My Loot, Your Tears

Our C3 wormhole is usually quiet; I was running the few cosmic anomalies we get every day. This involves triple-boxing with two Drakes and a Thanatos. The Thanatos sits just outside a POS shield and assigns fighters to the Drakes, and this gets through C3 sites agreeably fast.

With the latest site finished I swapped out one of the Drakes for a Noctis. I was thinking that eventually I'd lose either it, or one of the Drakes: "In wormhole space, you have to accept that eventually you're going to lose a ship or a pod. I should write a blog post about that; it's been a few days since my last update."

Apparently I hadn't gotten the memo, re: DON'T TEMPT FATE. A few minutes later a Sabre warped into the anom, popped a bubble, and promptly started shooting my Noctis. I then did a bad thing: I panicked and warped my Drake out. If I had stayed and shot the Sabre things might have worked out differently. By the time I realized this, and tried to warp the Drake back, the Sabre pilot had popped the Noctis, and then my pod. I woke up in a station I had forgotten I had ever set as home; been quite a while since I got podded.

2011.08.14 02:21:00
Victim: Khalia Nestune
Corp: Suddenly Ninjas
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: Unknown
Destroyed: Noctis
System: [deleted]
Security: -1.0
Damage Taken: 8611
Involved parties:
Name: [deleted] (laid the final blow)
Security: -0.8
Corp: Manpower Inc.
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Sabre
Weapon: 150mm Light AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 8611
Destroyed items:
Modified Fluid Router, Qty: 4 (Cargo)
Electromechanical Hull Sheeting, Qty: 21 (Cargo)
Sleeper Data Library, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
Small Tractor Beam I
Neural Network Analyzer, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
Ancient Coordinates Database (Cargo)
Cap Recharger II
Salvager I, Qty: 4
Sleeper Drone AI Nexus (Cargo)
Fused Nanomechanical Engines, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
Medium Salvage Tackle I, Qty: 3
Dropped items:
Sleeper Data Library, Qty: 16 (Cargo)
Small Tractor Beam I, Qty: 2
Neural Network Analyzer, Qty: 8 (Cargo)
Reinforced Metal Scraps, Qty: 13 (Cargo)
Ancient Coordinates Database, Qty: 5 (Cargo)
Heuristic Selfassemblers (Cargo)
Salvager I
10MN Afterburner I
Powdered C-540 Graphite, Qty: 10 (Cargo)

Meanwhile, I had warped the Thanatos, thinking I might be able to at least shoot him with Fighters. A long shot as he could just warp off. Which he did, but not until almost out of hull.

Lessons? I already said, you'll lose a ship eventually. I had been on d-scan and there were no probes, so I assume our Sabre pilot had scanned for anoms with his on-board scanner, found the single one left, and warped in. My backup Noctis is now fit with a shield booster to last a bit longer for help to arrive.

Loss of a Noctis and fittings is about 65m. I use Drakes for the same reason - if I lose one, it's not more than about 70m total for hull + rigs + fittings. Two anom sites cover that. Thankfully for me, the Sabre pilot left most of the loot, and when I finished salvaging the wrecks, I got enough more drops to cover a Noctis and fittings.

Sadly I lost the 70 million ISK bounty on my clone that I'd had for over a year. I'd kept it around mainly as a running count of bear tears. Grats, Sabre pilot, you earned it.

This entry was posted on August 13, 2011 at 10:42 PM by khalia and is filed under Wormholes.