Near fatal mistake

Sunday night I made a mistake. A mistake that nearly cost me my beloved Gothic-Robochicken, the Onyx that has been with me for a good 2 months.

My first one at least died honourably in a swarm of 47 Sons of Tangra Heavy Assault Cruisers, but this time….. I was preparing to commit seppuku due to how fail I was to get into a situation like I did.

The lead up

It had been a long day. Once-again the northern coalition was fighting in the cloud-ring station system of 9-4 against Evoke. It was one of those fights where I would normally post awesome screenshots of massive fleets of battleships and carriers all pounding away at a hostile pos. I would normally tell tales of last minute covert-ops warp-ins and heroic sacrifices of interdictors. But this time, it was Evoke and friends that were doing all this and Mostly Harmless and allies were sitting in a friendly pos spinning our ships for four hours….

It was a little bit fun getting into the system, with Evoke camping the incoming jump bridge with cloaked interdictors. But we only lost 2 battleships in the process of getting 150+ ships into the system, which is not too shabby. Our FC got the testosterone flowing in us all when he rallied the troops in his Scottish accent: “make no mistake about it, We’re crossing the street with a sniper aiming out the window on the other side… we’re going to loose people. We will fight them in the trenches, we will fight them on the beaches…” well, perhaps he left out the Churchill part.

At one point I was sent out to a few hundred km off the friendly pos in the direction of the hostile pos. I assume since they had a habit of warping their battleship fleet in at about 175km I was to bubble if we ever saw them aligning and ensure they dropped out of warp outside their firing range. Nothing eventuated however and so I sat there, not even able to take good screenshots of the capital fleet jumping in…

my attempt at snapping a shot of the caps from a distance

Anyway – after a stupidly long amount of time, during which I got a good portion of my fan fiction short story for this month done I had to log off for dinner and a movie with my wife.

Complacency kills

Logging back on later that night, the hostilities had died down and I took the jump bridge network back to our home region. At one point however, I had to slow boat it through two star gates to get to the next jump bridge. I lacked patience due to the late night and unsatisfying day we had, so despite the fact there were two pandemic legion in local, I headed for the gate anyway. Hitting the directional scan button as an afterthought when in warp I saw a mass of mobile warp disruption bubbles. Having resigned myself to the fact I was going to die, I was quite relieved to find these bubbles were not on the gate (no idea where they were) and jumped through.

On the other side, however there was a recon, stealth bomber and an interdictor. I knew I was screwed. I had killed my poor ship by bad judgement and lack of use of the intel channels.

They only had three ships however, all of them fairly soft targets, so I locked up the manticore and started pounding away with my one missile launcher I had equipped. In hind sight I should have chosen the interdictor, but no matter. I mentioned in local that this fight would probably take a very long time, but got no reply.  In hind sight I should have offered to spare their ships for a ransom, or suggested a good book to read while they killed me, but wit in hindsight (hind-wit?) is 20:20.

Despite the fact I expected to die, I asked in our intel channel to see if anyone had any spare pew they could send my way. By this time, the hostile numbers had risen to about 6 and the dps was starting to make a dent in my shields they brought in an arazu and another ship which my combat log says was firing 250mm Railgun II’s. It turned out though, that there was a small bunch of friendlies in the next system over. I held out for what seemed like ages, I had moved to 40km away from the gate in the direction of where my buddies would be coming from and I didn’t use my mwd (to reduce my signature radius and therefore the damage that the stealth bomber was doing to me).

Saved!

Then local filled up with blues – I was saved. The best part is that the interdictor had a bubble on me so when my buddies warped to my gate, they were pulled into the bubble, directly on top of the hostiles, rather than continuing 40km away to the gate.

I was saved and my shield barely went below 50%. The combat log said the first hit on my shields was at 20:59:22 and the last at 21:05:05 so I think that’s pretty damn good. Apart from my ship not exploding, a couple of good things came out of this: I learned my lesson, the hostiles learned that you can’t take out a shield-tanking Heavy interdictor with a stealth bomber, 2 combat recon and light interdictor (and something else) in under 5 minutes. And my buddies got some pew and the satisfaction of saving an alliance mate.

Did some calculations on my onyx – I’d only really ever looked at the Effective Hit points because I’m buffer tanked (tanked for maximum hit points, with any passive regen being icing on the cake) and I never expected to be involved in a fight on a gate, solo against a small gang. Nevertheless with my maximum shield regen at 73hp/s and my shield resistances ranging from 78% to 91% my passive regen ranges from 347.6dps to 811dps! depending on the damage type being done of course – not bad for a buffer tanked ship in any case. With kinetic resistance being my second highest resistance at 87% and the manticore using kinetic torpedos (they get a bonus to kinetic damage), no wonder they were having a hard time taking me out.

I guess this post puts me officially in the shield-tanked Heavy interdictor fanboy club….

alright, fine – here’s some eye-candy before we finish up: