Farming PWNAGE

Grab your glocks when you see 2pac
Call the cops when you see 2pac

In late January, we moved from Placid to Bleak Lands to try taking on some locals.
We set up shop in Kurniainen, a nice pipe system and home to our ally bozoKaido and his mates.
Kurn is just eight jumps away from my old home of Amamake and is part of the Amarr-Minmatar war zone. It is also connected with Gallente lowsec so there's always somewhere to go when one is looking for fights.

Very often though all you need to get a kill is undock and check your overview: FW mission runners never stop visiting and we have already killed eight stealth bombers here.

Then there are regular mission runners and ratters who of course are forced to pay for polluting our system with wrecks. Sometimes they reply with juicy tears and hatemail.

And, finally, there are naughty neighbours who are seeking fights themselves.

Zen, who has only recently joined Pyrotechnics, scored a nice kill a couple of weeks ago when his Thrasher faced an Incursus and a Dramiel. It was funny because just before that I was telling him how only an incompetent Dramiel pilot would die to his Thrasher. Here's how Zen himself described the engagement:

I encountered these 2 at a gate, they immediatly warped to a nearby planet. So i followed, i immediatly landed on top of the incurses which fell in 4-5 volleys. but the dramiel liked to orbit at about 13km just outside my range. Even though he was faster i ran from him. at about 20km he started catching up so i swung around and bumped him at full speed. turning on my scrambler which shut off his speed and he began to melt. idk how he did it but he managed to launch himself back out to 9km but it didnt matter he suddenly popped :)

ended the fight with 70% structure.

they aggressed me, no kill rights, no sec status loss as bonus :)

Sormani > was damn fun
good guy the dramiel pilot was.

but what they did wrong... neither one of them deployed their drones. :)

A few days later, we were chilling in Kurn when our scout reported that a Rapier was in the system, piloted by an experienced pirate. One of our mates was out "ratting" in a Myrmidon while I switched to a Rupture to provide another soft target for the recon ship.

Before long, our Myrm pilot reported being tackled by the Rapier. Bozo and me warped to him and quickly dispatched the Tech 2 cruiser. His mate warped in twice in a Thorax only to warp out immediately. I needed to abandon my ship after that and thus paid little attention to the killmail.

It was hours later when I had a good look at the report and realised the Rapier had sported very expensive faction modules. Then I remembered the Thorax warping in twice and realised he was trying to salvage the loot. Frantically, I started asking my partners if they had been able to get to the wreck first. A flash of my wallet was the reply.

Then it was Zen's turn again to introduce us to the neighbours by killing an Amarrian Retribution Firetail and, together with our partner St3r1on, a Drake piloted by a member of SOAPY alliance (mostly notable for their frequent camping of the Ala-Gratesier stargate).

Later on the same day, I was (battle-?) cruising in my nano Drake when I noticed a Broadsword in a belt, an obvious bait most likely set up by another neighbour, the Dragoon Federation alliance. Having just been heard about how terrible they are, I decided to spring the trap by tackling the heavy dictor and orbitin it at 20 kilometres.

Sure enough, a Harbinger soon warped in. I quickly sent my ship flying upwards, a direction where enemy reinforcement were unlikely to come from, and switched point and fire to the Harb. It gave chase, despite being considerably slower than me and I had to slow down to keep him in the disruptor range. Soon, a Pilgrim also showed up but both the recon and the Broadsword appeared to be slower than the Harbinger. I don't know why but the Harb pilot never stopped chasing me even as he went into structure. By the time he exploded, both of his mates had abandoned him.

Fast forward a few days, and we spot a Sleipnir running a mission in Kurn. Now this requires a serious approach. A lot of mission runner ganks fail at the probing stage, especially since probes have been added to overview filters. In order to minimise the chances of this happening, our prober moved out of d-scan range before deploying a set of combats. He scooped them up and redeployed them immediately after getting the initial hit. This technique requires the target to refresh his scanner less than every 10 seconds (or get lucky with its scanning cycle) to spot the probes - something that I think would drive most people out of their minds.

With the target located, the goal was get it tackled. This is another part of the gank that often fails due to people being aligned or just moving out of point range. Come Arazu, a ship that can disrupt the target's warp drives from over 57 kilometres with just a Tech 2 point. Together with an armor Tempest, the recon warped towards the Sleipnir's last known location.

The choice of tackler proved to be right since the mighty (and expensive) command ship was about 40 kilometres away. Both pirate ships engaged their microwarp drives and the Tempest soon had the Sleipnir (which was slower due to using an afterburner) pointed and webbed, allowing the fragile Arazu to leave the battlefield.

The Sleip was not going down without a fight and got our battleship into structure before its tank failed under heavy fire and neuting. A well-planned and perfectly executed gank - such a rare occasion in the life of Pyrotechnics!

Finally, last night me and Bozo were checking out the 'hood in our Cynabals when I spotted a fresh FW mission beacon in Kurn and immediately warped to it, alerting Bozo. My directional scanner registered three stealth bombers: a Hound, a Nemesis and a Purifier. However, just after I passed an acceleration gate, a Rapier uncloaked next to me and quickly put a point and two webs on my Cynabal.

Stealth bombers, which initially cloaked, started decloaking and pounding me with torpedoes. They were each between 30 and 50 kilometres away from me but what is 50 kilometres to a Cynabal? Click-click-boom! Click-click-boom! Click-click-boom! Six rounds, three dead bombers.

By this time I was down to about 25 percent shields but the Rapier started disengaging once I turned my guns to it. Fortunately, Bozo had already arrived and together we finished off the recon which, I think, was sitting there to gank incoming pirates or pilots of the opposing faction. Gank report is here (warning: a lot of PWNAGE).