New Toys

He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words "Please do not press this button again".
--Douglas Adams

I recently discussed the new direction I was taking my skill plan in.  Battlecruisers IV will be finishing up for me tomorrow and I already have a couple of Myrmidon hulls ready to roll out once it does.  But this post isn't to talk about those, this is to talk about the new toy I didn't mention in that post.  This is to talk about my Armageddon.

Wait a second, when did I get a Battleship?  Why did I get a Battleship?  I can sense your confusion from here.  Don't worry though, I'm here to talk you through it.  Everything's going to be alright.  Trust me on this one.

The simple answer to when I got an Armageddon is about a month ago.  The reasons for it are a little more complicated.  Remember all those new mission runners I've been seeing lately?  Well, an awful lot of them are running level five missions in Carriers.  When it came time to finally do something about them, a Battlecruiser just wasn't going to cut it.

When I sat down and took a hard look at how far I was from being able to fly various things about a month ago, I was a little shocked to see that all I lacked to fly an Amarr Battleship was to train Amarr Battleships.  That simple really.  Now, in order to fly one with Tech 2 guns, I was going to need a couple of months, but that's when I got another surprise.  The Amarr Battleships still perform surprisingly well without T2 weapons.  I'd lose out on using Scorch, but if all I was planning to use it for was sitting point blank on a Carrier that wasn't a problem.

So I took the plunge and invested in the skills to fly an Armageddon, had it hauled in from Jita and then figured it'd be a while before I'd ever get a chance to undock it.  Then the next day came.  The very same pilot that had lost his Nighthawk was missioning in our home system in a Thanatos.  The call went out for all the Battleship pilots we could muster to log in and reship.  Moments later, having thoroughly spiked local, the Carrier pilot docked up.  Thus began the waiting game.

About an hour of the waiting game in fact.  I've spoken before about how patient Pirates can be, but clearly this pilot isn't reading my blog.  An hour may sound like a long time, but it wasn't so bad really.  When you consider that we're all friends and basically just sitting around talking on voice comms the entire time, it actually passed the time rather quickly.  It didn't hurt that the Carrier pilot would occasionally ask things like "WTF is this, pirates convention?" in local, letting us all know that he was still around and anxious to get back to his mission.

When his desire to complete the mission finally got the best of him, we were quickly alerted by one of our pilots with a cloaked prober in system.  Once he was back in his mission, the command was given to simultaneously undock and for the prober to put his probes in position.  Some of you may be surprised to hear that we hadn't probed his mission down yet, but a Carrier is big.  Really big in fact and we knew that we'd only need one pass with probes in order to have him.

Our prober was not one to disappoint, and almost instantly upon undocking we caught a fleet warp into the mission.  Landing atop the Carrier I braced myself for the full might and fury of a Thanatos enraged.  What I got instead was a pilot who just gave up as soon as he saw us.  By gave up I mean, withdrew his fighters and initiated self destruct.

While there was certainly plenty of tension as it was happening over whether we'd be able to break him in time, I won't keep you waiting that long and just say that he managed to self-destruct while in structure.  Apparently seeing that we were a bit disappointed, the pilot decided to make it up to us by showering us with sweet sweet tears.

Injured Pride > What's the matter.. poor pirates pissed we blue balled you ?
Augment > You're out the carrier bud =)
Augment > We didnt lose anything but a few drones
Injured Pride > I got plenty where those came from
Radio > Free fighters!
Radio > Sweet! grab another and bring it out
Injured Pride > Next time, go fuck yourseves
Augment > Nice language buddy
Augment > you sounds upset
Radio > I think, my friends, its not the pirates that are angry.
Augment > I thought you had plenty more
Radio > ^

If you take anything away from that exchange, it should probably be that taunting the people who just killed you with the knowledge that you have a lot more ships they can kill standing by is not a good idea.  Since we had destroyed his Nighthawk two days earlier, I have no doubt that he has plenty more ships where that came from.  I'd also like to point out that this one pilot's loot has single-handedly funded my piracy for the next month.  Thanks for that.

Regarrrds,

FNG