Just realised that I lost my 90s roam post from last week! Sad Panda but all I can say is that Pearl Jam rocks. The Bastards requested that we do a frigate based roam, get some ransoms and kills and then blow up horribly from a smart bombing battle ship. All these elements were present in the roam last night varying degrees.
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| Flash - what could have been.. |
So, it was 70s night. A much under-rated decade in my view: not into the fashion myself but the music rocked!
I believe big hair, bell bottomed trousers and floral patterns on shirts were the order of the day?
I put together a Youtube play-list, fired it up and then undocked in my Jaguar.
Here's the playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=67F56A02AE76126F
1. Disco Inferno - Trammps
2. Brick House - Commodores
3. Y.M.C.A - Village People
4. September - Earth, Wind and Fire
5. Stayin' Alive - Bee Gees
6. You're My First, My Last, My Everything - Barry White
7. Last Dance - Donna Summer
8. Flash Light - Parliament
9. War - Edwin Starr
10. Play that Funky Music - Wild Cherry
11. Kung Fu Fighting - Carl Douglas
12. Don't Fear The Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
Other pilots had the their own and I will be collecting these into a compilation album.
Anyway, in frigates it meant we could cover a lot of ground quickly. We had scouts in all the neighbouring systems, including the jam packed area towards LXQ2-T where the Northern Coalition (NC) was assaulting the drone regions; packing the local star systems with their capsuleer swarm.
One of our scouts spotted a ship and shouted out:
"Rattlesnake! Rattlesnake on scan!" We thought he was on the happy juice so asked for him to confirm. The scout was 100% sure and started dropping probes to get closer. Our frigate fleet was scattered between five different systems all trying to sniff out a target but we all raced towards the penultimate destination. The Rattlesnake (a wonderful variant of the feared Scorpion battle ship) was running a mission of some description, it was possible that only ships equipped with after burners would function properly so checking the fleet disposition, there was only one ship that had a long point
AND an afterburner. He was picked as the main tackler and he made himself ready.
Probes were now squirting back the information to our prober who fine tuned and narrowed down the location until he could get a warp in. The minutes are agonisingly slow with time sliding slowly past you as if it is in treacle.
"Hit. Hit." The prober warped in, cloaked and sneaky while the rest of us waited, impatiently.
"Got him. I am nine kilometres away. Warp to me now." The tackler took this as his cue and raced in, points all ready. I then sent in two more with webbers and scramblers just to be sure. The remaining pack of frigates clustered around the gate.
"Point." Said the first tackler.
"Point and web." Said the second. We had it. I ordered the rest of the fleet through and we warped, en mass towards the rattlesnake. He was being hit hard by us but the local Blood Raiders (what were they doing here I wondered?) were also taking a chunk out of him.
We wanted a ransom and I appointed Arrhidaeus as the ransom taker. He pulled the rattlesnake pilot into our dedicated ransom channel and started negotiations with the ransom set for 900 million isk; a nice sum for sure.
The shields on the rattlesnake dropped alarmingly and we also realised that this feared ship was fielding tech 1 drones. Not too scary.
As the negotiations were progressing, the rattlesnake dropped down into armour and I ordered us to start firing on the Blood Raiders who were swarming all over the rattlesnake and ourselves.
I kept an eye on the ransom channel and it wasn't going as expected: the pilot actually wanted to die so he could 'see a pretty explosion'. Quite odd but we obliged and
popped his rattlesnake unfortunately, we also popped his
pod as well.
A few minutes later as we were aligning to get out: Arrhidaeus caught
a thrasher pilot and killed the ship. We grabbed the pilot and demanded a haiku in order to save him from a pod kill. He was too poor to pay us and we had no desire to kill him without some sort of payment (the rattlesnake pod kill was the result of an itchy trigger finger by Red Vegas). So Veliric stepped up and delivered the following:
Pirates are great,
they will decide my fate,
I hope this is not to late.
OK - it doesn't strictly follow the haiku path but a damn good try nonetheless. Everyone in the fleet decided that this was an excellent attempt. We cheered and applauded loudly. We let the pilot go after
the haiku delivery and recorded this onto our ransomboard.
Meanwhile, our presence in Eifer was noted by a few people and we noticed combat scan probes appearing. They were quite far away and we weren't bothered by it - the chap probing for us wasn't doing a very good job.
However, a megathron soon appeared and Arrhidaeus excitedly pointed it. No fire was coming from the megathron and only a few desultory looking drones ambled out. The rest of the fleet warped in and we started to apply points. Wary of any smart bombs we maintained orbit but surely someone using drones wouldn't be stupid enough to have drones out as well?
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| Edwin Starr is a Brutor |
With Edwin Starr's 'War!' playing out loud and proud ( a hit by Edwin Starr for the anti-Vietnam war song and a number one hit in 1970 in the USA). We detected two approaching ships and seconds later, dropping out of warp was a drake and a taranis from the same corp as the megathron. They all arrived approximately 50Km from the megathron, no doubt to get a view of the fight.
They then turned tail and ran, a wise decision considering they were facing over a dozen frigates.
No weapons' fire was detected from the megathron so we suspected strongly that it was smart bomb fitted (or had no ammo!). Arrhidaeus, unfortunately got too close and
proved our suspicions. We maintained our wide orbit as only poor Arrhi was caught in the blast. We tried to ransom the battle ship but the pilot was having none of it and we sliced the
megathron to pieces. The megathron pilot whipped his pod out as we circled around the wreck.
We tried to get his other friends to engage but it wasn't possible. Meanwhile, another one of our scouts had reported a mission running hurricane and a small cruiser gang roaming. We turned and raced towards our target. We passed a few juicy looking ships but they were all near the star gates and in frigates, tackling them would be a bad idea: the sentry guns would completely shred us.
Sard Caid was busy with friends in Atlar and was wise to our presence and waved to us when we joined in (the cad!).
However, while the fleet scattered to grab a mission running hurricane; my, Tibbs and Arrhidaeus managed to grab a rupture pilot. We demanded a haiku as payment for his release. After trying to figure out what a haiku was he offered this up:
Akala Rocker>>
Pirates have my ship
I call but no Concord comes
Please don't kill my ship
Not bad an attempt,
we recorded it on our ransomboard (we thought it was worth 20M isk easy) and we let the chap go.
The 70s tunes were throbbing and grooving and it was a great night - so good that we had to run the frigates into the first camp we could see and attack it. I mean, the night had to end in fireworks - either an adversary or our own. Here's the
result when frigates meet battle cruisers.
An excellent night and some damn fine tunes from The Bastards.
Road trip coming up with great tunes no doubt.
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