fun with stilettos

I saw no bubble up and so immediately warped off before they could drop one, and ofcourse alerted my corpmates. Later scans showed no interdictors on the gate, and no bubble. The enemy fleet was alerted to our presence, and began getting into position to possibly attack us. We quickly began setting up traps using bubbles and snipers to hopefully split the enemy fleet into more sizable chunks for us to kill, but unfortunately the enemy retreated to a gate and camped it in the hopes that we would come to them instead of the other way around. Both fleets were in the same system now, and I moved my stiletto to a scan point near the gate. I reported the entire hostile fleet sitting on the gate and a mobile small warp disruptor. The enemy fleet hasn't been on the gate for very long, so in all probability the anchorable warp disruptor hasn't taken effect yet. I told my commander to make sure gang speed mods are on, so I can warp to the gate at 100 and give the rest of the fleet a safe warpin point, and off I go.

I enter warp while scanning constantly... about 60 on the gate, tons of sniping battleships, lots of chowder...

I exit warp safely(?) 100kilometers off the gate and immediately turn right and fly as quickly as I can. The enemy fleet, battleships frigates and all are clustered around the gate and a warp disruptor in the process of anchoring sits there too. A third of the fleet is able to target me and the excitement begins.

The first thing I notice are powerful energy beams lancing through space to stab at my weak shields, and soon after I hear small, high velocity impacts, from both artillery cannons and railguns. I see off in the distance blurry points of light emerging from the cluster of ships at the gate- cruise missiles and torpedos. Based on the number of flashing red boxes in my overview, approximately 15 people were attacking me.

"What's going on??" the fleet commander demanded.
"They're all shooting at me, but my stiletto is uber. I'm tanking their whole fleet." Maybe exaggerating a little, but after a few initial hits my shields held at 70% and I was entirely too fast and too far away for the enemy fleet to do a thing about me once I was up to full speed. Torpedoes and cruise missiles exploded against my ship, inflicting damage values like 1.1 and 0.8
"warp to me at 100 now" and a few seconds later purple squares started appearing one after the other far from the gate.

At this point, everything dissapeared.

I stopped my ship, disoriented and slightly confused for a second. Then it hit me: I had gone off grid, and the edge of the grid was bugged and was very close to the gate(200 kilometers or so). After my gang warped to me I did not stop my ship, and instead kept flying at over 6km/s to the right and didn't realize it until I left the grid.

I told my gang of this, and the fight that ensued was confusing and difficult to describe at best. When i reentered the grid at the gate, the enemy fleet was still flashing red due to some bug and it was difficult to tell what was attacking me. But I flew along in my stiletto as quickly as I could, parallell to the enemy fleet once again. Enemy ships were starting to follow me and the enemy snipers began to spread out to try to secure the entire area. I drew some fire while flying like this, but like before, I didn't take enough damage to die, and I soon found myself alone once again. Offgrid safes were bookmarked and those hostiles that had left the safety of the gate were tackled and picked off. Eventually the enemy must have realized what was going on with the grids, because a small group of them stumbled upon the next grid over which most of our fleet was in. They emerged one-by-one from this invisible barrier and died one-by-one as well. Some gang members almost died when they accidentally passed through the grid wall into the enemy fleet and got tackled. The only actual death of ours that I remember occured that night was our interdictor. For some reason all the missile fire he had drawn in the grid where the enemy fleet resided followed him through to the grid where we were and killed him(usually when that sort of thing happened that night the missiles scattered the moment lock was lost). As the fight continued the enemy fleet realized that in this situation spreading out was not a good idea, so while their numbers remained sufficiently too-high for us to engage directly, the remainder of the fleet gathered close on top of the gate and there was nothing else we could do but pick cans and leave the scene.

It was a fun fight, and smack free which is a plus. We often fight enemy fleets outnumbered, but until that night I don't believe we ever engaged an opposing force with so many more numbers then us and came out with so few losses, and in such an unusual way too.

stay tuned for the next installment: how mazzilliu lost her first stiletto!