Death to Flying Things Campaign Victory \o/ - 5-18-1

Up early on a cold rainy Seattle morning to do some trading in Jita and carousing in Ishomilken.  Both were successful.

A punisher owned by AKAHUKU JP was flying around Ishomilken.  I almost caught him at a belt but he warped off - into the arms of fellow Rebel Yuzuki Katayanagi at a gate.  Yuzuki's rupture gave him some damage but he jumped and was gone (that's why Yuzuki shows up on the killmail - but the punisher was repaired when our fight started).

A few minute later AKAHUKU JP was back and I offered him a 1v1.  I asked Yuzuki to not interrupt us (Black Rebel Rifter Club members honor 1v1s always...).  I warped to a planet and AKAHUKU JP did too.  The fight was on.

All went well.  In fact, this was by far the longest fight I've been involved in (2 1/2 minutes according to the combat log).  I was fitted with 3 autocannons and a nosferatu instead of a missile launcher.  So my damage wasn't as much as it could be.  But I was hoping to have a bit more time for my armor repper with the added cap from the nos.  As it turned out, that might have been a Very Good Idea(tm).  In the killmail I see that our two ships were almost identically fitted - the punisher has an extra low and one less mid slot so he had an adaptive nano plating instead of a web.  The rigs were also a bit different.

The punisher and my rifter were orbiting close.  We were slamming projectiles into each other and at first I was ahead.  He hit armor while I was still comfortably in shields.  But then things seemed to stall (probably the effect of his extra nano plating).  I continued to pour hot phased plasma into his armor, but it was my turn to start losing.  I passed him and hit my hull before he did.  It was looking bad.

And then that ominously pleasant voice said, "The capacitor is empty".

I clicked on a celestial and prepared to warp my pod away after the all too familiar explosion.  But I kept up the fight and suddenly things started going my way again.  I wasn't receiving damage and the punisher was quickly dropping through his hull.  I was winning!

A few seconds later, the punisher exploded!  \o/

Looking at the combat log I see that suddenly his damage dropped precipitously and he even missed on about 6 out of 8 shots at that critical period.  Being generally unaware, I'm not sure what happened.  Range?  He burned out his guns?  Something else?  Whatever it was, I flew away with an empty capacitor and 39% of my hull intact (forgetting the loot - I'm not comfortable with this "victor" side of the equation yet...  I returned for it after repairing).

My battle execution wasn't flawless.  I had a bit of a problem during the fight with overheating.  I discovered that the new on/off toggle of overheating is NOT control/click but actually shift/click.  I was worried about overheating and kept clicking control/click to turn it off to no effect - in fact, that just turns the module off and on!  YOW!  Eventually I got things working, but it did cause me to turn off the nos for a portion of the fight and the punisher wasn't as webbed and scrambled as it should have been for a good portion of the fight either.

But, in the end, it was a victory in my personal Death to Flying Things campaign.  Thanks to AKAHUKU JP for a fun fight and to Yuzuki Katayanagi for standing by (he flew in to observe but didn't participate) during the excitement.