One Falcon Too Many

Last night I was bombing around Gulfonodi running some missions. My agent assigned the three part Recon mission to me again, he seems to come up with it every 5 missions or so, but its easy and gets me to the next storyline faster so I don't mind. And Recon 3/3 is so damn cool, I wish CCP would make more unique environments like that.

Anyways, the call went up in corp chat that four battleships were camping the Teonusude gate in Bosena. I jumped in my falcon and went to Bosena the back way to scout it out for my three gangmates.

I got there and sure enough the pirates came into view, flashing the red symbol of criminal flags, a Dominix, a Hyperion, a Raven, a Typhoon, and something new... a cruiser... a Falcon. Since I was sitting in a Falcon myself (cloaked of course, I'm being a recon pilot here!) I could easily imagine what my counterpart had: covert ops cloak, ECM, and who cares what else, that would be enough.

Our gang had a Scorpion Battleship, Sacrilege Battlecruiser, and another battleship along with my Falcon and we were confident we could take on the four enemy battleships: lock a couple down, hammer the other two quickly, and win (its worth noting that the Sacrilege may only be a Battlecruiser but the pilot is very good and the damage he puts out is extreme).

But the enemy Falcon effectively negated one of our two ECM ships and could turn an advantaged battle for us into a pitched battle or a disaster in seconds. Negating that Falcon is going to be hard because, sure enough, he just cloaked. We called off the operation. It was far too risky without a few more pilots on our side.

But for a moment there, when I was cloaked and I knew there was another cloaked Falcon out there somewhere, I felt like a WWII sub commander eyeing up a convoy and worried about the ships I couldn't see, knowing if I took the first shot I might never see the return shot coming for me.

Cloaking is so cool.