RVB - join corp, get fight

The other night, after squaring away some stuff on my industrial alt I logged into Jakob and hit "Accept" on joining Red Federation (RVB).  Immediately on corp chat I see that a "T1 cruiser and down" fleet is forming up.  The only thing I have fit up in Otela is the Thorax that I had been roaming with, so that's going to be it.  A few minutes of waiting for form-up (during when I download the RVB overview settings) then we're into battle.

Our 12-man fleet only had a few cruisers, so I fully expected that my Thorax hull would be primaried early due to its ganktastic reputation and since as a brawler I'd be getting right up next to targets.  Amazingly not, so I got to contribute to a number of kills before I went down.

Yes, it's a pretty standard high-gank Thorax.  Sadly, I didn't manage to get top damage or final blow on any targets, which makes me think I was doing something wrong.  Something I finally managed to rectify by Sunday night.

In the meantime was Ganked Fleet 66 - an (almost) all Venture fleet.  We chased an cyno and got smacked around, then roamed around a bit until we had a negotiated battle with Brave Newbies.  Lots of death and destruction.  After losing ships I fit up the only thing I could find parts for - a Rifter whose primary purpose was to use a target painter to help my fleet out.

Sunday was mostly running around being chased by a Blue Republic fleet with superior numbers and class of ships.  I lost a lot of ships just trying to get involved there, which is a new experience for me since I'm not used to have war targets camping me into stations or on gates.  After supper the numbers dropped (must be a lot of EU TZ people in Blue) and it was more a matter of 3-5 man gangs and solo fights (thus the fights linked before)

To balance the wins, you may notice that I've lost 6 Incursi, a Thorax, a Rifter, a Thrasher - oh, and two Ventures - all since joining RVB.  It's a shame that the corporation killboard can't distinguish only the kills and losses I've made since joining the corp.

Lessons Learned

As usual, you veterans will groan at these I'm sure

Overheat on your way in.  Finally I managed to put into practice that you can pre-overheat your modules.  On my Thorax of the fit listed above that means guns, scram, and one web.  This in particular pushes out the ranges of the scram and web (10km, 13km) which is critical since I want to lock a fast target down before he realizes I'm there so I can apply the Thorax's 500+ dps (my skills, near optimal with faction AM).  Overheating the MWD I'm not as confident on unless I'm in a chase scenario - I'm worried about blowing past them, perhaps too worried.
Manual Piloting.  I need to work on this.  In a frigate duel I really noticed that i was falling into a chase position on an opponent Tristan I was closing on as he went perpendicular.  I think this helped his drones fall in right behind me and toast me up.

I think the piloting part of things is going to be my next big hurdle to get to the next level of PVP skill.


The downside is that I'm burning through the ships I bought for RVB pretty fast, and I blew most of my ISK in buying those ships.  Once those ships are gone then I'll need to either leave RVB and try to make ISK (missioning will also repair that sec status that is droping after Ganked) or buy some PLEX.  This is the downside compared to FW, of course, which running plexes can make good money, though at the cost of opposite-side faction standing.