Reconnoitering and Fight #45

Bookmarks to port, bookmarks to stern, bookmarks to aft. This weekend in New Eden boiled down to 15 hours of boredom and 20 minutes of terror (well sorta). I set out Friday to do some honest to badness lowsec pirating. I didn’t find anyone to fight until sunday evening. In the meantime I made bookmarks.

Lots and lots of bookmarks, so many in fact that I now have a system with naming conventions for my bookmarks. Here’s what I’ve set up in about 12 lowsec systems:

Gate bookmarks:

OVERWATCH gate (system on other side of the gate name). e.g. OVERWATCH gate mara.
UNDERWATCH gate (system on other side of the gate name). e.g. UNDERWATCH gate mara.

Overwatch bookmarks are approx. 150km from a jump gate on star side of the gate. Underwatch bookmarks are approx. 150km from a jump gate on the far side of the gate from the system’s star. These allow me to scout out gates, relatively safely and let me jump directly to the gate if I want. Having two positions at a gate lets me be a little tricky. I can warp from one to another and it appears that I’m warping to the gate. Underwatch in most cases gives me a good view of where the ships are warping to within the system. This is helpful for finding potential prey. In the future I’ll add bookmarks within tackling and scrambling range but I’m not ready for that yet.

Asteroids/Ice fields

HUNT asteroid belt II (system planet) 1. e.g. HUNT asteroid belt II 1

These bookmarks are also 150 km from the belt. From here I can see if there is any potential targets at the belt and or NPCs. If I want to engage I can simply warp straight to the belt. I am considering manually adding some bookmarks at the belt, the two ends and the middle so that I am able to warp within an appropriate range to my target. This I learned the hard way which I’ll get to later.

Safes

Typically these retain their default names except for deep safes which get named “deep safe”, crazy I know.

I’ll usually make 3 or 4 “shallow” safes and 1 or 2 “deep” safes.

That’s it so far for my booking methodology. And no I don’t do this in every system, but it’s a good way to spend your time while hunting.

So after two days of stellar cartography I finally found a target. A lone Kestrel in system with only a couple of other people around. Kestrel vs Rifter seemed fair enough and I’d been itching for a fight all weekend. So let the hunt begin! I tracked that ship for 2o minutes, he must have been making rounds thru the system or he was hunting me. Everytime I thought I had him nailed down to a belt or station, he was gone right before I could warp there. Finally I scanned him within 5 degrees of an asteroid belt and warped straight to zero. I came out of warp CTRL-DoubleClicked and hit the afterburner. Then everything went down hill. I hoped to warp to him within 10k meters so I could tackle him but unfortunately  I was about 1800km from him and I started taking missile hits at about 1700km out. Time to bail on plan A. I switch my approach to orbit spiral in on him to lessen the missile damage. Shields down to 50%. 1300m from target I switch back to direct approach but I’m not gaining any ground. I’m warp disrupted. Can’t get close enough to do any significant damage with my autocannons. Can’t tackle him. Can’t warp away. Into armor now. Repping the repairer just to see how long I can last but we both know it’s over. My ship blows a minute later and I warp away in my pod. GFs were exchanged. If only I’d warped in close enough to tackle him.

In the end I was happy to be in a fight where I had at least had a chance and now I’m thirsty for more.

Only 44 more fights till I graduate from my 50 fight plan, I need to pick up the pace.