

The key decision - commit to return to the entry gate. On the occasions that Starwalker had attempted to make a run for it or to warp to the out gate or a nearby celestial - he had been caught. When he had been caught it generally seemed to be too late to try to burn back to gate. Those vital first few seconds mattered.

Even so, crashing the gate was not guaranteed to work, in particular:

• Insta-locking ships with high alpha or simply a single volley destroying the ship
• Stasis webifiers being applied very quickly and preventing the timely to return to the gate
• Neutralisers removing the capacitor charge and completely disabling the ship
• Ships on both sides of the star gate that are part of the same gate camp

Security status tags offered Starwalker an alternate approach to surviving a gate camp - raise his security status above -5. It was also a treadmill to maintain it above -5. However, Starwalker was contemplating it again as he now had another reason to want his security status above -5. He had recently bought shinier ships (Deimos, Stabber Fleet Issue, Megathron and Hyperion) and he did not want to lose them to gate camps. Losing them in a fight - no problem. Losing them to a gate camp - no fun.