An EVE Battle Report
Sometimes in EVE not everything goes as planned...
A Happy Beginning
<div style="width: 500px; text-align: center" align="center">It was late one recent Sunday night, and Milwaukee, EXE, Hala Kast, and your esteemed author decide to clear some sleeper sites in a connected wormhole system. Milwaukee is flying his Nighthawk, an expensive but powerful ship equal to two of our standard fit PVE Drakes. EXE and myself are flying the standard fit Drakes, ships that are no slouches in their own right. Lastly, Hala Kast is salvaging and looting the wrecks in his Cormorant, a defenseless ship fitted out to come in behind us and collect all of the loot that's left once the site is cleared of NPC enemies. His role is the role that actually makes us money. And with 19 sites to clear and only 4 people involved in the operation, the payout was looking to be pretty good. Rough estimates put the take at about 200 million ISK (EVE's in-game currency) per person. To put that into perspective, that's about four times the cost of the Drakes that EXE and myself are flying. Or put another way, 200 million ISK is almost 2/3 of the way towards being able to purchase another month of subscription time. In short, it's a lot of ISK and we're all looking forward to spending it on new toys.
Everything is going fine, and we're working on clearing site #5, when we spot a Helios -- a covert ops ship -- on our scanners. He's lurking somewhere in the system, but we don't know where. Mil calls for us to recall our combat drones to our drone bays, and for the salvager to activate his cloak. Now, while you can fit a cloaking device to almost any ship in the game, few of those ships can fly around a system while cloaked. The rest have to remain stationary while their cloak is active. A covert ops ship is one of the few that can fly while cloaked. Furthermore, when you're flying a covert ops ship, there are only two reasons to drop your cloak: to jump through a gate/wormhole into another solar system, or to launch scanner probes which will let a pilot pinpoint the location of other ships in space. Shortly after we see the Helios on scan, we see his probes on scan. This guy is looking for us. Things are about to get interesting.</div>
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