More Outlaws

A quick summary of kills and losses since my last post:

• Killed a Rupture and a Rifter solo, a Jaguar and an Arbitrator together with a corpmate.
• Lost a Wolf to another Jaguar, another corpmate lost a Probe in the same fight.

Now, to details.

A BAD IDEA
I've made my first kill in a Crow class interceptor after hours of fruitless roaming around Heimatar and Metropolis the other day. I arrived at a gate in Eszur and saw a Rifter hanging around. I decided to provoke its pilot to start attacking me by settling into a 20 kilometre orbit and targeting it. The trick worked: the Rifter started blinking red in my overview and I engaged my warp disruptor and missile turrets. The frigate was unable to scratch me and died quickly. I then found out it was set up to maximise speed at the expense of defence so I guess the pilot thought he had a chance to outrun me.

JAGGED
A day later, I was cruising around Gulmogorod in my Wolf and spotted a Rupture in a belt. Its pilot had made a mistake of not renaming his ship which allowed me to quickly check his background and identify him as a potential target. I warped to the belt and started my usual routine while chatting to my corpmate who was also keen to do a bit of shooting. Everything looked fine until Cactuz III entered the system and quickly scanned us down. His Jaguar started doing some serious damage to my ship and I asked my corpmate for help. Unfortunately, he was in a Probe frigate set up for scanning with just one autocannon and our combined firepower was not enough to break the Jaguar's tank. Cactuz dispatched both of us.
Of course, it was a mistake to bring in the Probe since it really made no difference. An even bigger, and more fundamental, mistake was trying to do something in a fleet without voice comms. Fortunately, I was able to arrange a better small fleet operation the following day.

DYNAMIC DUO
I was just warming up when a corpmate (another one) asked in the corporate channel whether our alliance was running small-ship operations for inexperienced pilots. I invited him to Amamake area and he soon arrived in a brand new Harpy assault ship. Having arranged proper voice comms this time, we sat at a safespot in Auga scanning belts when I spotted a Jaguar and rushed to it. The Jaguar escaped and commented in local that he was not interested in a fight he'd likely lose.
Well, we made him fight by catching his ship in another belt some 10 minutes later and destroying it easily.
Just eight minutes later, we caught an Arbitrator in the same belt cluster. He sent his drones after me and I concentrated on the pesky litle creatures while my mate was tearing down the cruiser's defences. The drones were hitting me pretty hard and the Arbitrator pilot did a smart trick of activating a tracking disruptor on me, so in the end I switched my fire onto the cruiser and we killed it just in time to save my ship from the drone assault.
I then took my mate on a roam around the area, but unfortunately no other targets came our way. We did scare a ratting battleship, though, which served to boost our confidence.
I think I should do more small-ship small-fleet ops.