When Lowsec exploration goes wrong

I suppose I was getting a bit lazy with venturing into lowsec for exploration. Blind jumping through gatecamps and all.

I also wasn't fitting my ship properly for the job either. The final escalation in "Kidnapped" requires destroying a ridiculously tough station, which can take a frakking long time if you're in a drake using t2 scourge furies. Seriously, you could sit there for an hour, especially if you have to cloak and wait for the combat probes to disappear.

So I decide to take a failfit drake through. No biggie. If it gets popped, ehn, it's insured.
I didn't even have mods in all the mids. And to top it off, no scram (biggest mistake).

So I jump into lowsec, and before I could cloak, I was targeted and scrammed. At first I can only see one flashie, but as I align to the nearest asteroid field and hit my afterburner and hardeners, I'm joined by at least 3 other flashies. So now I'm in a failfit drake, and I have stabbers, a drake, and a myrmidon all scramming and firing at me. Oddly though, my shields are not going down fast, so it was time to fight back. I targeted the smaller ships first hoping to get clear of the webbing. The stabbers got to structure fast, and warped out. Gateguns may have popped one of them, but I didn't get on that killmail. Then I started hitting the myrm, and before long, it too was at structure and warped out. Now all that's left is the drake, and I'm not really doing much to it's shields.

My ECM drones get a lucky cycle on the drake, so I recall them and successfully warp to the asteroid field, and immediately cloak. I watched as all 4 ships, now fully repaired, arrived and scoured the area for me, to no avail.

I spent the next hour doing the escalation, and sitting at the escalation site cloaked while they were probing for me. I figure I owe my ships survival to two factors, I didn't panic and managed the threats correctly, and I wasn't paying attention before I left hisec with a pithi-c type kinetic resist amp on. I was packing wicked kinetic resists. Oh, and the shiny ecm drones deserve credit too.


There was both an unhappy and a happy ending to this story, which all explorers in Eve must deal with. I only managed to save 15 civilians which promptly got spaced (I got no other good loot dammit), but last night myself and two corpies went back to that system and slaughtered that pirate corp. We faced off against 5 or 6 of them, and they all lost their ships.