Bombed (And Not In The Good Way)

I wasn't due to log into Eve last night, but my wife got a phone call from her best friend and previous experience suggested that it was going to be a long one. I was lazy, too lazy to go to the office and log in... what if I was wrong and the call ended suddenly? Then I would have wasted the twenty steps to the office and 20 steps back... plus turning on the light and off the light, monitor on, monitor off...etc... What can I say? I was beat.

So I broke out the laptop. I figured I'd check some Weewar games, update my market orders, nothing strenuous. But after all that was done I was still waiting on the wife. Gift of gab indeed.

Now I have a rule that I don't PvP on the laptop. Its powerful enough to run Eve ok, but no voice comms and using the touchpad instead of my favoured trackball mouse makes delicate maneuvures dangerous at best, deadly at worst.

I should have just browsed the internet. Instead I logged into Kirith. Just to look around New Mexico again.

I played it cool to start, warping to a scanning spot cloaked, warping to an off gate bookmark (cloaked) to see what was there. Admired the Dominx, Zealot, Devoter Heavy Interdictor with bubble active and agreed with myself there was nothing worth bombing in this little camp.

I should have left it at that. But I've got Bombing Fever baby! So I decided to move into a bombing position in case something juicy showed up at the gate.

Of course, I forgot that short warps still get impacted by interdiction bubbles. So instead of landing 30 km from the gate, I warped to the endge of the Devoter's Warp Disruption Field.

"No biggy," I thought. "I'm still 18 km from all the bad guys. I'll just turn around and move away from the bubble."

Except that the gate's docking ring is fracking huge as we discussed before. So large that the Devoter at the gate had its bubble draw me right to 0 km from the gate itself (even though the gate model was 10+ km away.

There goes the cloak.

Taken totally off guard, I panicked and tried to warp to my safe spot to recloak while the Zealot pilot was quick with the reflexes and started to lock me. I could have jumped through the gate, but I was caught flat footed both by the bubble and the dropped cloak, and I'm sorely out of practice for null sec space.

The Zealot made me pay the price. Sigh.

I'd like to say that had I been on the good computer I might have made that warp before dying, but its iffy. I sucked and that's the real problem. Out of practice.

But with each loss comes a lesson and I was due for a good smacking, I've had a long run of good luck. Next week I'll be back in New Mexico with a new bomber and we'll try it again.