That Was a Surprise...

I thought I'd maybe check on some wormholes in Auner and headed to the hangar to grab a cheetah scanning ship.  Hmmm...  Where is that thing?  Lots of rifters and slashers.  But no cheetah.

I checked my assets screen and noticed that it was still in Lantorn.  That's right!  I had been heading over there a few days ago when I was ambushed by 9 (or was it 13?) enemies who destroyed my firetail.  Checking the link, it turns out it was only 4 of them.  It seemed like more at the time...

Whatever.

I decided to head over to Lantorn to pick up the cheetah. I found a merlin that seemed like a good ship to take me the 7 jumps - and if I could find a fight or two along the way and lose the merlin that would be fine too.

It didn't take long to find a fight.

In the next system over, Resbroko, I saw a Republic Fleet Firetail on scan.  I quickly narrowed it down to a faction warfare plex and turned all the knobs up to 11.  I didn't have much hope of surviving against the firetail in my modestly equipped merlin and I wasn't high on any performance enhancing drugs.  But it was worth a try and the worst that could happen would be I'd head back one jump for a new ship.

I landed on the gate and jumped through.  The firetail as close and I chose a close orbit, scrambled his warp engines, webbed him, and started tearing into him with my overheated blasters.  Things went very well.  I was doing plenty of damage and he was hitting me lightly - my speed might have been too much for his 200mm autocannons.

Whatever the reason, in a relatively short time the firetail exploded!

That was a real surprise.  But a nice one for a change.

I continued on - through masses of FW gangs that I avoided.  Waved hello to former Black Rebel Tomba when we were in the same system, and eventually made it to Lantorn without incident.