Today I spent a lot of time putting a Hulk in armor, but I couldn’t close the deal with my Prowler. I love that Minmatar pile of junk, but it doesn’t have the raw DPS that I can achieve in a Crane.
I’m not going to give the full battle report, because those are only fun when there’s a killmail. But in short, I found a Hulk mining in a belt, in an alliance, with a very young corpmate (alt) hauling for him. There was a transfer jetcan with some ore, which I took.
Hulk pilot thought long and hard before launching drones — a mix of Hammerheads and Warriors. The Warriors didn’t hurt much, the Hammerheads were painful.
I had to kill the Hammerheads. With a heavy missile launcher.
That was long and slow and painful and by the time I was done, I was missing most of my armor. He had at least one brief chance to flee when I lost cap for warp scramble, but he didn’t take it; that warned me he might have friends on the way.
Once I was shield-stable again and he was firmly scrambled, I began chewing on his shields. Bottom line: I needed to overheat my launcher to get it done. This is not something I’ve done before.
Once I got him into armor, I was low on missiles and ready for a new flavor. That’s when I screwed up. I accidentally loaded precisions instead of Navies in the new flavor. By the time I got that sorted out, he was back to half shield.
So, I turned on the overheat again, watching closely with an eye toward turning off the heat at the last possible moment to save my launcher.
I got rid of his shields and was literally mousing over to the button to turn off the heat — when my launcher finished overheating and died.
Game over, man. I broke my only tooth.
So, I started to warp way.
And it’s possible that was a good thing, because as I was aligning for warp, one or more corpmates of his finally arrived on the grid. I wouldn’t have had time to kill him, unmolested, anyway — although it’s possible I would have, if I hadn’t flailed the first missile reload.
Ah, well, combat lessons learned, at the cost of a 700k-ISK armor repair bill back at station. It’s cheap education.
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