Flight of the Tarantula

You might be tempted upon reading this blog with posts about Orcas and Tech II production to think of me as a carbear industrialist. But I started playing Eve with PvP on my mind and that is always my first goal when I have adequate time to get online, and I know my way around the dangerous end of a blaster and missile.

Saturday night the stars aligned and I logged in with a good solid two hours to burn. News that the war declaration from Invicta was ending has come through and most everyone was relaxing and thinking about rebuilding wallets for the next war. I prepared to run a mission with a corp mate in the good ole Insisto Oblivium II when some neutrals came into the area flying suspiciously in a Raven battleship, Harbinger battlecruiser, and Thorax cruiser.

Allow me to explain. We live in the Sukanan constellation in Tash-Murkon region. Its a low sec dead end pocket with one entry system from high sec, and all of the local residents are either in our alliance or friendly to us. So when three combat ships enter the constellation and are neutral to us and our allies, warning bells immediately go off.

Now we're all anti-pirate so we don't shoot first unless they are marked as pirates (i.e. flashing red from really low security status) or on the CVA KOS list. In this case they were neither, so we needed to see if they were tourists or hunters. A gang formed up and my corp mate in his Onyx went to a gate to see what would happen. I jumped into my own Onyx named Tarantula and prepared to join in upon his command.

One system over he waited at a gate and the three targets jumped in. Without him doing anything they targeted and fired off some shots. That was all we needed. The gang jumped in on them, targeted and primaried the Raven. It went down quickly as the Thorax and Harbinger ran for it.

We spent the next half and hour hunting the badly damaged Thorax and Harbinger. Eventually the Thorax was caught in one of our camps and the Harbinger a few minutes later. I got my first kill mail since dicing up Mynxee in that duel for the Harbinger kill.

The rest of the night was spent trying to catch another group that had come in, this time in Tech 1 cruisers and frigates. They were outgunned and we were smelling blood in the water. Eventually one of them sacrificed a Rupture to allow the rest to escape. With that I parked the Onyx in the garage and logged for the night.

It felt good to get in on a couple decent kills and work with the alliance in a fleet. I feel I acquitted myself decently, and shook off some more rust from the PvP skills. I am however disappointed with the setup of the Tarantula. I put it together as my first Onyx back in the early days of Strife 2.0 focusing on a hard active shield tank and long range warp disruption field, depending on gates mates of our roaming ops to have the webs. But at one point last night I was camping a gate with a fleet mate in a Raven and I realized the lack of web and MWD meant anyone I scrambled would most likely just outrun my field and escape anyways.


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So I'm going to have to rejigger it for less tank and better tackle for use in the operations that m3 and Blackwater run. This setup allows me to keep the rigs I've installed and still get a decent tank and some better tackling ability:

(click to embiggen)