It's always sunny in Venal

  Last night saw my first participation in our effort to make headway into the north. Right now we are operating under very strict engagement parameters because we are hunting reds/neutrals while the pilots we have set to "blue" would be happy to give us a free ride out of their space. Therefore we must be very careful to keep an eye on local and listen to the FC. Thankfully we have some very good FC's as well as capable fleet participants.

  In light of the fleet makeup I decided this would be a perfect time to let the new character sprout his wings and fly. So I undocked him for the first time, set a course for one of our offices, and signed up for the corp. Barely two hours after his first undocking exercise the new fella had scored himself the kill-mail on a pod kill; good start.

  Our FC had us in smaller groups which kept on the move as much as possible. This lead to quite a few “pouncing” kills as the fleet arrived on grid just moments after a target was spotted. This action was extremely exciting but at first it seemed that my subgroup was destined to be on the wrong side of every jump gate, causing us to warp into the battle just as my fleet mates were cleaning up. It looked like that pod kill would be it for the night.

  The fleet continued to move and as the night wore on we decided to pack it up and head for safe harbor. As we made for home our forward scout reported an Ishtar directly in our path; we had already been forced to pass on a Drake kill so we decided to take this guy on. He jumped in and was bubbled just before the fleet could get on grid. He managed to pop our interdictor pilot (who fought the good fight) but we landed and began tearing into him before he could escape. Sadly he was a veteran pilot who knew exactly when to disengage and he jumped through the gate with only seconds of structure remaining; oh well.

  As we continued home, all a little sad we didn’t get the Ishtar, our scout reported that the locals were gearing up for us. Specifically wanting to remain friendly with the locals we thought fast, pulled a hard left and went around them, right into a pair of red pilots we were all eager to engage. On the report of the ship types we were all a little confused; it seems that with all the fleet’s experience no one had ever met a Sentinel in the field. After a very short cat and mouse game the reds were engaged. The fleet targeted the electronic attack frigate and ripped him apart before I could even get a lock. We then turned our attention to the other pilot in a Taranis. I opened up with every piece of electronics I had fitted and target painted his ship like a Christmas tree, then I let my missiles fly. These guys did manage to take down a pair of T1 frigates we had brought but trading T1’s for T2’s is a pretty good bargain to me.

  In the end it was a very good night; losing a pair of T1 frigates and our bubbler while taking out 2 pods, 2 T2 frigates, and a rifter.