Waiting sucks.

I'm a person who likes instant gratification when possible. I know that it leads to problems and frustration, but I just can't help it. What really isn't helping me right now, is that I decided it was a good idea to grab a Wolf and a Jaguar and fit them out, before I've trained my Assault Ships skill too high, currently it's training from III to IV. Once it gets there in two days, I'll start bringing them out. Getting to this point though also means I'll be spending more money (even though the Firetails I've grown to love, stupidly I might add, aren't cheap). This'll probably lead me to buying another PLEX before I start having a decent income. I was reading back through the Eve FNG archives and saw him talk about using PI to make money fairly passively. That really appealed to me, so, once I've got my AFIV trained, I'll be taking a break from my combat training to get that kind of thing going, and hopefully I'll be able to support myself on there without too much trouble, but that remains to be seen.

On to the meat of this post though, the fun with explosions in the world of Eve. Once again there were the regular non-descript kills that aren't really worth doing much of a write up, though with Michael Hickey, I will say he was polite after the fact, and I was glad to give him some advice after the fact.

I had been out roaming for a while when I was in Ostingele and saw two young pilots on scan, and they seemed to be moving around together flying an Incursus and Rifter. I scanned them down to a belt where they were ratting, and warped in. As soon as they noticed me though, they both aligned away and warped out in different directions, the rifter was the second to warp so I followed it to one of the planets and managed to get a scram on him as he was trying to align out. As my Autocannons started firing their hot metal towards the other pilots Frigate, he returned the lock and turned his guns on mine. Blasting straight through his shields and chewing through his armor quite quickly, my shields gave out as his hull blasted apart. Able to grab a point on his pod right away, and thinking the Incursus may just be coming I pop it, just as the Incursus actually does land. I right away empty the Republic Fleet Fusion I had in my autocannons, and load the Barrage ammo that had been collecting dust in my cargo hold for a while (I seriously need to remember to use it more often). Orbiting the Gallente ship at 5km with him scrammed and webbed all the while, he had still been able to do a little damage here and there to the armor on my Rifter, but not more then the ships repair systems could take. Once my guns had their ammo again and were able to rain hot death on the Incursus, it didn't last long. I once again managed to grab the pod, and invited him to our ransom channel, but his response was less then polite, and earned him a one way trip to the clone vat.

Looking back on that fight, I'm quite pleased with how I did all of that. Though both characters being very new at the time is probably the main reason I came out on top, my thought processing in taking the time to load barrage and change my orbit distance when I went to work on the Incursus was probably the right one. In the time before I had the range on him he had landed a couple pretty hard hits.

Flying around in the Amoen/Avaux loop, I saw Leif Nardieu  flying around in a Daredevil. After chasing him around for a while I saw him dock up, so I left myself parked outside the station in Avaux in my rifter. Usually I wouldn't even think of taking this fight on, but looking at his killboard he had lost a rather expensively, but not too well fit Daredevil previously. Soon enough he attacked, but I was also a little slow to react and get moving, so he got a few real nice hits on my stationary spaceship. Once I had my orbit, with my afterburners going though, his damage wasn't nearly so bad, and I started taking some good chunks of his shield off. The problem came in when all of a sudden, I lost my target on him. It took me a bit of time to clue in that he had ECM on this daredevil, I started spamming the lock button as soon as the cycle started to end, and his jam failed so I was able to start putting damage on him, and get my NOS helping my cap again. Getting a few rep cycles in again, we both entered structure at around the same time, when disaster struck, and he was able to get another jam on me. I was at around half structure yet when the cycle ended and I targetted him again, but it was too late, and he was able to drop me with ~1/2 structure left on his Pirate frigate.

Back in Avaux a couple days later, I saw a Navy Vexor on scan. Usually I wouldn't pay any attention to this, but it was named after the Pilot. I put out a call in our Corp and darmwand was nearby, and jumped into an Ishkur to try and take this expensive ship out. I scanned it down to a belt and jumped in. Landing 15k off I overheat my afterburner and point and go in, landing a point I settle into a 500 metre orbit, and start preparing for drones. I'm a little surprised when ECM drones come out, and start jamming me. Between trying to pulse my rep for the damage and trying to maintain a lock, I don't notice that she's actually using light blasters on this fit, and fail to adjust my orbit before my Rifter's hull gives out. darm was already in there working on the Vexor though, and had a point, so I warped my pod out and started heading home to Iges. Talking to darm over voice, he's doing fairly well against it, and had dropped a good number of drones to where she had started recalling them and sending them out again, letting him take even more out. I'm feeling pretty good that this will still end in a killmail, when he says he warped out, a Harbinger had warped in. He keeps on scanning and soon sees the Vexor's pilot in a pod and we both see ourselves on the killmail afterwards.

The next day in Iges I get on to find that atan had scanned down a Drake running missions there, but they had never managed to get a point on it when they tried to gank it. We went roaming for a while and didn't find much action, so we headed back home. Sitting there for a while, h0tsauce notices the drake back on scan, and warps to the mission right away, announcing pretty quickly that he has point, darm and I warp to him as fast as we can push our ships. We both land and get point as h0t says he's taking too much damage from the drones and is trying to get out, but sadly his Incursus doesn't make it, and that was also his last ship in system, so that leave my Firetail and darm's Ishkur to try and break this PvE tanked Drake. Neither of us are taking all that much damage after we had dropped the drones, so the only worry was if we actually could get through the passive tank. Nearing the 30% max regen point we both overheat our weapons, and the combined dps of his blasters and my autocannons push it over the edge, and his shields fail. His amour melts, and we get into hull, when we notice he ejects and gets his pod out before we have a chance to grab it. It's a free drake for us! The small problem was that neither of us, nor h0tsauce could fly it. hammerof thegods was a couple jumps out at the time, as he had gotten a GCC on our roam before that and had to wait it out. He offered to fly it back for us, so we left it's burning hull there in space, watching its shields regeneration. Eventually Hammer warps to us in his pod, but is also busy trying to link a build to one of the corp members, and doesn't go to board this drake right away. It's at this point that we notice another drake on scan. Another drake that's named after the pilot like this one was, to be specific. He lands and locks up his old ship, along with hammer's pod as HoG tried to board the abandoned ship. With the new circumstances though, apparently HoG couldn't get into the ship, so he was forced to warp out, so he jumped into a Jaguar and came back for the new fight. Right away we notice that this new Drake's priority is to take out his old ship, (he says something in local after about wanting the insurance money from it, plus something about his corp's ship replacement policy). With  HoG's and Maleficas' Jaguars now in addition to my Firetail and darm's Ishkur, we make fairly short work of the Drake's shields this time, but this time we invite him to our ransom channel, to see if he's interested in keeping it, for a price. Knowing his tendency to try eject and warp his pod out, after confirming that the others have point, I drop point and start watching for a pod to come out. He had never agreed to any of the prices we wanted for ransom, and it's about then that he ejected again, but this time as he tried to get out, he found himself on the receiving end of my warp scrambler. Noticing this, he right away got back into his drake, which we then proceeded to kersplode the Battlecruiser, but he manages to warp his pod away from the exploding wreck, even with a couple of us trying our darndest not to let that happen. Quite the series of events, 2 Drakes, 1 killmail.

And once again with that, this walloftext seems to be getting to the point I'm not sure if I should add anymore. If anyone has some feedback as to the length of these posts, It would be really good to hear if shorter/more frequent posts may be better then doing these larger posts a couple times per week.

Fly dangerous
'Chord