They said: “You can’t fly solo”

Lately, my roaming grounds have been deserted - or blobbed. And I have managed to do, is getting podded and loose a whole lot of Rifters - with no good fights to justify the losses at all. It’s when these kind of periods comes along you start believing the propaganda that says New Eden has no place for the lone hunter. You become impatient and move restlessly with no rhythm or confidence.

Last night I managed to break out of that cycle, as I decided to not skip the dead end low sec pocket I was about to just skip - because I had not seen anything in there the last ten visits or so. So I dropped in, and I got a warm fuzzy welcome in local! Miners chatting merrily about drones!

A bit later, after having dropped off the loot for collection by my fence, I went back to the same system. Miner 1, from my last adventure, was still in system, but now in a Brutix. I was about to call it a day, but I thought that a nice little scare would be a good ending for the day. Nothing boosts morale like scaring a battlecruiser off grid with your flashy red frigate. I found him killing my allies, the Serpentis, at an anomaly. I warped in at 100 km, after all, my plan was just to say BOO!! and make him have to get some new underwear. But he was not scared.

Now, if you read my last log entry, you will see the following statement by this very Brutix pilot:

Miner 1 > I always keep my Hammerhead II just to keep the rats at bay

So you can guess my excitement when I saw a flight of five Hammerhed Is fighting the Serpentis! Time to live up to being the founder of Overheated Hotheads! With the afterburner overheated, and the scram pre-activated and pre-heated I made quick progress towards the target. When I got him locked down, my HUD showed that my allies had shredded his shield, and that he was armor-tanking the Serpentis. His tank was about to be broken.

I guess he quickly understood this was about more than his underwear, and I can imagine him screaming in some corporate communications channel: Forget about new underwear!! Come save my ass!

His help arrived: A corp mate in a Tristan. I was already in the mental state of The Brutix WILL Go Down Even If I Am Gonna Die. YEAH, BABY!

As stated earlier: Scaring big ships makes me feel really confident.

The Brutix exploded, but the newly arrived Tristan quickly made some gaping holes in my armor plates. My guns where already heavily damaged by the overheating, and my only hope was my energy sucking nosferatu and my armor repairer. Structure was becoming, well, a bit unstructured, but the repairer kept giving me that very small buffer again and again.

My guns were already around 80 percent damaged, but they would have to take some more heat as my structure now was critical and the Tristan still had quite a lot of its hull integrity left. My guns glowed in the darkness, spewed out projectiles and the Tristan soon turned into a ball of fire.

I arrived at my safe with 39 percent left of my hull. My guns had 89 percent damage and my nosferatu 94 percent heat damage. My Rifter was SMOKING HOT AND SEXY! LICK MY MOUSTACHE, BABY!

So, you say you can’t fly solo? If you wanna experience this kind of excitement: Join Overheated Hotheads and you will. Dip into The Overheated Hot Tub for a taste of the exciting life as a Hothead!

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.