solo roams
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.
Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you. And sometimes..
…The bear slips on a banana peel and falls in the river.
So it was when I ran into a Solar Fleet gang while roaming in my Harbinger. I was in NJ4 in warp to the G9D gate, and Solar started jumping in while I was in warp to the gate. Landing, I discovered a Malediction, a couple of Stilettos and a couple of Sabres waiting for me. I wondered if this was all there was to it – a small, very very fast roaming gang. I sat on the gate and waited to see if they would all aggro me, or if one of them would be smart and hold off to pin me on the other side.
Well, to my considerable gratitude, they all aggroed me, and I jumped through as one of the Sabres tried to bump me off gate.
On the other side, I saw a nightmare list of a dozen HACs and battlecruisers. In a token attempt, I warped to a planet at 100.
My velocity indicator was at 50% when the fastest lockers acquired me and started firing. I expected to see it start to dwindle as more and more of them locked on, waiting for the little warp scrambling icon to appear next to them in my overview. Soon, every one of them was firing, and my armor was starting to go down fast.
And then I went into warp.
The Solar gang apparently didn’t put any tackle on their DPS ships… and then let all their tackle get stuck with aggro on the far side of the gate. Oops! Making safespots, I bounced around till my aggro timer ran out and logged. Not a good fight, but a lucky escape.
In Which Our Hero Achieves Partial Success
A pilot named Dolmatin from the rather uniquely named Orange Orchestra corporation went on a rampage in Vale of the Silent and Tribute, killing ratters and generally wreaking havoc. He was showing off how the combination of speed, DPS and capacitor independence makes the Hurricane an excellent solo ship while ripping to shreds or running away from everything that came after him.
I could not allow a challenge like this to go unanswered. Hopping in my latest experimental solo Rook fit, a lightly tanked version optimized for DPS and truly serious ECM capability, I went after him. The merry chase went on for five jumps out of Majesta Empire space and into Morsus Mihi’s section of Tribute. As I chased the Hurricane he managed to kill a Morsus Falcon (which I can only assume was asleep at the wheel or something) before I finally caught up to him.
The Hurricane managed to warp before I could lock him not once but twice; only my T2 cruiser’s superior warp speed allowed me to keep up with him. Just past the border to Venal, he decided to stop and fight me, as we were alone in system and it had become obvious that I was burning after him alone.
His first volley put me at half shields, but it didn’t matter – he never got a second volley. I put a Minmatar racial jammer on him and he did not get to fire another shot. Instead my Hobgoblin IIs screamed out and orbited him while I slammed him with Caldari Navy Thunderbolt missiles. He activated his microwarpdrive and started orbiting, trying to lessen my DPS while waiting for me to miss a cycle, but to no avail.
Dolmartin soon did the smart thing and aligned to warp out, his MWD letting him burn out of my disruptor’s range easily enough, and he fled the field just as he entered armor. I couldn’t fault him for withdrawing at that point; it was the only sensible thing to do, and while I would have loved to have gotten a kill on him I will content myself with having won the engagement and driven him off. I pursued him as long as I could, but he was soon long gone.
A Fatal Pilgrimage, Part Two: Scream And Leap
In Larry Niven’s classic science fiction setting Known Space, there exists a race of felinoid aliens called the Kzinti. Highly aggressive and territorial, the Kzinti are the principle antagonists of Humanity. They have every advantage: they are bigger than humans, stronger than humans, have faster reflexes, are a culture totally dedicated to warfare, and have been a spacefaring race far longer than humans have. Yet the humans win every time for one simple reason – we stop and think, we plot and plan.
A Kzin, when presented with a target of opportunity, screams and leaps.
This is an instinct which is present in humans as well, albeit to a lesser degree, and it is one which a soloist must eliminate in order to be successful. One must learn to resist the temptation to pounce blindly on an enemy ship. A soloist must stalk, slowly and carefully, sometime over a period of hours, waiting for just the right moment to strike when one’s target is at the point of greatest disadvantage.
Unfortunately, upon sighting that Apocalypse I felt millions of years of evolution and the entirety of my frontal cortex melting away in a single instant. I had more in common with my cat trying to catch a moth than I did with a reasoning human being.
In short, I screamed and leapt, decloaking and siccing Hornet EC-300 ECM drones on him while my energy neutralizers did their work. This part of my gambit worked: the ECM drones ensured that he was unable to fire on me or the rats until he was well and truly neuted. I began to orbit him up close and personal, activating tracking disruptors to throw his guns off even if he did muster the capacitor needed to fire them.
At first, everything worked The rats pecked away at his armor, and my neuts and ECM drones kept them from shooting back. But I began to realize I had made a mistake in attacking immediately. The spawn in this belt was tiny, just a pair of destroyers and battlecruisers, and its damage was so miniscule that even a totally neuted battleship could hold out on raw HP alone for some time. He was going down very, very slowly.
When my ECM drones missed a cycle, the Apoc pilot ordered his drones to engage me. My Pilgrim was armor tanked and could hold out for a while, but not indefinitely. I pulled my ECM drones, confident that I had him thoroughly neuted at this point, and sent my light drones to attack his medium ones, hoping that I could destroy them and leave him totally defenseless before he brought me down. Even if he did, I was still confident that I could disengage and escape.
One of the problems with flying a temperamental recon like the Pilgrim is that you have to spend a lot of time managing not just your ship’s movements, but your modules and your cap. Pulsing the MWD and e-neuts requires a lot of hands-on adjusment, as does activating the cap booster when necessary. Orbit, transversal, capacitor, neutralizers, drones, target status, local – that is a lot of things to watch. Dividing your attention that many ways is risky and requires a great deal of practice, practice I just didn’t have, especially with my heart thundering in my ears from the adrenaline of combat.
In the end, it was forgetting to activate my cap booster at a crucial moment that did me in. I didn’t realize my neuts and repper had stopped for a few precious seconds, and before I knew it not only was I almost in structure, but this “ratting” Apoc had pointed and webbed me as well. I didn’t last much longer after that, and was sent home in my pod, kicking myself for being so over-eager and foolish.
There were so many things I could have done differently in that fight. I could have watched the Apoc carefully and followed him through the belts until he was under the guns of a really nasty battleship spawn. I could have watched my energy management better. I could have used medium instead of light drones to attack his, and maybe wiped them out faster.
Embrace your inner monkey. A human’s only natural weapon is his mind. Use it.
…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…