Accidental Bait

Fishing Lures from flickr user Chau kar

We took a fleet of about 10 ships out last night. We ran two plexes in Heyd without incident; in fact, for about 15 minutes there was nobody in Heydieles except us! That's *really* strange and I'm quite sure it's the first time that has happened. I should have jumped in my Epithal and liberated the contents of my factories, which are starting to fill their respective POCOs.

On our way to answer a call for help in Ladistier we ran into 2 Stabber Fleet Issues at a gate. We tried to goad them into opening fire on us, which they did, but the gate guns didn't seem to bother them much. They took out one of our two Navitas repair ships and when I tried to repair it (I was the second of our two repair ships) they got me too. We were unable to bring either of them down and when three more SFIs turned up, the rest of the fleet scattered.

The FC decided to reship into cruisers and take the fight. When we re-entered the system to look for our targets we noticed there were 102 people in local....Brave Newbies had arrived! We sent a scout to see where they were; he reported a cloud of BN ships with no enemies in sight, then they started posted their kills in local. They included a Rhea, which drew whistles of approval from our fleet.

We reshipped into smaller vessels and returned to Heyd; here's where I accidentally became bait (and forgot to video the damned fight again, sorry!). We entered a plex that already contained  a Condor. We suspected it was an Old Man Gang pilot that would keep his distance and try and tempt someone to chase him and, once separated from the pack, kill him.  Tonight, that was me!

It wasn't on purpose; I was totally set to orbit the button like usual but the FC says "Vic, burn in the opposite direction"....odd, but I do it. He was setting a few things up so I didn't think to question the order. After a short interval he says "What are you doing out there!?" as the Condor burns towards me. I drop drones, lock the Condor, and engage as my fleet-mates burn towards me to try and help. I wish I'd recorded the fight because its all a blur. I was scrammed early so I could not get away quickly, but I did try and burn away in a straight line and let my drones do the fighting. His damage on me was erratic; two or three big hits interspersed with small hits. My group were able to catch him, point him and attack hard....he went down when I was at about half structure.

So why was I ordered to burn off? The FC thought I was still in a Navitas...which was destroyed in the run-in with the Stabbers! And I'd been in an Algos after that, and was now in a Tristan. There's a lot to keep track of when you're an FC :) No harm done; I still miss steps in one ship, let alone tracking ten of them!

Heydieles was at about 15% contested when I logged out, so we're making progress towards recapturing the system. I also dealt with my factories...4 of them are humming along quite nicely though I have not been able to pick up their output for a couple of weeks. Then I went ratting in the asteroid belts, found and ran a data site (12M in loot) and logged out.