Well, the fail-war from the fail-alliance is still on, which means that my salvaging operations in Dodixie are still... proceeding as usual. They tried to work with a missionrunner to trap me in a mission last night, but I saw all eight of them on directional scan, and moved to the next hit, coming back into the mission once in a while to make the MR call them back in before scampering on again.
Last night, Emizeko Chai and I were busy extracting salvage, loot, and tears when we came across a fellow named Ironical in a Hyperion working a Serpentis L4. I told Emizeko that I had a good feeling about this particular missionbear, having recently killed another overconfident Hyperion mission boat recently. We started salvaging, and when I grabbed a particularly nice piece of loot from a large wreck, Ironical locked me and sent his drones after me. I bookmarked a wreck near the Hyperion, aligned to my safespot and, just as the drones got their first hits, escaped with about 80% shield left.
I docked up and grabbed the NinjaRaven. Asking my associates (I know, it's sad that I don't know this by now) I learned that Serpentis do Kin/Therm damage, so as I was warping to the deadspace I loaded Bane torpedoes into the launchers.
Damn those deadspace restrictions! I landed about 100km away from Ironical's Hyperion. I was hoping that perhaps he would burn toward me, but instead he aligned to a station and warped away. Usually when this happens I call it a day, since a player with enough sense to get his mission boat out of harm's way will also be smart enough to sit out the aggro timer, or bring back something nasty and disposable. When I looked at his pilot info, however, I learned that the character had been created in March of 2009. Hoping that he would come right back, but confident that I could take anything he would be able to throw at me anyway, I launched a can at the warp-in point and began orbiting it in an effort to lessen the damage from the two Serpentis battleships about 80km away.
A few minutes later, Ironical appeared on my overview again in the same Hyperion. Yes! I engaged my warp disruptor, went to target him, and... crap! He'd warped in about 50km away from me. I don't know what happened there... maybe he closed the mission when he left me, and came back at a different spot? I guess I'm not as up on mission deadspace mechanics as I would like to be.
In any case, he started burning toward me. I got my point and fell into a 10km orbit around him, launching torpedos and engaging my heavy neuts. Short story short, he went down, but not before getting me to 20% armor. Way. Too. Close. Emizeko had a medium remote repper on his Apoc, so that may well have made the difference.
I very nearly lost my battleship to a 5 month old player. That would have been unfortunate. I guess what I need to keep in mind is that though I am an older player, I only began training battleship-type skills a few months ago. Ironical had gone back to station and swapped his mission-specific tank for an omnitank, which explains why I was getting so little damage from my torps. I believe that his fatal mistake was failure to load faction ammo into his guns. ALWAYS load faction ammo, folks. You won't use that much of it in PVP and it's a sizable damage increase with no additional skill requirements.
I opened a convo with the guy to let him know that he'd be featured on my blog and try to extract any tears that were welling up in his wide carebear eyes. He turned out to be a genuinely cool and funny guy. Of course, he still shot at a ninja, so I didn't feel too bad for him, but I enjoyed talking with him about what went right and wrong on both sides. Of course, we still came back and salvaged/looted his entire mission.
Lessons well learned on all sides. I'd call that a good night.
