Hunting the Carebear

Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game.
Paul Rodriguez

One of the things that I was explicitly not allowed to do in Noir. was can flip people. It wasn't something I was particularly interested in, but being unable to do it made me want to. So now that I've thrown off the rules of Noir., I decided to go out and have a bit of fun with it.

Now, in my year as a stealth bomber pilot, I often thought about how the stealth bomber is the only ship in the game besides a black ops battleship with no decloak delay. And unlike the BOB, it can warp cloaked. For the longest time I tried to think of ways to put together a tackle bomber, but none of them worked to my liking. I resigned myself to needing another ship to help me out in that regard, or to simply attack ships that cannot(or will not) hurt me before I kill them.

You may wonder what that has to do with can flipping, and I'll tell you. I decided to put together a Stealth Bomber specifically to can flip miners.

Now, I'll admit, this is pretty easy stuff. There's a certain thrill though to stalking a target who is completely unaware of your presence. Finding a miner who's putting his ore into a can can take a few systems of looking, but once you do, he will be completely comfortable, since you've yet to decloak. Here's the fit I settled on:

[Manticore, CanFlipper]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II

Parallel Weapon Navigation Transmitter
Cap Recharger II
1MN Afterburner II
Warp Disruptor II

'Arbalest' Siege Missile Launcher, Caldari Navy Juggernaut Torpedo
'Arbalest' Siege Missile Launcher, Caldari Navy Juggernaut Torpedo
'Arbalest' Siege Missile Launcher, Caldari Navy Juggernaut Torpedo
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Small Tractor Beam I

Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I

It can run a point, AB and Ewar for 4 and a half minutes, or it can run the AB and tractor beam indefinitely. This is especially useful when you want to make off with your ill gotten ore after you're done.

The target was a Retriever in Balginia. I thought about the ship, and figured that whatever hauler he was going to use was probably worth similar or more than the mining barge. So that'd be what I'd hit. If he had a hulk, I might've taken the chance of him continuing mining, but with a retriever, the killmail was more important.

So I began to orbit his can at 160 kilometers while under cloak. I started searching google news, periodically looking back to see how he was doing.

It took him an hour to finally fill his can. Once he did he warped away. I checked again that he had no corpmates in system(by this point I'd set the corp red for ease of checking) and went to work.

I warped to the can, jettisoned my own, put his ore in it. Took my torpedo back, and burned away while renaming the can to 2021, which was the name of his own can. Once I was more than 2.5 kilometers away, I cloaked. Then I let myself coast to a stop at 18 kilometers and waited.

And the target left system.

Well, I'd already waited an hour, what was a little more time? After about 13 minutes he came back. He had a friend show up in system as well, but I was getting less worried about that as the 15 minute hostility timer wore off. With about 30 seconds to go on my own timer, he warped back in. I'm still not sure why he waited till his corpmate couldn't help him to take his ore back, but he did.

He aligned to the station, and took from the can.

My cloak disengaged immediately, and my warp disruptor and target painter came up in less time than he had to hit the warp button. One volley of torpedoes later, and his Bestower was a wreck.

No time for him to react, just immediate death. I was amazed at how clean the kill was. At that point I warped to a safe and cloaked again.

One can say I just spent an hour and fifteen minutes for a single bestower kill, and that would be true. But that wasn't the point, maybe he was going to die anyhow. If I'd used a different ship or different strategy, would I have caught this guy? Probably not.

I just wanted to execute a kill flawlessly, and that's what I did. I recognize I'm picking on the helpless, and I don't care.

This is game has PvP everywhere. Get used to it.