This Drake Won't Break!

After having to power down and leave the fleet that I spoke of in my previous blog post - I returned to begin my journey back to our home system. The first few systems were quiet, I even passed an alliance member stalking around in his Dramiel. However, upon entering X-BV98 system I noticed a Drake on scan near a cluster of belts and decided to poke around for a closer inspection. Landing at 0 in the belt I just saw the Drake warp off, I soon slammed the thrusters into warp drive and off I went in hot pursuit . . . . And there he was again! This time he was some 50km off of me, as I burnt towards him at full speed he disappeared, he had cloaked up but to make matters worse I had become entangled on a rogue asteroid and had lost my true path towards him. Not to be outdone I stayed in the belt and after announcing the Drake was in the belts on our intel channels, I was pleased to see my alliance buddy in his Dramiel land in the belt as backup.

Now all we had to do was uncloak the battlecruiser. Easier said than done. We tried for a good ten to fifteen minutes but we couldn't find him. Marqui decided the task at hand was too much and he set a path for home. As he slammed his Dramiel into the dark skies, its engines leaving a trail of fiery blue vapour behind it a swarm of belt rats landed and began to lock me up. Now I don't usually hunt rats, kind of ruins my perfect -10 sec status but I decided to teach these punks a lesson - and just as the last rat went pop I decloaked the Drake!

I landed a scram on him and spooled up the autocannons as I began my orbit of him at close range. I called Marqui over the intel channels and he announced that he would return if I could keep hold of him, he was some 7 or 8 jumps out. By the time he got back to the field I had used up all of my EMP ammunition stocks and my gunnery crews were loading up Phased Plasma into the hot cannons. My gut feeling was that I didn't have enough ammo to finish the job as I called for more backup over comms. An alliance mate in his Thrasher was inbound as a corpmate of the Drake pilot entered the belt.

"Stealth bomber is on the field, he is launching bombs".

A bomb flew off in the opposite direction, maybe this guy should work on his bomb runs, however, surely if the bomb was somewhere near its intended target it would have also caused some bother to his mate, in the Drake, hmm. Anyway, we locked up the bomber without losing point on the Drake and smashed it into a thousand pieces of broken hot metal.

Back to work on the Drake. The Thrasher was now on the field and we began pouring on fire to the stricken battlecruiser, its shield recharging faster than we had hoped it would. Damn. The pilot of the Drake began mocking us in local, we carried on our task with zeal as a Vagabond pilot announced he was a few jumps out and would come in to our aid. Just what the doctor ordered.

And then . . .

The Drake went into self destruct mode!

Where was our Vagabond? Oh man. I was now shooting Barrage at the Drake and it was seemingly not going to die, albeit to its own sword. The pilot got cocky.


[23:15:03] sksshooter244 > yall arnt getting kill mail :)


Then our Vagabond landed. We had less than two minutes, a race against the clock, would we do it? Could we break the recharge rate of the shield tanked beast? Of course we could! The Vagabond danced around the Drake with purpose, spitting venom from its fangs like an angry snake.



[23:15:50] sksshooter244 > maybe u r


The Drake exploded in a glorious fireball.


A job well done. Looking back on the mail, I had spewed out some 65,745 damage points on the Drake and it had taken a total damage count of 114,369. I was also out of ammo.


:)

MB.