A Fatal Pilgrimage, Part One: It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This

I have occasionally heard the Pilgrim’s virtues extolled as a solo ship: sure, it has next to no DPS to speak of, but it can sneak up on enemies undetected and wipe out their capacitor in short order, then let its drones peck away at them until they fall. By all reports it is an extremely tricky ship to fly but can be very rewarding. I’ve occasionally pondered the idea of giving one a try, and when I happened upon a rigged Pilgrim being sold for the cost of an unrigged one, I could not resist picking it up and giving it a try. I already had most of the fittings sitting in my hangar in TVN, looted from Curses long past, so I felt that I had little to lose.

I went on the great loop out from Vale of the Silent into Venal, from TVN to QFF to 3A1, and from there swinging down into H-PA, turning east again at P-F and back out of Venal at Y-W. Blue North was bloody Blue. Even H-PA, wretched hive of scum and villainy that it usually is, was full of friendly faces who waved in local as I went by.

Oddly enough I was just out of Venal, one jump back into Vale of the Silent, when I came upon a lone neutral. Cloaking my Pilgrim and hitting the d-scan, I saw a ton of wrecks and one lone Apocalypse in the area – with no POSes to be seen. I started moving around and trying to narrow down what belt the Apoc was in, expecting him to either log or zoom to a POS at literally any second. But today, for once, luck was with me as the Apocalypse kept right on ratting. I finally caught up with him in one of the lower belts, idly shooting at a two-battlecruiser spawn with a pair of attending frigates.

This was perfect. An unwary Apocalypse, that most capacitor-dependant of battleships, alone in a belt with no allies as far as the eye could see, and me in a Pilgrim able to leave him quite toothless and undefended. I couldn’t believe it! After two weeks of fruitless searching and upwards of a billion isk in losses, I had finally found what I had set out to find: a careless ratter and a decent ship to take him on with.

Of course, this is precisely where my brain ceased to function. The only thought left in my mind was OMG TARGET MUST ATTACK.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this post, in which the reader is given an object lesson in why it is important not to let eagerness cloud your judgement.