Excessive Heat

-4-

You know what's awesome? Flying while impaired.  Either fleets of drunken retards happily shooting everything in their way, or just flying by yourself on several days of no sleep because of whatever.

Except not really.



Heild Solar System, Tartaven Constellation, Molden Heath
September 27, YC 114
14:58 hours, New Eden Standard time

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It had been a while since I had flown anything worthwhile.  I'd been piddling about in a Skiff, trying to get people who think miners are easy prey (like me) to shoot so I can surprise buttfuck them with webs, scram, and drones.  But no luck.

After the third fruitless night in a row, I ended up leaving the stupid ship (waste of 180mil, I tell you) somewhere in the ass end of Derelik and clone jumping back to Heild.  After picking over what remained in the hangar after Fight Night a few weeks back, I selected a Rifter, "Rarity is Worst Pony", and headed out to the Angel mining station looking for a fight, despite my state of tiredness.

Landing on the gate gave me a pair of wrecks, one clearly from a Minmatar frigate judging by the soot-blackened and rusty bits of armor plating orbiting the wreck like planets around their dead sun.  The other was the remains of a Caldari Merlin-class frigate, transponder still flickering with the pilot's name, "Sault Nalelmir".

Now, I like to make profit where I can.  Something's gotta pay for the pilot's license and the ammunition and the ships that I lose horribly and in stupid ways, so I burned towards that wreck hoping to pick something up, when in warps Sault himself, apparently having gotten another Merlin from somewhere.  So the dude locks me up as I preheat literally everything and I eventually manage to remember my way around the pod enough to set an orbit around him and fire up the guns.  He eventually stopped hitting me, because railguns are horrible at hitting quick little bastards like me, and he apparently had been cycling his Ancillary Shield Booster when I wasn't damaging him, meaning he had run out of charges while I had been switching to EMP ammo to batter his shields down.

In short, it was going pretty well for me.  His shields were almost down, he wasn't hitting me, and... then my pod flashed me an alert.  "Warning: Autocannon mounts 1-3 have been disabled.  Reason: Excessive heat has melted firing controllers."

FUCK.

Well, the rocket launcher that was left wasn't enough to wear down his shields, especially since his booster had finished reloading and quickly repaired his nearly-nonexistent shields, so there was nothing left to do but align to station and burn out of scramble range.

And that is why flying on no sleep is a shitty idea.  Also, I hear nanite paste is a smart thing to carry around.

God, I'm a fucking moron.


-PG