Tough week

Hasn't been a good week; I logged off near a gate in my purifier one hectic night. I logged back in and to my horror, there was a dramiel a mere 2km from me. Not able to cloak or run to the gate; the dramiel pilot (hats off to him) scrambled me and killed the ship. I got the pod out.


I then clone jumped to join Marco's frigate fleet - I was asked to fly Marco's sabre and as we progressed into null sec, I stupidly hit 'warp to' instead of 'align to' a star-gate...one I KNEW was already bubbled, as I came through it on the way in.

Being pulled into the bubble was annoying for sure, being scrambled by a hurricane and dramiel was even worse. Naturally, I blew up.

So my pod ran away, my crew dead and Marco demanding a replacement for his lost sabre.

One has to take the rough with the smooth eh? There's another op coming up this weekend, I hope I have better luck. Now where's that stabber fleet issue?

Two slippies, a drake, a rattler and friends and the welcoming committee when I got home...

This went boom....

I wandered into the usual Bastards hang-out; the 'Independence' bar and saw Fitz, Marco and a new chap called Jin. Fitz looked and sounded horrible: he had a serious case of man-flu and embarrassingly, excused himself from the bar, coughing and sneezing as he went.

Our fleet of three (two sleipnirs and a drake) undocked and went out hunting. The drake went on ahead, Marco and I in our sleipnirs sat on the gate and waited, our shield boosters primed to resist. as our scout and bait. However, it didn't take long before the star-gate we floated around pulsed once: signalling incoming traffic.

"Deploy drones." I said to Marco. The small winged mechanical killers slid out from their moorings and took up an orbit around us. Whoever had come in held their cloak. This boded well for Marco and I. Ordering battle stations as there was going to be some imminent violence, I waited patiently. I activated my shield hardeners and made sure that the capacitor booster was packed full with charges. The mystery ship still hadn't dropped its gate cloak but it was only a matter of time.

"There it is." Marco.

"Rattlesnake, rattlesnake!" I said with much excitement.

The distinctive Scorpion-class battle ship hull was there, hanging in space 25 km from me. Marco was closer and threw a point on it. I hit the mwd and raced over. The rattlesnake attempted to move back to the gate. We bumped it. We opened fire on it. His two friends in cruisers fired at us. Drones buzzed everywhere. The gate guns fired back on us. Our drake came back in to help. It was mad, fast and it was great.

The rattler went down and we got to work on the two cruisers: we somehow missed his fourth friend in a tempest and I think we also missed an Orca!

There's only so much a fleet of three can do on a low-sec gate. We quickly got off the gate and found a safe spot where we could collect the dropped loot and parcel it out amongst the Captains and crew.  Unfortunately, I had to leave the fleet and ran right into a small gate camp in our home system and rapidly blew up.

Not a good end to the evening.