In the past I have written about how I have tried out the Ishkur a couple of times but somehow never quite managed to click with the Gallentean assault frigate. Well, the times they are a-changing and one night in Agil I was twiddling my thumbs and wondering what to take out. A fully-fit Ishkur that had been sitting there for ages caught my eye and I decided to give her another chance to impress me.

Since the Russian invasion of the north I’ve found Catch and the surrounding regions to be the best place to go for solo frigate PvP. Sometimes HED-GP can be a bit heavily camped but usually its pretty easy to pass through. With White Noise and NCdot both lurking a couple of jumps away in Providence, HED-GP currently being in the possession of Red Alliance, and -A- close by in GE-8JV it makes a nice little mixing pot with plenty of people to shoot.

Her first encounter was a Taranis in HED-GP itself. I’m not quite sure what the high damage interceptor thought it was going to do to an assault but I played dumb and let him tackle me. The battle was brief and the outcome fairly predictable. First blood for my Ishkur. A jump later I found an NCdot Dramiel and once again did my best to look stupid (trust me, its very convincing). He took the bait and I opened up with neutron blasters full of Null. With my web applied and an overheated afterburner making sure he couldn’t escape it was another good victory with drones and blasters doing their thing and I warped off before his friends could arrive.

With those two victories under my belt and suddenly starting to feel pretty warm about the Ishkur I decided to head back to Agil and take a break. Despite being considerably slower than a Jaguar I’d been able to pin down and kill a Dramiel and that’s pretty much the whole reason that I fly afterburner assault frigates in null security space.

Which brings me to the question of whether or not it is wise or advisable to fly a frigate without a microwarp drive. The way I see it, a microwarp drive and an afterburner both provide very different things. If you fit a microwarp drive your strength is your ability to burn around the field and pull people apart before swooping in for the kill. They are excellent for when you are fighting outnumbered and want to engage a gang’s tackle. They are not, however, fast enough to stop a Cynabal or Vagabond from getting you so you need to be cautious in that regard. An afterburner instead provides you with the ability to dictate the terms of a fight. If you are expecting to fight only one or two at a time then it gives you much more control over the engagements and allows you to do things like keep Dramiels pinned down long enough to kill them. On top of that people don’t expect them and if you are clever then you can hide the fact that you have one until its too late. The big risk is that you get tackled by an interceptor away from a gate or dockable station and then you will need to pull some stylish piloting off to get out of trouble.

People ask me how I survive gate camps with just an afterburner to burn back with to which my response is “quite nicely, thank you”. As it happens the biggest threat when burning back to a gate is usually that a switched on Dramiel pilot will get a scrambler on you. With your MWD cut you are pretty much dead in the water. The afterburner doesn’t suffer from this problem. On top of that you don’t get the massive signature bloom that an MWD causes so by the time the heavier hitters get a lock on you you are already most of the way back to the gate. With an overloaded afterburner you need about 8 – 10 seconds to jump to safety, more than enough time.

A few hours later I logged back in and set out again to look for more fights. I poked around the usual systems but didn’t find anything exciting. There was either no-one around or camps that were too much for me to take on. Heading back to HED-GP I ran into a gang from The Seventh Day alliance, a PvP training group that is now home to Kil2. Despite buzzing around the edges of their gang I couldn’t persuade their Republic Fleet Firetail to fight me so in the end I just asked for a 1v1 in local and he was soon burning straight for me. Excellent. Approach, web, scram, blasters, drones, it was becoming routine now and proved far too much for the Firetail to take. I didn’t hang around to loot as a Loki had appeared on top of us although it turns out he was just there to try and get on killmails. That’s elite PvP right there, that is. Anyway, good fight to the Firetail.

A bit later on I stumbled into a GoonSwarm Federation Jaguar camping a gate. This should be a good match up and I was relishing the fight. He burnt for me and instinct kicked in. As his shields dropped the inevitable happened and a Falcon decloaked. He got his first jam cycle off on me so I did my best to keep range on the Jaguar and hoped he didn’t have enough common sense to take down my drones. He didn’t an instead concentrated his fire on me. I was winning the initial engagement handily but without my blasters adding to the DPS the fight slowed right down. This was made worse by the fact that I couldn’t get a lock to see how he was holding up. As I passed through 25% armour remaining I was rewarded with the sight of a bright flash as the Jaguar exploded, despite being able to warp out as I still had not managed to get a second lock on him. My drones turned their anger upon the Falcon and I settled into a tight orbit around the hated recon ship. Unfortunately he was firing on me and doing just enough damage to keep my capacitor dangerously low. After about five successive jam cycles I gave up, recalled my drones, and warped to safety. This is one of the good things about drone ships, even if they get a jam on you your drones continue to apply their DPS.

Happy with the day’s kills I logged off and called it a night. The next morning I was back and straight into HED-GP where local was significantly higher than I’d seen it for a while. There was a Dramiel kicking around and I was able to eventually lure him into fighting me. As in the previous fight I used the range of Null and the damage of my drones to lay down the hurt while my web and afterburner worked hard to keep him tackled. During the fight a Stiletto warped to us and rather than keeping range came in close to get a tackle on me. That was a mistake. As soon as the Dramiel exploded I switched my tackle to the Stiletto and began to work on him too. He was fit with a shield buffer and it was taking longer to chew through than I would have liked. Ships were landing on the gate one after another and I aligned away to a celestial hoping to escape as soon as the interceptor exploded. It wasn’t to be, a Raptor came in and got point on me before I could get away so I turned my guns on him too just in time for a Falcon to decloak and jam me. Great. By now their whole gang was upon me and my newly beloved little ships’ run was up. How many Russians does it take to kill a frigate? Twelve including a Falcon and black ops battleship, apparently.

By now I was thoroughly besotted with the Ishkur so I soon fitted up another and set out to look for more mayhem. I dropped into HED-GP and poked around a bit but found nothing much. There was a Sabre around but he seemed completely uninterested in fighting me. A problem that I’d had with several Dramiels over the last 24 hours. Maybe my playing stupid had lost some of its effectiveness. Bouyed by my victories I’d developed a habit of dropping drones a bit too soon and being too obviously aggressive. Anyway, I flirted with the Sabre a bit and eventually ended up hanging up on the station in HED-GP staring at him in a peculiar Mexican standoff. A smallish gang of Abaddons warped to the station and he suddenly gained the confidence to come after me. I made sure that I pulled plenty of range on the fearsome Amarr battleships and waited for his approach. I didn’t have to wait long and once again the well-rehearsed routine kicked in. It was a quick and brutal fight, the only real concern for me being a couple of lucky long shots from the Abaddons that put me into structure before my repair systems kicked in and I burnt away to safety.

So there you go. It turns out that the Ishkur can happily deal with both the major enemies of solo frigate PvP: Sabres and Dramiels. It must be love. But I am not so easily pleased. I wanted more. To compete with my beloved Wolf or the little Enyo that could the Ishkur needs a little something more. Something special. A certain je ne sais quoi.

Roaming into Querious I found exactly the thing. A Rapier was sitting just off a gate, uncloaked, doing nothing much. I had jumped in and my ship appeared just 12 km from the recon ship. Without a second thought I decloaked, overheated all my mid slots, and got myself into a nice tight orbit. Guns and drones began to tear into the Rapier’s shields while my overheated afterburner did its best to keep my speed up. Despite the fact I’d started the fight at point blank and got him scrammed, the Rapier returned my lock and slapped a pair of webs on me. It was do or die time. I turned on the heat and crossed my fingers.

To my delight he dropped Hobgoblins, a drone set that would come up against one of my best resistances and so I concentrated on staying out of trouble from his guns. As he hit half shields a Thrasher landed and began to lob shells at me from its 280mm artillery cannons. They were hurting more than the Rapier was but I kept to the task in hand, committed now. Next to land was a Drake. He too locked me up and slapped a target painter on me but other than the Rapier no-one had pointed me. Excellent. As the reconnaissance ship hit structure I prepared to align out and warp away only to see the Drake finally decide that it was best to point me. The Rapier exploded in a bright flash and my drones shuffled across to the Thrasher who took the opportunity to flee.

This left just the Drake and I tried to coax a little bit more performance from my already stressed afterburner. Slowly but surely I was able to pull range, repairing the incoming damage as and when my heavily depleted capacitor allowed. 20 kilometers. 22… 23… 24… 25… Warp! WARP! COME ON, WARP!! No joy, the Drake had seen my plan and overheated his point just to be sure. My afterburner was in danger of failing on me and I had to allow it to cool down and the Caldari battlecruiser began to close the gap again. Drat. What to do? There was no way I had enough juice to out run him, if I shut the afterburner down to repair it then I’d suffer at the hands of his missiles, and I was 80 km from the safety of the gate. With no other options presenting themselves I decided that my best course of action was to make a run for the gate but sadly I finally ran out of capacitor with 60 km to go and my ship finally succumbed to her aggressors.

An excellent fight and almost certainly that special something to finally cement the Ishkur in my heart. Long live the Ishkur!

NB: Since I wrote this the war for Catch has heated up a bit so be careful if you plan on heading down there looking for PvP. Last night the gates in Querious were pretty hot too but that’s another story and another ship.

Related posts:

1. I Want To Love The Ishkur…