Friday evening looked busy, local channels were swarmed with weekend warriors like me so I decided to look for trouble in new area. After spending most of my working day on Friday studying maps of low sec sectors I set best speed to Essence Region. With my security status now under -2.0 and no real desire to improve it I was going to look for a nice spot somewhere in low/null area to settle permanently and pirate my heart out.
In Akila I met a friend (who shot me down few days ago) who invited me for some training in frigates. Firstly my Rifter was set up against his Sentinel. Despite it's innocent looks Sentinel is a nasty piece of work, I managed to shot couple of his Warriors II but while fiddling with his drones he slowly drain my cap and got out of my web/scram range. Without AB and Armour Repair system working his drones started quickly chipping bits of my armour. To make matters worse I somehow lost drones from my overview setting and had to target little buggers manually. Thankfully it was just a training and at about 50% of my structure we stopped. Later I though that possibly better strategy would be just to ignore drones and focus fire on the ship, it is clearly a "trick" ship and as some examples show can be overpowered with sheer force of Minmatar cannons. After short recess he brought Punisher just to see how my Rifter will perform against T1 frigate and this time I had him in structure in no time with very little damage to myself.
We parted after that exercise and went our ways. Sinq Laison was very busy, I played with local pirate alliance in Raeghoscon for about an hour. At some point there was swarm of Sister Combat Probes in the system trying to pin me down but combination of random safe spots and staying in constant move kept me out of harms ways. Bored with that cat and mouse play I jumped to Essence looking for more suitable targets and the one I could actually engage with at least minimal chance of success.
I really like systems without stations, at least you know everyone in local will be somewhere in space, they might be at POS, cloaked or at safe spot but at least you know they are not docked at station. Onne looked promising and as soon as I jumped there I knew I am going to get a fight. There were 3 guys in local, all with low sec status, directional identified ships as Rifter, Ishtar and Republic Fleet Firetail. Ishtar was out of the equation and jumped out soon after my arrival, Rifter and Firetail looked a bit like me, clearly looking for some action. I quickly set up few observation points and started following Rifter, he also was using safe spots and I changed to Firetail.
Rifter left the system soon after I changed my focus to Firetail pilot. I checked his killboard, he knew his stuff, record showed him almost always flying solo and there was a number of Rifters destroyed on his account. It looked a good challenge and I wouldn't have a problem loosing my ship to this guy. He was ratting on the belt and I noticed 3 NPC wrecks, I wanted to give myself maximum chances and I waited for him to jump to new belt, some help from NPC would be welcome in those circumstances. He probably noticed me on his scanner and waited for few minutes before confidently jumping to next belt. This was a moment I was waiting for, I delayed by few seconds to give rats a chance to acquire aggro on Firetail and engaged my warp drive.
As I landed on the belt he was just finishing 2nd rat, there was nothing left and we immediately locked each other. He was very quick, I was scramed and webbed in seconds and his 150s started spewing bullets into my ship. I expected him sporting large shield buffer and my overheated 200mm autocannons immediately replied with volley of RF EMPs into his direction. My shields went down very quickly but that didn't worry me much, I engaged armour repair system and I knew I can stand up to 150s for some time. What was much more worrying was the fact that despite my opponent being webbed, my guns and rockets made little impression on his shields. Exchange of fire was going on for some time and soon it became apparent that my armour repairer was loosing the battle with my opponent guns, my armour was disappearing faster than my opponent shields. I was already well in structure when I finally punched hole in his shields and red sliver appeared on his armor status, unfortunately it was all too late. I still had EMP loaded and thanks to native EMP resistance of armour I knew I wont be able to win this encounter. Rifter lasted few more seconds and exploded, after initially catching me in scram and trying ransom, he let me go.
We have exchanged gf had a quick chat afterwards and he confirmed that he had large shield buffer with EM and Thermal rigs on his ship. I plugged his fit into EFT just to check how it compares with Rifter and it is clear I had no chance, he would have to mess things up pretty badly in order to lose this fight. His Firetail is faster and has alot more of EHP than my ship. My 5th Rifter was lost but I only just started enjoyin this new EVE experience and decided to extend this experiment by another 50 or so Rifters :).
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