Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

That would be: my shields.

I have been flying some Griffins and Blackbirds in faction warfare fleets, so (at the urging of some fleetmates) I decided to buy and fit up a Scorpion electronic warfare battleship. They are so cheap just now that if you insure them, and lose them, the insurance pays out enough to cover the cost of ship, insurance, and a full set of low-meta-level T1 fittings, making it a completely free ship to fly, or just a very cheap one if you get fancy with the fittings.

Took the fitted ship down to Nourvokaiken and stopped at the Tama gate to see what was up. A friend in a Raven was demonstrating EVE to a relative, and asked me to jump into Tama with him to provide a little cover and maybe get a little action on the Nourv gate. We did that, but nobody came to play, so we jumped back into Nourv. He docked, and I was planning to do likewise, when I noticed a flashing red target reticule on a neutral Megathron that was sitting there.

And then, as the saying goes, my shields began to melt like snowflakes in July.

It was a complete surprise and my reaction was one of barely functional panic. Our Gallente friends like to mock the Caldari style of play by talking about how we “roll our foreheads across the F1-F8 keys”. Well, that’s what I was doing.

I selected a random warp destination, gave the warp command, and began the slow and ugly battleship aligning process. (That thing is a flying PIGDOG, my BUSTARD aligns better!) Then I started mashing my jammers and seeing to the details of my tank. I honestly can’t say what he was hitting me with (there were drones involved too) but he was hitting me really hard. I don’t know if he got me warp scrambled (I assume he did) but when I dumped my whole rack of jammers on him, I got a successful jam cycle, which lasted until I was in warp.

It all happened very fast. He didn’t quite get through my shields, but there must have been some bleedthrough, because I had about five thousand ISK worth of armor scratches that needed repairing.

It turns out he was a pirate, name of Ujagar Sommdax, member of Earned In Blood [EARN], with a thirty million ISK bounty on his head. We had a fairly pleasant after-action convo in which he attempted to convince to come back and jam him again “just for fun”. (I declined.) He also expressed astonishment to learn that this had been my first-ever fight in a battleship. As for me, I was trying to find out how he could attack me in high sec without a Concord response, because he is not at war with me and not a member of the Gallente militia.

All he would say is that I “stole his cookies in low sec.” It is true that while out with an Achmed fleet last week, we did engage several neutrals who were attacking the fleet. So I checked the killboards. Ah, there he is. If memory serves, several neutrals were attacking fleet members, so the FC asked for volunteers to tank the gate guns and take them out. I volunteered; so presumably he got kill rights in that encounter.

Is there a way for an EVE player to check, via the interface, for active kill rights other people may have?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Today In Ironfleet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.