My First Solo Kill!

from flickr user Stephanie Sicore

Fighting For Fliet

We have been defending Fliet from a quite determined push by the Caldari, wherein they got over 50% system control, mostly achieved during the AU/Russia prime time. It took us two to three days to get it back down to stable. During the effort I build ships for the corp, contacted galmil to ask for help (thanks Thanatos Marathon!) and joined in plexing fleets.

It was an odd fight in some ways. The actual Caldari militia pilots largely disappeared by the second day, leaving a pirate corp called Mad Pixel Collective to harass us as we deplexed. Had the Calmil left a couple of frigate pilots in system they could have actual plexed too, making our job a lot harder, but I'm glad they didn't. We tried to make the pirates lose interest by using cheap ships, mostly with warp core stabs in the lows, and running away, and I think that might have worked.

It was close to the end of this battle that I got my first kill, and its a doozy. I killed a Confessor (80M Tech 3 destroyer) in my Algos (13M, T1 beast, no links, implants or drugs)! The killmail shows another pilot on the kill, a corpmate of mine, but that was damage from an earlier fight. This fight was definitely just me and Iga Angel.  I had gone to a small plex and Iga landed right behind me. I assumed he would follow me in so I dropped my 2 Hammerhead II and 3 Hobgoblin II drones, pre-overheated and activated All The Things and as soon as he landed he was hit with my blasters, web, scram and neutralizer. I also had 400M armor, damage control II and a small armor repairer; a pretty standard solo Algos fit.

I started taking a lot of damage fast, as expected. I was orbiting him at 1500m. My friends were reshipping and my hope was to to stay alive long enough for them to arrive. To my surprise, though, once I got through his shields he dropped fast. My friends were surprised when I yelled "I'm winning! He's going down!" as I saw his structure going faster than mine, and he soon exploded. I'm very, very happy with that!

We talked about his fit on comms for a few minutes, concluding he was set up for kiting and just hadn't been able to get away from me in time because my scram shut off his MWD, and he'd perhaps forgotten to switch to defensive mode. I pulled 12.6M in loot from his hull, which is what my ship was worth; a nice symmetry there in this David and Goliath fight.

I really, really, really wish I had the video running for this fight, but it'll have to be a pleasant memory instead.

Trading

I had a huge score when someone, either drunk or with very specific needs, went on a Jump Freighter buying spree. I sold 4 JFs to them for a total of 28B ISK. The sales history for the four types of JFs show 15 of each sold that day, which must have been this guy.  I still have five left to sell, but this is a very nice start to my new investment plan of regularly buying plex instead of jump freighters. There's a principle called dollar cost averaging, investing gradually over time to "smooth out" lumps in the prices. I've started a bit heavily and bought 8 plex, but I plan to buy 3 or 4 a month.

If you have the order slots available it's worth leaving items up for sale at a fairly high price. You never know when a huge sale like this will come along. I've had some other items surprise me in the past.

I've sold most of the datacores that I'd accrued, as each flavor had a price spike that I was able to take advantage of. The latest was Gallentean Starship, which went to 150K for several days. If you're lucky you can shift maybe 5000 during a spike, so if you want to try this, maybe start with a 2-3 thousand. You can often buy them for about 100K at Jita.