A Night of Firsts

Plas was online, I had a new lowsec Sabre fit I wanted to try.  That’s pretty much all the excuse we needed for a roam :)  Dual-boxing Bruce in the Sabre and my alt in a covops in case we needed probes proved to be both challenging and rewarding.

Just a few jumps from home Plas caught a Merlin napping in an anomaly.  Unfortunately the Sabre was too big for the gate, so Plas had to burn him solo without me whoring the killmail.  Plas is such a nice pirate, he even finished the guy’s mission for him during his GCC.  Bless.  He was kinda new.

More jumps, yada yada, nothing. I did have a flashy cane try to alpha me at a gate, knocking off half the Sabre’s shields before I jumped, and Plas almost caught a Manticore, but otherwise it wasn’t until I’d docked up at home and Plas just nipped into the next door pocket that we noticed a Thorax in a mission.  Screw bedtime, let’s break out those probes.

Plas narrowed him down with D-scan to somewhere on a line from the sun to the gate, 12AU from the sun and slightly below ecliptic. Not wanting to spook the cruiser, he jumped out and my alt came in with his pimp Sisters-fit Cheetah.  Starting at the recommended spot at 2AU and working fast, nothing on the first scan. Up to 4AU, a double ping. Now he knows we’re here if he’s on the ball. Refine, resize (THANK YOU CCP for the new resize controls) and shortly had him 100%. Quick bookmark and recall probes, and warp in cloaked for a look.

Acceleration gate. OK, now he’s seen probes and he’s got a Cheetah on d-scan. But he’s still there.  Warp in, cloaking en route, and there he is – 100km away, in a cloud of wrecks and fighting 3 battleships.  Too close for a warp-in, we’ll have to charge it and hope he’s asleep.

I park the alt and focus on Bruce, jumping the Sabre in and warping with Plas to the alt, jumping the gate on contact.  MWD on, almost certain that we’ll be blue-balled as the Thorax would surely notice 2 ships on grid, including a feared Dramiel now hair on fire coming at him at over 5km/sec. 75km… 50km… 30km… point. We couldn’t believe it.

A tech 1 fitted Thorax against a Dram and Sabre was only ever going to end one way.  He was cool about it, and we had a little dig at his corpie in system who didn’t even undock.

My first dual-box kill, and first kill in the lowsec fit Sabre (all my others have been bubblies). First kill I’ve personally probed down.  Plas’s first cruiser kill in the Dramiel. Win.

To quote Lady Shaniqua: GF GF

The Eve Gate Pimp Roam

It was time.  Plastician’s birthday Dramiel needed to be blooded and all of the scooby gang was online and itching for a fight.  So the great Pimp Roam began.

I had my trusty Firetail, Brep in his Comet, Kim in a Thorax (he’s new, it’s his pimpest ship) and Jesse’s Malediction. We decided to take a slightly different route to the usual one up to Old Man Star, instead hitting some quieter lowsec in the hope of avoiding the T3 blobs. It wasn’t far before we ran into a Rifter in a belt, which we promptly sploded.  Weird fit huh? Seems to be specifically fit to kill Dramiels, going by his recent losses :)

Further down the pipe we bounced some miners, but even the “jump in and everyone scatter to a different belt” method of trying to surprise them wasn’t enough.  It felt very eerie down in that part of space, we could almost hear the banjos. Brep has a purty mouth too, so we got out of there stat.

We did eventually nab a Stabber off a planet, but it was way too fast for the rest of the gang and Plas was taking a lot of fire solo with the tackle.  I’d warped away to come in to Plas at 0 hoping for a lucky scram/web, which would have shut down the Stabber nicely, but the risk of a dead Dramiel was too much and we let him go.

Ibis at the sun? Yes, it was bait. Or a very interesting coincidence that the flashy Typhoon decided to attack that Ibis at the same time.  No casualties, but we couldn’t take a phoon.

The beginning of it all

By now we were very close to the Eve Gate and close to the end of the roam, and some of the gang had never seen it, so we detoured down the pipe.  It was very active with campers, and we were pursued on the way out again, losing Kim’s Thorax to a well planned camp.  Not a great way to end the roam, but we all pitched in to replace his losses so no harm done.

this is what we do to poor defenceless miners

Splode them.

Wtf you’d be solo mining in lowsec baffles me.  Not a word in local from him, though he did warp his pod out and then, strangely, back to the wreck.  Macroer?  I had to laugh though when I checked the stats of his alliance.

Few milestones here: Bruce is, for the first time, negative sec (-0.01!).  It was Kim’s first kill, and Brep’s first in a long while.

Fun little roam up through Old Man Star and back through upper Placid.  OMS was disappointing as usual.  Maybe it’s just our timezone.