In my last post I mentioned that the Hound (and stealthiness in general was sexy). Training time to get me into a Stealth Bomber, and pilot it semi competently, was about a year and would mess up my Rifter Plan so...
I have an old alt with a stupid name I made 4 years ago, who took some learning skills and some very basic, caldari frigate based training , then sat in Jita accepting my courier contracts to sell.
So now he has some unallocated skillpoints, but not enough or enough skills to sell for enough to cover the transfer fee. Rather than biomass him and start a new guy, or buy an existing SB pilot, I've dug this baldy Caldari out from retirement and set him a punishing training plan.
I allocated his spare SP which got him through some of the basics (no navigation skill, no mechanic, no engineering wtf was I on 4 years ago?), he then underwent some Neural Optimisation which will reduce his total skill training time by 30 days.
He's currently getting to grips with Cybernetics as I have a couple of +4 implants with his name on them which will further reduce his training time by another 33 days. In the mean time he's been busy and now has 2 jumpclones installed, a shitload of skills injected waiting to be trained and a few skillbooks sat waiting in his hangar for his training to catch up.
All in all cost me about 200million isk, he'll be able to do covert scanning etc in a couple of months and will have the skills to be a decent Stealth Bomber pilot in 9 months.
For now he's keeping his head down and focusing on training, training, training - if I catch him having fun I'll force him to listen to local in Jita!
When he's done he will go down the pirate route, so once he isn't a total embarrassment in a fight, and if he's very nice to me, he may be let out to blow up some unsuspecting muppets, just to acclimate him to the stresses of combat.
Speaking of which, on to the main topic of today's blog :-
Last night I was out and about around looking for trouble in my Thrasher, I was bouncing around a couple of low-sec systems looking for someone suitable when I warped through a gate into a dead end system to find a flashy red Hurricane 17km away. I was 12km from the gate, I held cloak as long as possible in case he was going to jump through, then burned to the gate with my MWD overheated and my DCII on. He got lock, webbed me and opened fire.
Shields went straight away, I was halfway through my armour when I reached jumprange, I managed to resist opening fire on him and jumped through just as a Wolf landed on my new side of the gate!
I held cloak again, but knew that if these two were working together I was probably toast...but the Wolf jumped straight through!
I immediately warped out and headed to a station for repairs. 43k isk later my Thrasher was good as it gets and I headed back out.
This time the same low sec systems were quieter, though there was a Thrasher on my D-scan intermittently, I looked up the pilot and he was more experienced than me so I decided it'd be best to avoid him if possible.
I noticed a relative young character in a Coercer (destroyer) show up on D-scan along with some probes.
I tracked him down to a belt and warped in at 0 hoping to catch him unawares - bollocks, he was 99km away! Burning 99km in my Thrasher would give him plenty of time to notice me and warp out so instead I warped straight out back the way I'd come, hoping he either wasn't paying attention or else thought I wasn't up for a fight.
I warped back to the belt at 100km and he was still there with his probes out - at 199Km! I obviously hadn't checked where he was in the belt, just looked at his distance. This time I warped to a celestial in the same direction I was already travelling all the while checking my d-scan and expecting him to warp off - he must have noticed me by now?
I warped back to the belt (now my third warp in to the same belt in about a minute) at 100km and landed right on top of him, locked him up and blew him away, he must have been /afk as he didn't react at all, just sat in his capsule.
All the while I'd been refreshing d-scan in case of company and I was just about to warp out when I saw the Thrasher I'd been avoiding earlier heading my way.
I waited and he landed 70km away.
~~~~~ Time for a brief Interlude ~~~~~
R1fta is a very relaxed corp. R1fta as a corp do not care about killboard stats, lossmails, stoopid failfits, experimenting or whatever. All that matters is fun and explosions, preferably other peoples, but our own will do.
I'm all good with that, otherwise I'd probably have been kicked from most other pirate corps for general muppetry.
My kill:death ratio is about 10:26, though I am ahead in isk lost - helps that I fly cheaper ships.
I would like my kill:death ratio to be better - not because of Corp rules, but because I want to not lose quite so many fights. (There are only two R1fta rules by the way i) always honour 1v1 fights, ii) always honour ransoms - violation of either of these will see you kicked without appeal, everything else is just fun).
So, the rational thing to do when the Thrasher landed 70km away was to GTFO and enjoy the +1 on my killboard.
~~~~~ Normal Service Resumed ~~~~~
I decided, "fuck it, if you don't try, you'll never know" and burned towards him with guns overheated, and my chest pounding.
Shortly afterwards I went Boom!, didn't do a huge amount of damage to him, warped off in my pod and gave a gf :) in local at about the same time he posted his own gf.
We had a bit of a chat about Thrashers, he advised me to stick with it, had nice things to say about R1fta and one of my corpies he used to fly with.
Quite an adrenaline rush, maybe too much, as I then started seeing flashing lines across my vision and my heart was still hammering away.
Much laughing in corpchat when I said what was happening, but a strawberry jam sandwich seemed to calm me down and a couple of minutes later my vision cleared.
A little later he emailed me his fit (I need to work on my shield skills to fit it though).
So now my kill:death ratio is 11:27, but I was killed by a helpful guy and I got a new fit to try.
I will have to try and pick my fights a bit more though and try and get my K:D ratio up so at least they are close to even.
And I may need to work on some calming techniques.
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