Frigates, Frigates, everywhere...

Frigates

Quite recently in Aurohunen, a large corp has moved into the nearby low sec and they spend alot of their time roaming in huge 15-20 man blobs full of... T1 fitted frigates.

One frigate alone isn't much to worry about but when you see a huge 20 man blob that can dish out 2000 dps and the only way to hit them is with your drones, well that's when you start to worry.

So anyway, today me, Spectre and Felix decided we would fly around in our nanod out cruisers and maybe get to kill something before we all docked up for the night and went to bed. Space was pretty empty until we saw 19 reds enter local and checking their info we realised it was the frigate gang.

We figured we could definitely take them being nanod, and most of the pilots in the blob were only a few days old, which means most of them wouldn't of learnt to use Microwarp drives just yet.

After seeing them jump into Dantumi, which is right next door to Aurohunen. we decided to give chase. Aligning to Dantumi we were interrupted by Spectre:

"Ah Crap, just gota sort something, back in a mo"

Being good corp mates, me and Felix decided to leave Spectre alone in space and go hunt the frigate gang ourselves. We both jumped into Dantumi and saw the gang towards a planet. We immediately warped and landed a few kilometers of them all. We activated our microwarp drives and got out of their web and scram range, then released our drones and hoped for the best.

We were soon joined by a couple of Monsters (a corp in our alliance) and all the frigates started dropping very fast. 11 or so frigate explosions later the rest of the frig gang decided to cut their losses and run leaving just a couple of capsules lying around space, which were quickly podded and their corpses collected. (Don't ask why we collect corpses, its best you don't know).

It was while sifting through the wrecks trying to find something useful to take home and maybe sell when Spectres voice crackled over the comms:

"OK back, what I miss?"

Well where do I start?

Sleight of Hand

Sleight of hand is a term magicians use when performing magic. Its about turning the audiences eyes away from the "magic" part of trick with some kind of distraction. And today, that same corp you just read so much about tried to do something similar.

It wasn't long after the previous battle when their leader decided to offer a challenge in the local channel of Dantumi.

"Anyone want a 19v1 fight?"

19 vs 1? that's hardly fair. But it got my interest nevertheless. Opening a private conversation with the guy, I asked what kind of ships we were talking about. Apparently if I accepted the 19v1 challenge I could fly whatever I like, "even a dread" and the opposing gang would only fly frigates.

My thoughts wondered to my tempest floating in my hangar and the huge stack of smart bombs I had just brought from Jita. If this was for real it would be awesome.

We continued our conversation discussing details about the fight and any rules we would have to follow. We agreed to fight at a planet and my friends could watch from a distance if they liked. Everything seemed fine until I started to get a little suspicious of the time they were taking to form up. Apparently they were forming up in Korama and were nearly ready. But again, they were taking a long time about about it and it seemed as tho they were stalling us or something.

Maybe they gota buy new ships or something right?

Wrong.

Ossa is a dead end high sec system next to Dantumi, and its like the Frigate corps second home. they go in and out of there alot and imagine our surprise when one of the alliance scouts, sitting on the Dantumi gate in Ossa, cloaked, told us that there was a FREIGHTER from their corp about to jump into Dantumi.

Auro local began to fill up a little and it seemed the frigate gang was coming after all. But they wasn't coming to fight me, they were coming to escort their freighter through low sec.

Smart, keep us distracted with the prospect of smart bombing 20 or so Frigs and their pods while at same time bring their billion isk freighter through low sec right under our noses.

We played along and watched their freighter jump in and warp to Aurohunen. Some of our gang were already on the gate and as soon as the freighter jumped in Spectre got a point and called for backup.

I was still in my smart bomb Tempest, which isn't exactly the best thing for killing a freighter, but i warped to the gate anyways and as I saw a few of the Frigate gang land trying to protect their freighter from our rather weak gang.

I had landed next to the gate and for those not familiar with the use of smart bombs you cant activate them within 5 k of a gate. So I slowly headed towards the freighter who was about 10km of the gate now. And hoped that I could maybe get out of the gates range quick enough to get a few frigs.

I was scrammed and webbed and only able to go about 50ms, but I eventually made it out of the gates range and activated my full rack of smart bombs destroying a couple of their frigs, a few pods and even one of my own alliance mates (Sorry Dextor!). The remaining frigates bailed and accepted thier freighters fate, which was destroyed shortly after. Unlucky for us it was empty and it refused to pay us a decent ransom.

So the Moral of today's story is:

1. Don't go AFK, even for a few minutes. Or like spectre, you could miss a huge fight.

2. Even carebears are capable of being smart.