Oi, stop hijacking our thread 
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OP4 didn’t turn up at 23:00, surprise surprise 
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To be fair to @colin2cold, he and a friend did show up at 01:30. Well, what I mean is: one of our last faction members online came across him raiding our neighbour’s base. I was still in discord so I jumped in-game and our other last member online began warping back from ECC. Then we hatched a plan… 
You see, Colin’s known for flying ships with more blocks than I can count—the kind of class 3 ship that can tank damage for hours and then still escape to safety—so we had to be smart.
We decided @Hedge3, our faction mate on the ground, would do the neighbourly thing and use an HV to push Colin and his friend away from @Thranir’s base. But first, he set all his guns to target turrets only. You see, we didn’t want to scare them away… just slowly disarm them while they thought it was a 2v1. We let this go on for about 10 mins until almost all the turrets were gone and the HV was ready to quit. One of their ships landed to re-arm and we decided that was the perfect moment to pounce. Wrighty and I used the pincer maneuver to attack them from opposite sides in our Class 1 comabt SVs… seeing the terror in their eyes as Colin’s buddy literally turned tail and ran leaving Colin alone was beautiful.
We danced around Colin’s SV, dodging most of his fire, and before he knew what was happening this was all that was left of his ship:
Looking at his ship, I can understand why Colin is such a proponent of keeping Class 3 SV restrictions. This ship has no less than 22 layers of pyramid blocks in front of it’s vital components at the mid-rear. Even in this sorry state there’s still 8.5k blocks there. From these lofty heights, dropping to Class 1 must be a terrifying prospect. Btw, thanks for the blocks Colin!
Anyways, I love Class 1 SVs personally. Earlier in the night I used this raider (designed by @Fulgrim) to win a couple of 1v1s, one of which was taking down a much larger SV:
[dark image to save exposing Fulgrim’s 1337 design skillz]
Even when this guy’s friend came to collect him in a fully-armed CV they warped out rather than carry on the fight (I think the real reason they warped out was that we were in the black hole and they knew the rest of the faction couldn’t be too far away, as opposed to the sheer terror of being attacked by the raider… but still! 
). From the wreckage of Colin’s ship I could make 20 of these. Beautiful.
We knew we’d be going up against one of Colin’s behemoths so we used a slightly more tanky Class 1 against him, two of our faction designed Stormcrow’s:
We could ‘only’ make 4 of these from one of Colin’s. It’s wonderful to fly though and takes on much larger ships with ease. But yes, I can understand why you might think the sky would fall if we were all restriced to Class 1. You would have to design ships with a specific purpose, rather than being master of all [or should I say most… eh Colin? 
]. Take that raider I was talking about, it has 8 guns on it, 2 ammo boxes and a single cargo box. But it maneuvers like one of those #%@$ing annoying flies that just wont leave you alone and it’s too small for most people to hit.
This is the point in the story where I should probably admit I’m definitely looking back on these battles with ‘slightly’ rose-tinted glasses. Honestly, I’m a complete n00b and I don’t know what I’m talking about. I started playing Empyrion multiplayer 2 weeks ago so most pilots would probably wipe the floor with me and I’m just chatting 
tbh. But I saw an opportunity to give a bully that likes to taunt and torment and talk over his victims a taste of his own medicine AND make my case for Class 1 SVs/HVs all in one go… I couldn’t resist!
Also, to Colin: you claimed your ship was bugged. I’m sorry if that was the case, we didn’t notice anything unusual - but as I said, I’m a n00b so maybe I missed something. Instead of you offline-raiding us everyday forever in retaliation, as you claimed you were going to do [really, would we expect anything less?], why not come back for a rematch? If 23:00 is too early for you lets arrange a time and place that is convenient for both sides. The only reason for my trash-talking is to try and make you realise it’s not fun when someone does it to you. I don’t mean it and we’d love a good fight sometime. I’m sure you’ll school me in the rematch. So… when and where? 