Rifter Drifter

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had been generously gifted fifty Rifters by a reader. Well, they’ve finally all been hauled to low sec and are now sitting in Amamake along with a big pile of tech 1 fittings. I think I spent about 25 million ISK fitting up this little fleet so that’s about 500,000 ISK per ship (I got bored of waiting for buy orders to fill). Not bad at all. My plan for them is pretty simple, I’m going to take them out and try and have as much fun with them as possible. Because they’re cheap I’ll take risks but I’m not going to be completely suicidal. I am going to film every fight and put it all together in a video. Okay, I’ve so far missed one of my deaths but I got all the rest.

To spice things up Commoner, a Tusker, suggested that we run an in-house sweepstake on the whole thing. We fairly quickly agreed on a 10 million ISK buy in with the winner taking everything. So far the prize pot is at a measly 60 million ISK but I hope more people sign up soon. It’ll encourage me to actually get out there and look for fights. The Tuskers seem to have a lot of faith in my abilities. Even with the crappy fit that I am using the spread is between 72 and 200 kills. I was thinking it’d be somewhere closer to 30. Now I’ve got to prove them right.

At the time of writing my current kills to death ratio is four kills for three losses. I’ve managed to pick off a couple of Rifters, and Incursus, and a Kestrel so far while at the same time dying pretty horribly to a couple of null sec gate camps and a Rifter / Rapier pair. The second null sec camp I should probably have escaped from but I was an idiot. After a bit of consideration I’ve decided that null sec just isn’t worth the distance I need to travel to get there so I’m going to stick to the Amamake are for now.

Warp core stabilisers seem to be the bane of my life right now. I’ve lost a Vigil and Magnate despite having them scrammed. Its got me so frustrated that I’m tempted to go and fit up a Thrasher with dual warp core stabilisers and annoy the hell out of people in belts.

So far things are looking pretty good, though. I might even live up to my corporation’s expectations. I’m going to have to go and lose a fair few of these buggers, though, if I plan on ever finishing this project.

After several hours hunting I got a welcome break when another reader challenge me to a fight. Unfortunately for me Lau Wensink (his name is already ominous) only really flew cruisers and battlecruisers and I didn’t have any in the area. He generously offered to buy me a Hurricane, though, so I headed down to Kamela and scraped together the fittings for a shield tanked Hurricane while he fetched his Drake. The biggest problem was that I could only get T1 guns and that crippled my damage pretty hard. Never mind. My main mistake was fitting an afterburner rather than a microwarp drive. I assumed that it would help me mitigate the damage from his missiles but it crippled me because when we began the fight I was outside of my engagement range. Shit. By the time I closed to a distance where my guns were effective I was already at half shields. The fight was over before I’d even begun it. Damn.

I offered a rematch with cruisers and spent my insurance pay out on a Rupture. Again I was crippled by T1 guns and his Caracal had a mean active tank. I was slowly breaking it down while my ECM drones singularly failed to get a jam until I was already in structure. By now his shields had broken but horror of horrors I was out of ammunition. Nooooooooooo. Another ship lost. That’s my killboard stats for the week in tatters. Lau really enjoyed the fights though and even gave me another donation to thank me for giving him some fun. I enjoyed it too and I came out of it with enough ISK to actually go and get my own Hurricane to replace one I lost to an obvious bait trap last week.

Related posts:

1. Rifter Fleet Issue
2. There’s No Place Like Home
3. The Rifter Guide: Solo PvP
4. Keeping Up With The Jonses
5. Pushing My Limits