Crime & Punishment

This is what happens when a neuting VNI takes on an active-tanked Sac. Granted, I wasn't fit for long-term neuting (i.e. no cap booster), but I think the outcome would have been the same even if I was.

EDIT: Note that in my VNI loss above, I took 17k total damage. In terms of EHP, I think my fit was pushing 40k. When I beat Badman in the video I linked above, he took 57k total damage. That's before resists. Yeah. As long as you have enough buffer to survive an alpha strike and soak up damage while your cap boosters/tank are reloading, active is the way to go.

I think that Gilas and Sacs are relatively well matched in terms of speed and maneuverability, but he could keep his MWD running far longer than I could, so he managed to dictate range for most of the fight. And he did so to very good effect.

Most of the time I was just trying to slingshot him into NOS range, but not really focusing on it. I didn't really need the cap but I could tell he was running dual reps so any cap warfare would have hurt him. The one time I really needed to pull range to reload my ASB with low shields, I overheated my MWD and burned straight away from him. I managed to get about 30 seconds of respite which is all I needed. If I hadn't gotten away at that point, the match may have gone the other way.

Before the final "death plunge", he also pulled range out to 70km to cap up and try killing my drones.

The decision for me in the Gila to kill the Sac's drones was a no-brainer, but, yeah, for the Sac pilot it's less clear. It seems that going for a Gila's drones would only work in a long-range fight where the drone travel time is significant, but in a brawl or near-brawl like this was, I could just scoop them before they take any armor damage and deploy fresh ones right away. You'd practically have to be able to alpha them for it to work. Tough call.

I did come up with a potential soft-counter that I want to try out in the next Thunderdome round.

Noragen, I don't know if you've ever flown an MWD fit hull tanked VNI but that monster is unreasonably fast. Full nav skills I think it's around 2800 m/s with heat. Pretty sure it can still fit a full rack of medium neuts too; might have to downsize one of them.

My response was unclear. I believe from the ehp on that sac and the pressure even 3 heated med neuts apply it is screwed if the vni can get on top of it

Lesson 51: Battlespace preparation can make or break a fight. While waiting on my next Thunderdome match near Jita, I decided to hang out some at 4-4 for a while and play some station games in spite of my previous experience otherwise. I noticed one -10.0 pilot, Schwein Hosen, hopping around masterfully in a Thrasher avoiding the local authorities and fellow capsuleers yet staying on grid long enough to find a target and engage. Knowing that they would almost certainly be in a cheaply-fit ship and not giving a damn, I made it my mission to catch him just once.

At first I tried to snipe him with a Naga, but I quickly realized that I couldn't effectively achieve enough lock range and scan resolution to effectively engage. So I decided to take a different approach.

I hopped into a fast 'ceptor and I just watched him.

Every time he warped to a new spot, I would burn towards it and put a bookmark at roughly 20km off where I last saw him. After a while of doing this, I noticed him starting to show up at the bookmarks I had placed and I knew my time had come. It took me a time or two to catch him, but eventually I did. He was not criminally flagged when he went down and I would have easily solo'd him, but FacPo and other players did assist in the kill.

I got little bounty from it, and virtually no killboard value added, but I did get the satisfaction of a good hunt, which is worth more than either of those in spades.

GF to you Schwein, and thanks for the hunt.

I also like to 'white knight' on occasion. I normally attempt to entice profit when I do it but the main goal is just to mess with people

It's a good way to hide your fleet comp from the enemy but to make sure your impel isn't shooting out armageddons you can have it agress with something and that truely hides it. We once hid a Moros in our WH using it for bashes of dead towers and POCO's by doing this until some moron went afk (me) for 2 mins before the POCO popped and the ruse was up.

That is very clever. I feel like it only matters in certain situations though. In a WH bashing POCO hiding that intel is great. If you're burning all the modules on a tower though, switching out for each one would be a pain, but maybe shipping down for the last couple % of the tower itself and staying in that for the mods would work.

For most things HS it wouldn't matter but could be useful for dedicated fleets running specific doctrines with particular weaknesses.

In 0.0 I don't think it would be worth doing at all.

I actually ran into that exact same issue after the kill mentioned. The issue is that "large" POS mods (EWAR, large guns, etc.) are all 4000m^3 in volume. Since the base cargo hold on an Impel is smaller than that, you cannot scoop those mods without fitting cargo expanders in spite of the fact that you have a massive fleet hangar.

I knew that CCP had changed fleet hangars to allow POS mods to be deployed directly from there as part of the DST changes, but I didn't realize that the change was only one way. Unless they do change that mechanic, only a Bustard and Mastadon can scoop large POS mods without cargo expanders.