…And Execution (by missile fire)
The system of N6G-3C is an interesting one. It sits near one of the entrances to Venal and thus is a chokepoint for traffic, making it a logical enough gatecamp spot. But the particular brilliance of its choice lies not in its position but in the layout of the system itself. Most of the celestials in the system are clustered relatively close together, but the outbound gate on the pipe lies 20 AU away from the nearest object, well out of d-scan range.
This meant that when I jumped into the system and saw a lone member of White Noise in local, all of my warping around and d-scanning did me no good at all. I was fairly sure I had all the planets and asteroid belts covered in the course of my scans, and I had turned up nothing. At this point my best guess was that the WN pilot in local was a cloaked scout placed to monitor the movements of Northern Coalition fleets as they carried out operations against the WTF coalition’s assets in Venal, and that I would not get a fight out of him. With that in mind I shrugged and warped to the next gate in my route…
Right into the catch bubble of a Broadsword sitting some forty kilometers off-gate. I had forgotten that the next gate was not in d-scan range of a celestial, so I had no way to see if it was camped. A sensibly cautious pilot might have turned around rather than taking the risk of going through a gate he couldn’t check before proceeding. Caution is a difficult habit to acquire, especially in video gaming, when one is normally rewarded for having twitchy reflexes and diving into the thick of things.
Cursing, I aligned for the gate and turned on my microwarpdrive, knowing full well that it would be pointless to try to break a Broadsword’s tank and fully expecting that he would have backup coming in any second now. The best I could hope for was to burn for the gate and tank their DPS long enough to make my escape. The problem was that the Broadsword pilot, Econom, was even more clever than I realized: he had positioned his ship so that the shortest path through the gate would take me right past his ship. This allowed him to use a 9km-ranged warp scrambler to deactivate my microwarpdrive as I went by; a stasis webifier then stopped me dead in my tracks. At 75m/s, I would never make it the 35km remaining to the gate. There would be no escape, all I could do now is go down fighting and maybe take one or two ships with me.
Unfortunately for me, the White Noise pilots used a classic 3-ship gang setup: the gate flashed twice, and we were soon joined by fe25 in a Cerberus and Sascha Balkin in a Falcon. The Falcon ensured that it wasn’t even a fight, merely a textbook takedown after a perfect set-up. The Cerberus and the Broadsword laid on their DPS, and I was soon back in TVN station. The Broadsword’s bubble ensured that I couldn’t save my pod even if I wanted to.
I found myself longing for a Rook again, the higher sensor strength and ECM capability might have at least let me live long enough to kill the Falcon. My PVP losses were getting very expensive, but I found myself addicted to the thrill of solo roaming, and I knew that I would not give up. Plus, a reader of this blog had suggested a new Rook fitting that I wanted to try out, so it was not long before I undocked again…
