Explosive Saturday

Thanksgiving has come around for us Canadians, eh?  Unfortunately, my son is sick, so my wife ended up taking my daughter to her family dinner and I stayed home with el sicko.  Despite having a fever, the little guy ran around non-stop and passed out pretty early.

This allowed me to jump into Eve earlier than normal.  I decided to return to the area I used to haunt when the corp was in Faction Warfare and use some of the hulls I had stocked on the edge of the battlefield.

Man, I had fun.  I won a Republic Fleet Firetail from Somer Blink, so it got kitted out and I lost it facing a Caracal.  I landed right near the Caracal and set up a close orbit with my afterburner on.  Unfortunately my Firetail wasn't fast enough to outpace the missiles being launched at me.  I don't really know why I decided to engage the Caracal.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Anyways, I'm going to point out that I didn't actually kill the Caracal, I only exploded his drones and got a few rounds off on his shields.  Two other nearby pilots came in behind me and finished it off.

I brought an old Corax out and chased a Thrasher through lowsec for a while.  I caught up to him eventually.  Thrashers are fast.  The pilot was able to control the engagement using his speed, but I caught up to him through manual flying, scramming and webbing him long enough to hit him with my rockets.  I even managed to get him into structure just before I popped.  As I was flying my pod out to reship, I noticed the pilot yelling in local for someone to stop shooting him, he was friendly.  Apparently he was too friendly?  That type of stuff was typical in the warzone, from what I can recall.

Ninja-edit:

I also remember taking out a Kestrel and a Condor, getting some good fights and dying in a few balls of fire.  The Condor was me shaking the rust off, I warped in on a small crew on an acceleration gate and popped right quick.  The fight with the Kestrel was a blast, basically it was a close race though shields and armor.  The Tristan won.

What I Learned:

- Lowsec is a blast.
- It's good to go out every once in a while and plan to lose ships.  Fight anything you can catch.
- Speed is a major factor in all engagements.  I've seen it from both sides of the equation.
- I need to keep working on my damage application skills.  I feel some of those engagements would have turned out differently if I had some T2 weapon systems.