Crow v Stiletto

The hunt:

I was on a roam, when I landed on a gate with Stiletto sitting at zero. He was not flashy, so I jumped on through. I saw him jump after me, so it seemed that he fancied his chances.

He broke cloak first, and the range between us made me feel fairly comfortable engaging - I was beyond scram range, and I was pretty sure that he couldn't keep me in the fight if I really wanted to leave.

So we began orbiting each other. He was artillery fit, and had a rough time hitting me. When he did hit, he did very little damage. If my shield skills were any good, there would have been a real question about whether he could break my peak shield regen.

On the other hand, I found myself unable to hit him at all. I have no range extending rigs on this Crow, because with Interceptors V, it hits out to 22km with Javelin rockets. Of course, I don't have Interceptors V (And yes, I am aware that I am sounding like a broken record on this point, and Interceptors V is clearly the most important skill in all EVE, but I'm training it as fast as I can!).

Because CCP can be very cruel, they have left the speed penalty on Javelin rockets, despite removing it from gunnery ammunition. While probably an oversight, and will be fixed "soon", it left me in the following situation:

If I loaded Javelin, I was too slow to actually dictate the range agains the Stiletto, and my imperfect skills left me unable to hit him. If I loaded faction, however, the rockets were not actually fast enough to catch him (faction rockets have a velocity of 2,250 m/s before skills and bonuses, whereas Javelin has a base velocity of 3,375 m/s). Because Interceptors V adds a 10% velocity bonus to my rockets, either tactic would probably have worked if I was at max skills.

Still, I was not about to give up; all I needed to do was figure out a way to get close while having Javelin loaded. Cunningly, therefore, I broke away and very obviously warped to the sun at 50 km. This gave my shields a chance to top up, and I expected him to expect me to expect him to warp to the sun at range (ie, 20-30 km), and so would actually warp in at 50 km. Putting him right on top of me.

Dissappointingly, he didn't warp to the Sun at all. Even though I'd not laid a finger on him - which meant that he was "winning" - he did not appear to fancy his chances. Instead, he just waited out his aggression timer and left.


Afterthoughts:

Another fight made difficult by my lack of a clear speed advantage. While I may grumble about my rockets, the truth is that it would have been very hard to hold onto him if I had started winning - just as he was unable to hold onto me.

Of course, rockets give me a huge advantage here: I can get in close (making it harder for him to escape) and actually keep hitting him (theoretically - max faction rocket velocity in a Crow is 5,062.5 m/s), whereas there is no way the tracking on his artillery is going to be up to the task.