Thursday, March 20, 2008

Hey You! Come Kill Us!

Last night I log in to find a couple corp mates with a dilemma: the insurance is about to run out on one of each of their battleships. What should they do?

Well, there is only one thing to do: head to the local 0.0 hotspot and get themselves killed while taking out anything they possibly can. Hot damn, sounds like fun, sign me up.

I hopped in my Scorpion, threw in some ammo and Sensor Booster scripts, and headed out to the rally point. Our CEO and other director joined us as well, the former in his Dominix (not Dominatrix as I foolishly wrote a couple days ago... its easy to get confused, everyone just says "Domi") and the latter in a tech 1 throwaway Arbitrator cruiser. Along with my Scorpion and the original Dominix and Armageddon battleships, we're ready.

We jump into 0.0 from Torrinos (one of the few if not the only place where 0.0 and high sec border each other) and much to our dismay there is no gate camp. We wait a few minutes but it becomes apparent that no one is coming to play. So we start some playful banter in local chat.

"I'm in yur system... campin yur gatez"

"I'm limboing under the gate!"

"Can I be primary? I've never been primary before."

Who were we talking to? Well you see, one of the big scary alliances, Triumvirate, frequents this area and there is an outpost in system. With 15 people in local and only 5 of them us, we figured their intel channels were abuzz with comments like "who are these guys?!"

Eventually a Tri pilot in a Vagabond Heavy Assault Cruiser came out to check us out. I easily jammed him with one ECM but he wasn't there to tango, just to see what was up. I'm sure they scouted Torrinos to see if we had more hiding and waiting, but it was just us five suiciders (suicidees?).

After about twenty minutes and quick buzzes by the Vaga pilot and a stealth bomber and Covert Ops frig, it became apparent that they would probably not engage four battleships within range of jumping into high sec. And we really wanted to die. So we warped to the next gate into 0.0. I imagine the Tri pilots started to salivate as they watched us go.

We jumped into the next system, the Vaga keeping pace with us. We knew now it was only a matter of time. The gate activated and a Neutral Typhoon battleship appeared on the overview. Man, wrong place wrong time. We jammed, scrammed, and webbed that poor bastard and tore him a new one, but in the meantime gate rats took out our Tech 1 cruiser buddy. Ah well, one for one.

Then Tri decided to play. The gate activated... and activated... and activated. And in seconds my overview was filled with red flashies. And the one that caused the most fear in my heart was the Falcon.

You know what happens when two ECM jamming ships tangle with each other? The faster locking one wins. Well in Eve all things being equal smaller ships lock faster than bigger ones and even though I had two sensor boosters, he probably only needed one to lock me faster and jam my ass making my ship the biggest and most useless battleship within ten jumps. To rub salt in the wound, besides the Falcon pilot they ignored me; they knew I was out of the fight. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the Falcon had all Caldari racial ECMs.

My compatriots put up a fight taking a ton of damage but as you can see from the kill mails we were heavily outnumbered. On the upside, we took down a Rapier before dying which made everyone's day. Hell, going on a suicide mission and dying was the plan, getting the Rapier and the Typhoon was pure bonus.

What happened to me? Well, I was jammed as Tri brought it and I decided to jump back through the gate as I wasn't doing anything on this side. I suppose I could have stayed to keep the Falcon busy but I wanted to be more than a static piece of scenery. On the other side there was a bubble and a Devoter Heavy Interdictor (not sure if the bubble was from him or not). I engaged despite knowing that I had the damage of a wet paper towel, but if one of my gangmates jumped in perhaps the Devoter would go down. An enemy Taranis showed up but an Interceptor that I could easily jam was the least of my concerns. On Vent I heard the rest of the gang die in fits of laughter, and a Scimitar showed up on scan, so I decided there was no point dying when I could not take anything with me so I warped back to the Torrinos gate and made my escape.

That's right. I failed at the mission objective by surviving. Of course, I might have been motivated by the fact I was still in my +4 implant clone just a little, but only at the end when it became apparent everyone else was dead and I had no chance of getting a kill before death.

It was an exciting adventure and I got in on another kill which was nice (I missed out on the Rapier being jammed to hell and all).

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