Friday 8 October 2010

First Blood

This wasn't technically my first kill in a WH, that honour goes to an unpiloted Hulk that had bounced 300km out of someone's POS, that story however, is boring. This is the story of my first real combat kill in my new home.

Myself and another corpmate were opening and closing wormholes trying to find a C3 system with some activity in it, it's a fairly laborious process when there's only a couple of you but the rewards make it worthwhile. After a few goes we found a system that had a 3 caps, 3 haulers and a POS on scan from the entry hole.

My corpmate was inside with his probing alt having a look around. It turned out that only 2 of the haulers were at the POS, so he started having a look around the system trying to find him. The hauler ended up dropping a bubble in some empty space, we assume there was a wormhole there. The hauler ended up going back to the POS, so we weren't able to jump him.

At this point corpy decided to start scanning out the sigs in the hole, finding the static lowsec exit in the process, it seems the hauler bubbled a different hole. The hauler pilot then swapped out of his ship into a Loki. The new Loki warps off, drops some core probes and cloaks up. He looks to be scanning down the sigs in system.

While this is going on, I've been in our C5 on the C3 hole zipping around in my new Cynabal. I'd decided I wanted a nice fast and agile ship that could deal with the different ships I'd encounter in a C3. As a ship the Cynabal is lovely, it aligns like a frigate but hits like a HAC, with an extra utility mid over a Vagabond, I'd put a Tracking Disruptor in mine. On the hole with me is my corpmate's main in a curse.

Back in the C3 the Loki's probes are starting to zero in on the new lowsec hole, our prober had moved to the hole and was cloaked up near it. As he saw the probes getting closer and closer on D-Scan, he tells me to get ready. The probes are pulled and next thing the Loki turns up on the lowsec hole. Figuring he'll pop out to find out where the hole goes we jump our ships into the C3 and hold cloak to see what he does. Sure enough, he jumps through the hole into lowsec, we immediately warp to the covops and start orbiting the hole.


Wormholes don't have aggression timers, however they do have a mechanic all their own. Once you jump through a wormhole you are unable to jump through that hole in the same direction for 4 minutes. This means that if you jump through a hole and then back again you either have to warp off somewhere else or wait while the timer expires. EVE helpfully doesn't tell you how long you have left of your timer unless you try to jump.


Having been on the hole for a 30 seconds or so we see it activate, indicating that the loki had jumped in. He saw us waiting for him when he jumped in and initially held his cloak. Deciding to make his move he moved off the hole and hit cloak, thankfully my corpmate had hit approach and MWD in the time he was on overview and by a stroke of luck decloaked him.


I still don't understand why the Loki didn't warp off while he was cloaked, he had the right sub systems and he had a Covert Ops cloak fitted. maybe he was too secure in his ability to hide on the hole.


He was decloaked about 25k from me, my shiny 30km point made short work of keeping him pinned down however. I started orbiting him at 15km while pulsing my MWD to keep the transversal up, I'd also hit him with the Tracking Disruptor so there was very little dange now. My 425mm's made short work of his shields and he started dropping rapidly. Figuring he was toast anyway he'd started firing on the Anathema trying to pop it but the covops was able to jump out before he hit armour.


After a fairly short fight the Loki went pop and we looted his wreck. Shiny, a Sister's Expanded Probe Launcher had dropped, that was worth a nice 50m or so. We weren't able to catch his pod so we decided to head home and call it a night.

My first fight in a wormhole, I was hooked.

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