The weekend

The weekend ended up being a mixed bag of stuff. I've managed to get in on the tail end of a capital fight. Took a Rupture to that party and for once didn't die a quick and horrible death. Not much of an after action report for that one. By the time I had arrived on scene, it was shoot primary, watch primary dock up, shot primary, watch primary dock up, rinse, repeat. At the end I was trying to bump carriers but with little success as I had no experience with the tactic.

Also this weekend saw the completion of my first batch of donated frigates for the new corp. I'm a little worried about the requested fit (once one of them shows up on a kill mail I'll discuss details and pros and cons of Rifter fitting). What I'm worried about is that it may not be low SP friendly. This will limit the number of people who can get them without having "issues". Time will tell.

On Sunday I got in another frigate gang. This time going to high sec in the hopes of finding a war target that wasn't expecting us to show up. No luck, but man do those faction navies show up in large quantities... Also the size of the frigate fleet left a lot to be desired. That fleet ended with us landing on a pair of T1 cruisers, and the primary was the blackbird. I spend most of the fight jammed and we didn't manage to kill it before getting swarmed by more war targets. Another Rifter goes poof. This just re-enforced my suspicions that we were just a little lite on pilots for a good frigate op. Frigate ops do depend on numbers and quick attacks to get thier kills. However the Blackbird was able to jam enough of us, for long enough to realy diminish the effectiveness of the gang, thereby surviving the attack.

I have also coined a new type of op: FCIT ops (Fleet Commander In Training) aka "F*** it" ops. Those will be for when I'm passing out the frigates like party favors. Make sure your clone is implant free and make sure you bring a pod escape tab. I do need to stock up on different rifter builds for ops like that though. More generic fit rifters mixed in with some interceptor fit rifters (like the ones I normaly fly).

I did some math over the weekend a pure T1 fit rifter fleet of 20 ships runs about 7.5 mil all in (at nominal pricing of 10% above manufacture costs). Since the normal target of such a fleet are tech 2 cruisers and frigates of all types, this means that getting a single kill every few ops is doing great. When we run in slasher fleets and get a kill, well that's just laughing all the way to E-Bank. The other great thing about them is that I can easily afford to build mixed fleets of frigates off of mined minerals with very little input from my wallet.