A New Respect

Entry: four hundred fifty.

Where I'm largely the fleet style pilot, Anjali is more focused in the dueling arena of combat. The difference hit particularly hard today in replaying her roam today with her corpmates and some loosely allied pirates in her fleet.

After watching what was largely a failed roam starting in Dantumi and ending in F7C- in Pure Blind, due to weight class issues and general aversion of combat from potential victims, Anjali made several errors. The first, she was scouting, and in bouncing off of the sun to reach the next gate towards J5A-IX, she evaded a set of drag bubbles. She failed to relay this as the fleet jumped in, telling them to warp to the 0-Z gate, as the fleet was spoiling for a fight. Having not bounced, the fleet was dragged past the gate, and because of unfamiliarity with drag bubbles, most of the frigate gang she scouted for was destroyed and podded in that bubble.

The second mistake, after escaping, was going back. She knew full well that it was a frigate gang with interceptors in the mix, and she went back in her Slicer anyways. Because of how things have worked out, her speed isn't what anyone would call top-notch, and her thermodynamics skills are non-existent. Overconfidence, or a disregard for the odds, were her enemy.


The third mistake was what I think everyone would call pilot error. As it happened, she was evading the frigate gang quite well for a full minute, matching or beating their speeds, and even though she was warp disrupted, she drove off a Crow and a Rifter. She failed to destroy them, but she did drive off two of the eight frigates before being destroyed herself. How she got caught was what seems to be a lapse in paying attention to a particular Rifter that was closing in on her, and having failed to alter her path in time, the Rifter landed a scram on her, pinning her in place for the slaughter.

To be frank, her piloting skills impressed me. With only two and a half million skillpoints and a plan she was doing quite well. But also, to be frank, I'm pretty dubious about being able to fly that well in those situations. Maybe I can fly better, technically speaking, but in execution? I don't know. And here I sit with nearly twenty-three million skillpoints myself.

I wonder how she would view my type of piloting, which is to say tackling for a huge fleet with the other huge fleet doing everything it can to hit you with those battleship sized weapons. Would she think it was easier? Harder?

Then again, I have to wonder if what we each do is really different. Maybe it's just stylistic, maybe its circumstantial. Maybe there's no real difference, even though they feel separate. 
 
It's not often I find a new found respect for something, but with successful pirates...there's something great going on there, and I intend to discover it.
 
Computer: terminate recording.