Kronos down, Paladins hunted
I lost a brand new Kronos the other day. It wasn’t even fitted yet.
I normally fly my things from Jita to wherever I need them to be before unpacking them, mostly because flying in a DST is just faster. You can get ganked but that’s only happened twice in my entire eve career while flying my DST. And both times it was because I wasn’t paying much attention. But not the other day, well, not really at least.
The other day, I was just hauling a bit late while watching the Rookie with my girlfriend, a show we only just started watching (it’s so good!) and so I wasn’t really paying much attention but whatever. I undocked my trusty Occator, click jump on the system that I needed to go to and suddenly see my pod flying off.
Turns out there were a few gankers on the Jita undock. This is literally the first time that I’ve had this happen to me EVER. I have an insta undock and use it whenever I remember (this does not happen much), but the other day the RNG gods where not in my favor and I lost the Kronos I was going to bring in for PVP fun. 2.5billion isk down the drain, well 2.9 if you count the occator fit. Which is funny because an hour before that I was hauling 10bill worth of stuff so I’m glad that one didn’t get popped.
It was a bit annoying but “Oh well” and I bought a new one but flew that one in manually.
And not even a day later, yesterday, I was able to use it.
As per usual chains were being scanned, content was sought for. At first it was for PvE purposes, when that failed it was PvP purposes.
A Paladin was seen 2 jumps down the chain on D-scan but not found, and we gave up a bit. There was a nice highsec connection not too far from Jita so one of the guys decided to fly in a rolling battleship. Coming through the highsec we hear him go “Guys I see a Paladin and mobile depot on D”
Ears perked we told him not to decloak as a scout was looking for that exact person. Once the decloak timer ran out we told our friend in the trusty roller to just warp to the return. On the way there, his computer crashed.
The thing about EVE is that if your pc crashes, you won’t log out immediately, there’s a 30 second timer before you log off. So, in those 30 seconds, our buddy’s ship landed on the return, as well as the paladin that we were searching for. He had decided that a Tempest would be a nice little snack.
“Shit we gotta help him” seeing that there were only 2 of us on comms now it was time to bring the big guns I had just purchased.
While I started moving, the PC had restarted and he was back on comms, ready to log on, the battleship wasn’t dead yet. He logged on, exclaimed “I’m still full shield” and then the moment his client had caught up to what had happened, was suddenly in a pod.
Only a few minutes had gone by, our scout had the Paladin tackled and I was on grid with the Kronos, it was time.
Quickly moving a little closer so I could scram the Paladin too AND be in range of the wormhole to jump back if things get dicey, I started slowly taking away his armour, as he did mine. The little tackle that could had died already, and on D-scan a blackbird was coming to help the Paladin.
Since the marauder changes, Blackbirds are annoying little ships because of their ECM, when you’re trying to do a DPS race, you do not want to lose your target. Unfortunately, that happened a couple of times.
While all of this was happening, a ping had gone out on discord “@here Paladin” That was all that’s needed for our CEO to run upstairs from his kitchen having had just turned on the oven to come and help us.
Which was a good thing, there was another Paladin on D. But all was well, or hopefully it would be. Since two paladins shooting my Kronos did hurt a little bit and I was using quite a few cap boosters.
Our tempest pilot in the meantime had quickly gotten into his Vargur and started making his way down the chain too. Right on time because the first Paladin had jumped back to the other side having had most of his hull eaten away already. I started shooting the second one but he jumped back as well, so I went after them. In order to try and finish him off, the Vargur was there as well now, things would be just fine.
During all this our CEO brought in a Pilgrim and a Loki to chase the blackbirds away. I use plural here because there was a second one.
Having had killed the first Paladin, number two had to jump back but we were waiting and got him on the other side, the hole collapsing behind us. But everything was fine, there was still the highsec close to Jita in this exact hole.
It took longer than expected but, in the end, we came out victorious, having killed almost 8billion isk in ships and only losing 550m.
The Kronos, now named “Number two” in honour of the first one lost to the gank, had his baptism of fire. Having drank the blood (or rust) of its enemies, it now thirsts for more.
We’ll see how many times I can undock it before it goes up in a great big ball of fire.
Oh and, Yacht is recruiting!
Stay tuned o7