Success at last.
VICTORY FOR ZIM!
I have just returned home to TVN after getting my first solo battleship kill:
http://kb.epime.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13156
I was hunting in Venal, and was actually feeling quite disheartened as I had seen more members of my own alliance, which doesn’t even live in Venal, than I had of actual targets thus far on the roam. Indeed, I had only left a system where some of my alliance mates were ratting two jumps before when I entered the system of D-SKWC and saw a neutral in local. “Brutal angels” was not on scan, but I saw a great many wrecks.
When using the d-scanner, it is very important to use not only direction and distance but the process of elimination. What celestial objects are NOT in range of your scan? Could your enemy be near one of them? In this case, I got lucky: there were only three belts that were not in scan range, and I picked one at random and warped to it at 0.
While in warp, I spammed the scan button as I crossed the system. I soon saw more wrecks… no control towers… and one Raven. Oh, this was too good to be true. I could only hope that he didn’t warp out or cloak up before I landed.
As it was, this poor fellow made the three mistakes that doom a ratter: he was sitting at 0 on the belt warpin point, he was not aligned, even though his cruise missiles had the range to hit across the entire belt, and he was not watching local. I landed a bare 4 kilometers from him, and was pleased to see that he had full aggro from a small battleship spawn. This really was as good as it could get: he almost certainly had very poor resists to EM, if any at all, so I might be able to finish him very quickly. And then there was my little insurance policy.
Switching from Scorch to high-damage Amarr Navy Multifrequency crystals, I pointed him and opened fire as soon as I achieved lock. I activated my stasis webifier a moment later, wanting to make sure that he was pointed before I used it in case it let him instawarp. It is worth noting at this juncture that I fit both a 24km point and a 10km scram on my Harbinger, and I used both on Brutal’s Raven, which turned out to be prudent since he had a warp core stabilizer fitted.
The bar of red denoting the Raven’s shield level dropped in large chunks with every cycle of my pulse lasers. I was hitting for over 1000 hitpoints of damage per volley – exactly what I wanted to see, as it meant that he had no EM shield resists at all. The DPS of the rats helped as well, cruise missiles slamming into him periodically and weakening his shields.
That didn’t mean I was going to leave anything to chance, however. I deployed my insurance policy, a flight of five Vespa EC-600 ECM drones, and I immediately saw the enemy Raven stop shooting the rats. He never resumed firing again and never locked me – I can only assume that my little drone friends actually kept him jammed throughout the entire encounter. I also turned on my energy neutralizer, as I had plenty of capacitor to spare at this point, and it couldn’t hurt. If he had an XL booster fitted, it might be the little bit needed to make him cap out.
As it turned out, he only had a large shield booster fitted, and his tank was not even remotely able to handle the DPS anyway. The damage slowed down a bit when I hit the 50% armor resistance wall, but even at half DPS his armor quickly dwindled. I started doing full damage again as soon as he hit structure, and only a few seconds later the Raven blew apart in that beautiful blue-white flare of plasma and spinning wreckage.
Sadly, I actually lost one of my loyal little Vespas to rat aggro before I could recall them, as the frigate rats targeted them immediately. But ECM drones are so cheap as to be practically free, and the T2 hardeners and cruise launchers would recoup the loss many times over. Proudly proclaiming my success in corp chat, I turned my Harbinger around and set a course for home, knowing that I had finally succeeded in my stated goal of ganking a ratting battleship solo.
