Sunday 8 December 2013

My First Battleship Kill: It’s like mining with missiles!



What with going on holiday and a variety of other bits and pieces I have not had as much time to blog as I would have liked. However, I am now back gaming and times are interesting in the world of EVE again.

I had become somewhat hung up on not being able to sell any of my salvage in nullsec, sitting on a 1 billion ISK heap with no way of getting it out to high sec. In a last ditch attempt to generate some form of income I bought a caracal fitted it with basic launchers and set off to kill pirates for the first time.

Suffice it to say things did not exactly go well, struggling to take out low-end pirates and completely failing to dent battleships until they had eaten away my shield. It was sad times all around, no income stream and now even less money. Again I was doing something wrong, but didn’t quite know what.

I got chatting to a member of my corporation who pointed out two key things to me; one, that I was using the wrong sort of missiles and 2, that if I get within about one thousand meters of the battleships they should not be able to hit me. He was even kind enough to clear a field and save me a battleship, low and behold it couldn’t touch me and so it was that I chalked up my first battleship kill.

Evasive Manuevers
I admit it take about 10 minutes, but man it feels great!

Over the next few days/hours I set to ratting with glee, clearing out the smaller craft and then orbiting the bigger ones while pounding them with missiles. I couldn’t help but grin at the mental image of my capsuleer rapidly piloting his craft in between streams of turret fire, all the while shouting ‘fire fire as fast as you can, you can’t track me I’m the gingerbread man!’. Indeed things were fine and dandy again, I had an income stream, it may have been slow (it really did feel like mining with missiles) but it was steady!

I even managed to take out multiple battleships in one go, netting me some healthy bounties! I admit that it’s probably not the most profitable approach, but man was it fun! Again a little bit of knowledge went a long way. It was nice to see my ISK levels rising, even if there was not much to buy and the nearest trade hub was a LONG way away.

Two at once!
Seriously those ships are bigger than they look!

But pride comes before a fall and my downfall came as a result of not really paying attention. I warped into an asteroid belt and started to lay waste to the rats with wanton abandon. I noticed that some of the smaller craft were not blowing up with their usual speed and that one of them was even webbing me (halving my speed). ‘Oh Well’ I thought as the offending craft exploded ‘I’ll warp our recharge my shields and then come back’, it was at that point that another craft disabled my warp drive and then it was bye-bye caracal.

Turns out Arch Angels (one type of pirates) are not the same as Angels (another type) and I had used the wrong missiles………. Again!