Anatomy of a Hunt

The search for J213411

I first met Apex Bex (who runs a blog named "Disciple of Bob") when I was planning to bait his smartbombing Proteus, named the "Night Fever", designed to kill unassuming explorers venturing in his home system, a C3 wormhole with a Red Giant effect, bonused for smartbombing damage, vaporizing capsules in the process, too, leaving absolutely no dignity in the victim. He then proceeds with scooping the corpse and throwing it in the center of the sun as a sacrifice to Bob. Praise Bob.

The story starts when I "stumbled" upon his home system, or so I told him later. I didn't actually stumble upon the system, I was actively searching for it. Being in Wingspan, it was a matter of time before me or my corpmates found the system, but I still wanted to speed up the process. I used locators. The fact that Apex Bex functions like a clock made the process easier. I observed he usually logged in after downtime. And what does a wormhole resident do after he logs in? He usually scans the signatures, maybe checks out his k-space connections, too. So I start spamming locators. After 15 minutes of spamming (yeah, I know it's not pretty) I finally got a hit. A null-sec system. Well, better than nothing.

I sent my scanning alt on a little expedition. After scanning all the wormholes in the target nullsec system in the search of the "red" nebula specific to C3 wormholes, I jumped a frigate only wormhole.
I have finally found the home of the "Night Fever". I park my scanning alt in there and take a break from this operation for a little while because of the holidays. During this period I had time to create and skill up a new bait, because all of my other alts were already compromised.


The humble life of a bait

Meet Jim Natinde. Jim's entire purpose in life, or lives, for that matter, is to be used in baiting operations. Oh, how he must hate his creator. Jim was engineered with care, but not without imperfections. The Magnate he flies is designed to withstand 11.6k EHP of EM damage:

The Night Fever pulses around 2963 EM damage per volley in a C3 Red Giant with a fit which I believe is similar to this:

Each volley takes about 5.72 seconds to cycle when overheated, which gives our bait an estimated lifetime of at least 22.88 seconds. Plenty of time for my Stratios to take over the tackle the Magnate will initiate first. I was contemplating of fitting a Passive Targeter, but I had to drop the Afterburner. Having only an Afterburner and no MWD is suspicious enough, let alone no propmod at all. And I didn't want to bore him to death while he is watching an explorer slowboat to cans.

What else does a good bait need? A believable killboard, well, at least to a certain extent. So I sent poor Jim to lowsec to die in an explorer-fit Magnate with exploration loot onboard. It was harder than I thought. I picked the largest red dot on the map where a fight was probably going on and sent him there, which was not very far from where he was stationed. Upon entering the system, Dscan was flooded with Sleipnirs, but nobody was camping the gate. Sigh. I narrow the fleet of Sleipnirs and other stuff at a moon. I warp the Magnate there and land him 30k off a big ball of Sleipnirs which was bashing a POS if I remember correctly. Yes! Finally the moment has arrived. But what are they doing? Upon exiting warp with the Magnate, the fleet just warps away. Noooo! Come back! FITE MEEE! Did they think Jim had a cyno? Hilarious.

Alas, I change the name of the Magnate to "Not Cyno Bait" and Jim continues his journey to self-destruction. By now I was regretting I didn't just pop him with one of my alts, but all of them were parked in wormholes. I finally stumble upon red flashy scary people in local. Smartbombing battleships on gate. Oh, this will be glorious, and, dare I say, ironic. I actually have to warp Jim multiple times between gates for the battleships to kill him. Well, good enough for me.


And so it begins

This is not the first time I attempt to bait a smartbombing explorer-hunter T3 cruiser, as seen from the previous posts on this blog, but I know it will be the hardest. All my good baits were compromised and Jim was the only hope I had. Apex Bex describes in his blog he survived multiple attempts of baiting, so I have no illusion of how difficult it will prove. From his killboard, at least, I know he is interested in T1 frigates, so I take my chances.

I have already watchlisted all the relevant pilots I could find and I park my Stratios in the C3 Red Giant while they are offline. I scan down the signatures and, luckily, there was a Relic site already spawned before downtime. I make tacticals and move the Magnate inside the system, also. After that, I log off both my pilots and wait until after downtime.

I login my Stratios immediately after downtime and wait. 20-30 minutes after, the prey logs in. My heartrate rises a bit. He doesn't deploy probes, yet. Nevertheless, I login my Magnate (conveniently named "Jim Natinde's Magnate") soon after and start scanning the signature I already had scanned down with my Stratios. The Magnate is sitting at a safe without a cloak and I take my time scanning the system.

I try to put myself into his position. What does he see? What does he think? He obviously sees the Magnate on Dscan. I hope he checks the killboard of the pilot. I assume he thinks he is a newbro who tries wormhole space after being blown up in low-sec. The pilot is 10-11 days old, so I know it may look suspicious to him, but I still hope. The bait doesn't have a cloak, either. Not sure how he thinks about that, but I'll wait and see. He logs in another one of his alts, also. Not sure what to think of that, either.

I scan the Relic site with my bait and warp the Magnate at 0k on the site. By now, my heartrate is pretty high. I approach a can with Afterburner on. My Stratios sits tight at a tactical aligned to the can, as well.

Magnate starts hacking while sitting still near the can. I was insistantly looking on the overview and spamming Dscan, heart in my throat. Never felt anything like this before in a game. I know he likes to decloak on the first can, so I wait a bit. My mouse hovers over the first row of the Overview. I hold down the control button and stop breathing for what I thought was an eternity. HE DECLOAKS. GET HIM!!!!!!

I initiate target lock with Scram active. I warp my Stratios while still cloaked at 0k on the Magnate, but I already realize... it's too late. In my adrenaline rush, I have tackled an Astero instead of the Night Fever. Disappointed... I froze for 5 seconds, while my Stratios was putting damage on the Astero, so was the Astero putting damage on the Magnate. Magnate was specifically tanked for EM and couldn't last long against the Astero's Warriors. Although I had a chance to save him using the Afterburner with better range control, Magnate went down in the end and Jim warped away in a capsule.

I write "wwwww" in local. I usually do not desecrate wormhole local chat, but this time I wanted to make him think I had corpmates incoming who wanted to whore on the killmail. I didn't know what the other pilot was doing and I couldn't afford a properly fit Proteus to decloak on me while I was working on the Astero. Astero goes down soon after. I loot the field and cloak up.


https://zkillboard.com/kill/51124639/

I like the dual-rep Astero, one of my favourite ships. I use almost the exact same fit, I just space out the armor reppers and warp scramblers for a better heat management.

Op success?

I have killed Bex's Astero instead of the Night Fever. For the amount of preparation I have made, this seems little. My bait was compromised, shamefully splashing to highsec.

All in all, I still consider this an op success. I killed at least a ship and I had a friendly conversation with Bex after. Told him what I was doing, asked him some questions about his decisions. Looking behind, it wasn't the worst bait I made, but certainly not enough. What I've done wrong was keeping Jim in an NPC corp and logging him too soon after Bex himself logged into the system, without giving him a chance to scout around, even though he had the signature already scanned down.

I left J213411 and I was content I made a friend, or so I thought at that time. This wasn't the last time I would meet Bex in wormhole space, but this will be an interesting story for another time. If you want to read this story from Bex's perspective, check this link here:
http://bexfire.blogspot.ro/2016/01/the-price-of-infamy.html

The fun things is, that another guy tried to bait him shortly after I left the system. Maybe you've heard of the Cloaky Bastard:
http://cloakybastard.blogspot.se/2016/01/hunting-bex-when-your-heart-is-not.html