Today I thought I’d lost another one of my beloved Cranes. Instead, the enemy fled.
I was out in the belts, when I found a Retriever barge pilot (Bibiss, [L-D-S]
He immediately warped away.
I went on about my business.
About four minutes later, in a different belt, the guy landed on my head. In a Wolf assault frigate.
It’s taken me some time to appreciate just how painful has been the loss of the innate warp stabilization that used to be built into the blockade runner hulls. Today the lesson was driven home. The Wolf locked me before I could warp out, and he (obviously) has the speed to keep me in lock range.
He began to shoot at me.
It’s possible his weapons skills suck, because it didn’t hurt very bad.
I began to shoot at him, with some precision heavy missiles. I was hitting him, but not very hard.
My shields went down a lot faster than his.
When my shields got down to about half, I turned on my shield booster. They crawled back to full before (just before) I ran out of cap. And then began to drop again as soon as I turned off the booster.
By this time, he’s down to about half shields, but to all appearances, holding. Of course, I don’t know whether he has cap issues, or what they might be; but I haven’t seen any sign of active shield tanking. The Wolf is Minmatar issue, so I’ve never flown it and have no idea how or whether it tanks, or what its fitting issues are. But isn’t it supposed to have plenty of DPS to kill a hauler?
He’s in a corporation, I can’t get away and I’m not killing him, he’s obviously having trouble killing me. But surely he has friends incoming?
This time, by the time my shields get below half, my cap isn’t fully regenerated; so I can tell that he can eventually break my tank if I don’t do something. It will take him a long long time, though. How much ammo is he carrying?
He’s not orbiting me at any great speed, just chasing; so after I shoot my launcher dry of precision missiles, I decide to load some regular ones to see how they hit him. He’s still just below half shields, and looking awfully stable there.
Just as my launcher finishes reloading, he … warps away?
Well, all righty then. I guess it’s time to go home.
I’ve studied the logs. In four minutes of combat, I hit him with 23 missiles, that mostly hit for 15-20 points of damage each, call it 375 points max.
In that same time, he hit me with 165 rounds of ammo, damage ranging from a low of 14 to a high of close to 40, with a strong cluster in the high 20s. At a guess, let’s say 4500 points. If he could have carried on for another four minutes, he’d have been close to having me.
Maybe he lost his nerve, maybe he ran out of ammo, maybe he despaired of breaking my tank. I guess I’ll never know. But I’m happy to have “driven him off”.
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January 19th, 2009 at 3:01 am
The Wolf is an armor tank – as you probably saw in the info, it only has 2 mid slots vs. 4 lows, which means if you want to, you can fit a fairly sturdy tank down there as well as a bit of ‘gank’.
I can think of only 3 reasons why the fight played out the way it did:
1. The guy came out in such a panic he forgot to load any ammo on board,
2. His skills were so horribly deficient he figured he may as well leave you to it and not risk losing his ship/time.
3. He had it fitted with civillian modules and warp stabilisers
Personally, I’d go with all of the above.
Good work! Once upon a time I despised ‘flippers’ and ‘pirates’, but they taught me valuable lessons and made me a better person, and we can all benefit from the clearer spacelanes ;)
January 19th, 2009 at 5:34 am
Any port in a storm, eh? :) Must have been nervewracking.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Thanks for the responses, guys. Yeah, it was a little bit nervewracking, educational the way getting caught always is.
I’m indeed suspicious that he may have come out with just the ammo in his guns, with no reloads; it’s an easy mistake to make when you leave the hangar in a hurry.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
You’ve rather annoyingly changed my mind on can flipping and I’ll stop whining that Empire miners should be helped out.
What’s more annoying is I’m starting to think about turning one of my two combat pilots into something far more fun and have her do the responsible thing. That is, cleaning up all those navigation hazards.
A wonderful blog. I cannot remember how I got here but I’ve spent the past hour or so reading back entries and I not only love the antics, I’ve rather enjoyed the style in which you present them.
Finally, I do so enjoy that you realise the first to lose is the first to resort to profanity. Together with that you not only enjoy a great fight and even look forward to wardec’s but you give credit when it’s due and play the sport well.
After all these years, it has taken only one blog to change a mind set in concrete with regard to can flipping – I salute you O7
January 30th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Thanks, Random! I’m glad you enjoy the blog and can appreciate the Ironfleet play.