All Your Battlecruisers Are Belong To Us

One of my favourite targets when flying frigates, is the battlecruiser class hulls. There are all kinds of tactical challenges to consider when engaging such a beast. And the piloting requires the utmost attention as you will often find yourself attacked by energy neutralizers, hordes of drones or the consistent damage from an extremely well tanked missile boat.

Here are five logged encounters with different battlecruisers:

Hurry up, Hurricane
On a rather boring routine patrol to a dead end system I came across something unusual for this particular system: A Hurricane class vessel was clearing the belts of their local residents. My Firetail managed to eradicate his drones after some very good drone management by the battlecruiser. But when turning my turrets against the hull itself, I met a repair system capable keeping up with my autocannons. So it was a stalemate. Thankfully I had fellow rebels nearby to help finish the job. But what happens? When my helping hands arrive, the battlecruiser’s commanding capsuleer ejects and abandons his crew! After some minor autocannon negotiations with the local belt inhabitants, I park my Firetail in space and eject my own capsule. The crew of the battlecruiser was very happy to pledge allegiance to yours truly, as they had totally lost faith in their former command. Understandable. The Hurricane is now reconfigured for more dirty work and it will be flown as a stolen ship. I guess the crew one day will realize their bad luck, because this hull is destined for death and destruction.

Even You, Brutix?
It seems that capsuleers in dead end systems like to cruise around in battlecruisers looking for battle with local belt inhabitants. This was another case of such behavior. This one, however, thought he was safe as he had chosen an anomaly rather than a belt. The capsuleer quickly contacted me through the local communications channel when I landed my scrambler on his big spaceship: “How did you find me so qickly?!” I explained that this is usual procedures in my line of work while I worked my way through his armor. He also made me an offer I definitely could refuse, before he proceeded to eject from his ship to save his capsule. So far, my quite good battlecruiser skills have been used mostly to board and dock battlecruisers that have been left for me in space.

A Sugar Cane
Oh, this was a sweet one. The pilot looked decent enough, but I was feeling sexy and wanted to test my firetail under medium neutralizers. I sure did get one hell of a test. The complexities of managing capacitor, scrambler, webifier, repair system and and killing drones that get launched and withdrawn all the time - well, that is a very intense experience! But once the drones were gone, the tracking disruptor did an excellent job of keeping my Firetail safe from the medium sized guns. However, it was a decent chance that it would get away if my capacitor was bleeding too much under his neutralizers. It was a game of capacitor management. My nosferatu and I, we won it. Then a few minutes later I tried again on another Hurricane-pilot and lost.

Hurricane Downgraded to Light Breeze
There is something about battlecruisers. They seem to be the most tempting ship for freshly graduated capsuleers. Battle. Cruisers. They sure sound scary. But, when flying a big ship, you need certain skills to do so effectively. And that is an important factor to evaluate when choosing battlecruisers for targets. This pilot stood out as an obvious target – and sure enough, it hardly fought back. Oh, it tried, but couldn’t land a solid hit. So I took it down with ease. In my Rifter. That is a lesson I have given many green pilots. An expensive lesson, but it should be good value for their ISK lost.

To Drake Even
The Drake. It is a beast for a single frigate. You seldom find your capacitor neutralized, but there are two major problems: It will do damage to you. And it has a tank that needs some serious damage – and time – to break. So there is no doubt you’re gonna need an active tank to hold out for a while and decent damage dealing capabilities. The tracking disruptor installed on Firetail-class frigate did not become very useful in this fight (allthough engineers and scientists are apparently working on making it useful against missiles as well). The nosferatu and the armour repairer, however, did their job: Buy time. And after the drones was taken care of, the Drakes shields very slowly withered away. My pulsed repairer managed to keep up with the damage from the heavy missiles. And the nosferatu kept feeding my capacitor with just enough energy for my scrambler the pulsed repair system. Once the Drake’s structure began to crumble, the commanding capsuleer agreed on paying me 66 millions in ISK to avoid a rather embarresing loss. I decided that was a good enough offer and let the burning beast warp away.

Two kills. Two free ships. One ransom. This is why I love battlecruisers.

Up like a Rifter, down like a Drake

So, finally it happened. I found a Drake I thought I would be able to take down with my Rifter. However, it sat on a gate and I needed to provoke it to attack my flashing red Rifter. Just as I was warming up in the local communications channel, a pirate competitor showed up in another Drake clearly on a mission to take on the gate-hugging Drake. I sighed and thought it was lost.

However, EVE pulled one of it’s quick turnarounds of luck and I noticed on the directional scanner that my targeted Drake had escaped and warped to a belt. The Pirate Drake was still out of range on 360 degrees d-scan with max range. I warped in. There he was, shooting the local NPC-pirates 100 km off the belt. Overheating the afterburner and dodging the rocks, I was making quick progress towards it. And it seemed he was either not aligned, not paying attention or just very confident that a lowly Rifter would only make a dent in the shields! Overheating the scram, I got him locked and pointed and I started pounding his shields with Republic Fleet EMP.

Damn! There’s that Pirate Drake on d-scan again. I’m overheating the guns to see how far I can get. My competitor lands on grid. 100 km away! Yay! Many thanks to the Caldari engineers that made the Drake so very very slow. The pirate crawls his way towards me, and I needed to cool down my guns again. The Drake really is slow, so I get to keep on pounding my target and after a while my pirate competitor gives up the slow approach and warps out. Or is he trying to get a better warp in point? Time to overheat again! The tank breaks and suffering starts. I invite my target to Saftsuzes ISK Transfer Service, but no luck on ransom - and there’s that pirate on grid again! 30 km off this time. Time to finish of and get away. And so I did! And there was much rejoicing.

I bragged about it all day, and then, a little later, I undocked in my bling-fitted Helios to scan down a mission runner, got pointed and melted in seconds, just outside a station, by some pesky +5 security status law abiding citizen. So... That's the life of an Overheated Hothead.