Eve Online: It's cold and dark out there

I've ventured into the arena of small gang warfare in Eve. Although I have quite a progressed character I never seem to be able to fly the right ship. Fortunately the corp is reasonably relaxed about what you fly as long as you don't expect reimbursements for it. We have a list of fits that one theoretically gets reimbursed for losing but at the moment we don't have reimbursements as we've lost all our moons.

We live in NPC space and in calmer times the higher ups drop POSes on moons which collect money apparently. Some of the people we've been annoying though have developed a nasty habit of blowing them up so we took them down.

Our main gameplay is just flying around looking for fights. We're very territorial about our little corner of space even though in game mechanic terms we don't own it. It's actually owned by a Minmatar sub-faction called Thukker Tribe who are kinda halfway between nullsec pirates and empire carebears as NPCs go. Anyway they do a lousy job at shooting passing tourists gankers and gang roams so we've manfully stepped in to fill the breach.

Any new pilot to zero zero is well advised to fly tackle and this is what I've been doing. Tackle means small fast ships that can stop other ships warping off and slow them down. The key mods are a warp scrambler or warp disruptor and a stasis webifier. You also need a microwarp drive to have a hope of catching anything.

My ship of choice is the Crow, a Caldari interceptor.

My weapon of choice.

Crows are fun, fragile and relatively cheap while being very useful. I've lost 3 so far but shot a lot of ships. My isk ratio is something like 94% according to the killboard site but those sites cheat awfully by counting every kill you had a hand in as full value to you. (So if 5 of us kill 5 10m isk ships then all die we'll end up 50m isk damage done and 10m isk damage taken). I'm still well ahead.

I forget what the first loss was, think it was just a big gang on gang thing and I didn't respond to the "marines, we are leaving" order quick enough. My second was a heroic volunteering to go bravely forth and act as bait against a solo Crusader camp. I think that was a skill issue - I got too close and too straight I needed to point him while orbiting at 20 km. My third was a well spent sacrifice - two of us gave up interceptors to stop a Dramiel escaping. I very nearly had a fourth loss when I tried to solo a Rifter. Although only a tech one Frigate Rifters are very powerful and it utterly demolished my speedy little tech two ship. I managed to escape with no shields, no armour and only 30% of my structure left. Fortunately the gentleman was kind enough to wait around while I flew home, smoke pouring out of the back of the ship, docked, boarded my Drake and went back after him with 5 of my mates. You can never be too sure against Rifters as this gentleman will attest.