Lucky Rifter

I was looking for a fight and there were only two other pilots in Auner - I knew that for sure because they were lounging in the same station as I use as a base there.  So I decided to make a roadtrip.

First stop was the neighboring system of Resbroko.  That looked a lot more promising.  There were a couple dozen pilots in the system.  Nice!  I noticed that one of the pilots was Haki Aldard who is a member of the R1FTA sister corporation - Black Dragon Fighting Society.  So I reminded myself to be sure that anyone I jumped on wasn't Haki.  I didn't want a repeat of that embarrassing fiasco...

I checked out the various faction warfare plexes and one of them had a punisher.  That's fine.  I pointed my rifter towards the jump gate, turned everything up to 11, and hit the warp drive button.

I landed and jumped.  It wasn't Haki Aldard (it was Walksovernow) and he was waiting for me just a few hundred meters away.  I hit all the right buttons and soon I had the punisher scrambled and webbed (of course, he had me in the same situation...).  I started pelting him with my autocannons and rockets.  Things went reasonably well, I worked my way through his armor and started on his shields when I noticed a couple distressing events.

My warp scrambler and web shut themselves off because they had no more capacitor.  The rascal had an energy neutralizer and he was trying to disable my ship!  Fortunately, autocannons don't need cap, so they kept up the attack.  I turned off the afterburner to try to save some cap and managed to, at least temporarily, get my warp scrambler to hold him down again.

Then I noticed that my guns had burned out.  That wasn't ideal.  I resigned myself to a slow death as I had no way to harm the punisher.

And to top it off, a merlin arrived (no doubt one of Walksovernow's friends) to make it 2-1 against me.  Excellent...

I continued my orbit of the punisher and remembered that I thought I remembered someone saying that maybe it was possibly possible to un-group the guns and continue shooting with the one or two of the three that were unburned out.  If any were still in working condition.  I checked the guns and one option was "clear group".  What did I have to lose?  I hit the "clear group" button and it turned out that two of my guns were still functioning!  Attack!

I might be going to die to these two - but with some luck I would take down the punisher before I did!  It was slow and they were doing damage to my armor and structure.  I tried to align out and get away - but to no avail.  My warp engines were seriously scrambled.

I continued the fight.  The punisher was in structure.  I was in structure.  It was a race to destruction.  An then the punisher exploded!  \o/

I immediately warped away so that his pal in the punisher couldn't scramble my engines and was relieved to hear the friendly voice say, "Warp Drive Active".

With just 58% structure - I had survived the 2-1!

GFs were exchanged in local.  I said, GF.  Walksovernow said GF and noted that "the rifter was lucky" - which I totally agreed with.   Haki Aldard say GF.

What?  Haki Aldard?  Oh no!  He must have been in the merlin that arrived half way thorugh the fight!  Instead of surviving a 2-1, it was a case of me being on the gank side of the 2-1!

I've really got to start paying attention to pilot names when there are friends in system.  This is getting ridiculous!

Haki opened a private conversation and we chatted a bit.  I admitted that I hadn't realized the it was him joining the fight and sent him a link to that previous fiasco.  He said he knew about it from my blog already (I'm surprised anyone in our two corps doesn't flee when they see me in a system - I'm going to get a well-earned reputation as a menace...).

Haki apologized for joining the fight without asking - but said that he needs all the experience he can get.  I was happy he had arrived and I could use some experience too from the looks of it...