The Dominix was my first battleship. This was never used in combat as it was meant as a tool to generate ISK in the 2V pocket. It was fit (to the best of my abilities) as an asteroid-rats/plex machine. In the 3 or so months with me it did its work well. I was very happy with the results and life was good.
With all the changes going on in Providence and the amount of pirate/mercenary activity in the area I decided to move. For whatever reason, that I can't understand now, I decided to take my slow moving ship thru the longest possible route which led me to S9X. Because of all the Noir presence in the area I was forced for more than one occasion to cloak and seat it out. I did this twice. The third time I was tired and became impatient. This was my first mistake. As I was cloaked near the S9X gate in TU a call came thru the Alliance channel about some activity going on. I wanted to join bad, but had no eyes in the other side of the gate. I took a deep breath and decided to jump.
It looks like I appeared lost and with no direction, because as soon as I jumped some pilots from Noir decided to help me by jumping to my side. Not very thrill about someone touching my railgun I committed my second mistake. I panic. I still was cloaked from the jump and had a Prototype Cloaking Device, so I had plenty of time to decide on my options. I *should* have look for some celestial to align/warp to, but so mad I was of being so hasty and the possibiliy of giving a ship to these mercs that I didn't what was probably expected of a noob. I turned my slow ass boat around and burned to the gate.
As you can expect I didn't make it. At least I was lucky enough to warp with my pod even though I stood there for one second just looking at my first battleship in pieces.
As we know all know Noir had a great campaign in Providence, so with the huge amount of jumps I do thru the region it was bound to happen eventually. Still this was preventable and that makes me mad. Hopefully I will learn from this mistake and never do it again.
Lesson learned... don't jump in haste.
The Megathron. A tale of TCUs.
While I was still licking my wounds of my first battleship lost I was able to get a great deal in a Megathron. Unfortunately it was all the way in Amarr and we were at war. After a quick shout in corp channel, our CEO offer to use his neutral pilot to haul my new ship to Esa. I was really happy with the look and fit of my new ship. This was not going to be a PVE ship, but my first combat battleship. After fitting it as a sniper I went to bed that night really happy.
Just 2 days later I was able to experience my first battleship fleet. As I was login, intel came thru the channels about an operation in J6QB-P. It seems that there was a problem with some payments and sov dropped for this system. The lads in UK thought this was a very noble action by their enemies and seeing that poor system alone decided to take it for them. We were quickly heading to J6QB-P to take that TCU down.
The flight there was uneventful (even though there was a good number of reds in CBL-XP). As I got there found a good size fleet, including some Dreads, pounding on the POS tower next to the TCU timer was going. I really don't understand the mechanics, but it appears to me that you can't just shoot at the TCU anytime you want. I'm not sure if it was in some previous reinforcement state or if we were waiting for a BSU to come online, but we waited.
Suddenly the order was given and we started shooting. My contribution was very small since I lost time trying to catch another ship that got bumped very close to the POS shield, but still I managed to get on the kb for this TCU. Our victory didn't last long as the UK folks put another one online the next morning, but the experience was amazing.
This was the first time on a real snipping fleet with Dreads in hand to play. I had a lot of fun and can't wait to X for more fleets once my T2 railguns are done.
Lesson learned... Battleship snipping fleets are awesome!
