How not to fly with HG slaves

EWAR

Today I joined the Tuskers for my third week in a row, and again I flew my faithful celestis. It's not particularly durable, especially when shield fit, but it is a real asshole. One skilled celestis pilot is capable of intermittently disrupting the rep chain of 2-3 logis, or permanently shutting down one. I'm not saying I'm a skilled pilot, just saying it's possibru. I usually manage to damp out just enough logi (or enemy EWAR, if lucky) for the FC to not be super pissed at me for being terrible.

When your epic champion tackle lands
something he shouldn't have

My celestis was shield fit because today's roam was a gila fleet. The gilas were changed significantly in Kronos and their new incarnation did not disappoint. We started out in Verge Vendor as usual, but most of today's action was in and around Heydieles. The first to die was a cynabal...an armor cynabal. Is that a thing? I'm so out of touch. After that was a random ishtar. We then derped around a few lowsec pipes with no luck for nearly an hour, trying to find a decent fight. Finally we returned to Heydieles when a truly heroic scout managed to get a point on an Absolution sitting 200k off of a gate. He wasn't completely afk, as he did try to move at some point during the engagement. He certainly wasn't a forgotten link alt, considering the distinct lack of links. He also wasn't a trap, as no one came to help him. He managed to lose his pod as well, which was full of juicy high-grade slave implants and +5% hardwirings. In lowsec. How do these mysterious and magical things happen?

High Expectations Asian Father
disapproves of your fit

We then headed to a station for a quick break, where a guardian from the same corp as the absolution was sitting 80k from the undock. Puzzled, and again suspecting a trap, the FC sent the scouts out to see what would happen. Inexplicably, the guardian didn't do anything while we burned out to him, scrammed him, and killed him. He too was generous enough to be podded, and his implants were even awesomer than his corpmate's. An HG slave omega in particular is worth 1.1b. What's with the guns? Whoring? I can appreciate that. Dem reps tho...also, a navy mindlink, but not in a command ship.

It was around this time that we discovered an Eve Uni gang in the area. Sadly, a logi-heavy Snuff Box gang (10 absolutions with 5 guardians) positioned themselves in between them and us, and we didn't have enough firepower to get through them. So we took down a few more slow solo artists, like a sacrilege and a moderately expensive, brawly, frig-killing gila. We also sent our logis out to refit MWDs, as we wanted to be able to spread out EVE Uni to divide and conquer. After the cock-blocking gang went away, we tried to convo the Uni FC and arrange a fight. They didn't want to play, despite them outnumbering us in both gross numbers and logi. Sadface. As one of our pilots noted, "So they don't want to fight unless they get kills handed to them on a silver platter?"

The FC called the fleet after that as his pilots started to trickle out back to RL, although we did manage to trap a drake at the sun and this daredevil who thought he was going to save his friend from 12 gilas. Also this sentinel, whose pod was full of crystals. Weird right? A shield booster, in a sentinel...I'm tempted to try it out for sheer novelty, but the lack of a third neut would suggest that there are serious fitting issues.

Even though we didn't get a drag-out, knockdown brawl, we did have a lot of fun cleaning up Heydieles and generating blingy killmails. A string of ganks is a lot better than blue balls!