User:Lazarus laxenos

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
Wm. Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

I've managed to get it in my head that I need to lose a LOT of ships to get over my own loss-aversion in this game. In pursuit of that goal, I've set up a cache of Slashers at the NSC, and I'm in the process of putting a similar cache at the LSC where I already live. I intend to go out looking for LOTS of fights with these little guys. I'm going to take notes on each and every fight, immediately after the fight is over and while fresh in my mind, to start documenting what I learn along the way. The short version of these notes will show up in kill board posts, but I'm keeping a longer version to get around the kill board's 500 character limit.

My intent is to get past my irrational self-protectiveness and maybe get a few hilarious kill mails along the way. I will take fights with just about anything, so long as it's a target I can engage under Uni rules. Not all the fights I take will be wise, but they ought to all be educational in their own unique way. Slasher v. Proteus? Bring it on!

The Tally of the Dead:

1. A Catalyst in Null ... pods me.
2. I sacrifice my ship ... in order to kill a ship worth almost 3x more.
3. I try, and fail, to get a 2v1 for our side. Instead we have 2 sequential 1v1 fights and I'm the loser in one.
4. Heroic tackle tackles heroically, netting us a slightly more expensive Rifter.
5. So when I decided to plan 100 deaths, this wasn't on the wish list: I lose my most shiny ship to date, a mission running Drake in high sec. I passed the "don't fly what you can't afford to lose" test, but failed the "don't let your guard down" test.
6. I had my Blackbird 'sploded because I did exactly what I warn my students not to do: I took a fleet warp that landed me at zero, and got alpha'd because I fly with very little tank. (I might rethink that ...)
7. I'm a slow learner. This is my second Blackbird loss in the space of an hour. In this case, I warped in at optimals, but the fight was spread out enough that I had hostiles in range when I landed.
8. I tackle, I die.
9. I come back to tackle again, and die. Again.

I should point out that my time in null seeking death hasn't meant I've always been the one getting killed. There have been some interesting battles and very shiny kills along the way. I also managed to get my first (and entirely anticlimactic) solo kill early in this process.

While it has nothing to do with my time at the NSC, this kill is probably my favorite single in-game fleet op so far. We were patient, we were clever, our scouts were awesome, everyone exhibited great discipline and patience, and we were rewarded with a very shiny kill. The AAR succinctly summarizes the op, though doesn't capture the robust fun we were having in comms as we lurked in wait for our targets. It took almost 3 hours until the moment of truth, but was well worth it. By far the most fun I've had in game to-date.