Tengu Troubles

With regrouping business finished, we're settling into the new region and getting to know the locals.

In the meantime, a little roundup of a nice small gang fight we had in Assah before we left. It started when we killed a few battleships on station (most escaped), using carriers. In the thick of the action, a Harpy perished also. It took us probably twenty minutes to even find the mail.

When we finally did find it though, we were in for a surprise - a 600million isk, gank-fit Harpy. We've all seen extravagantly fit speed tanks before. So the Gistii MWD is nothing unusual. But T2 cap rigs on an assault ship? Faction damage mods, faction web/scram? It was set as a gank-AF, which is definitely something you don't see all the time.

A Harpy Pilot. Last Week.

This kill led to a nice battle in the neighbouring system in G-5. The pilot returned with a T3 Tengu - the first we've engaged of its class - and a gang of battlecruisers and lighter T2 stuff.

With G-5 being cynojammed we had to leave our caps docked up and change up. I think our gang was particularly well balanced - a damage battleship, a neuting battleship, a bubbler (Onyx), a tackler (Rapier) and myself in an Oneiros for rep.

A Nine Billion Isk sub-capital

There were certainly a few close calls in the fight. For my part, I did the usual thing in a solo logistics ship of racing for the gate, repping until primed, jumping, racing back, jumping, racing back to zero while repping.... rinse and repeat. Twice however, I got caught by warp scramblers that turned off my MWD (once by an arazu and once by a dictor). Luckily I managed to relay this information to Link and get the target insta-neuted, which enabled me to make it back to jump range (in structure).

With Lanari holding him and Zuldjan hitting him, the Tengu went down quite fast without cap. At one stage he de-aggro'd and could have jumped but feeling that the fight was going back their way, decided to re-aggress and try to kill Zuldjan's Megathron (but couldn't break our rep).

Sadly during one of my spells on the other side of the gate while racing back, Brudny's rapier went down, our only casualty, though his tackling helped generate the fight in the first place.

The Tengu's loot certainly didn't disappoint - a full officer fit. When we checked the prices of the sub-systems later the bill is certainly considerable for a sub-capital class: in the region of nine billion isk.

It's quite probably the most expensive T3 ship downed in 0.0 combat thus far, since their introduction. Respect to the pilot for bringing the good stuff and putting it on the line. I think in this case the key was as well balanced as you get a gang of five: damage, anti-cap, bubble, tackle and rep.