Late night Flights...

"The Piranha Brutix" 

"There's a man going round taking names..." opens up a Johnny Cash classic "The Man Comes Around", an old world favorite. With that tone in the back of our minds we set out to create a Low Sec Gank ship, that in the gang could take names. We looked to the "Wolf Pack" Talos of null with its speed and high DPS, what we wanted was a cheaper ship with higher tank, and could be thought of as a light weight brawler.  Enter what we call the "Piranha" Brutix fitting code HEB-ASB-MSF-VI. Un-boosted it has 30k EHP with okay shield resistances for an armor hull, and with Null ammo and Hammerhead II hits for 640 DPS, with the booster the EHP hits 40k with a 1500 shield recharge.

I know that I will hear that we are not fitting the ship right and that we need to use the armor bonus, and while most of the time I will agree with you, what we were going for is a bit of speed and gank. For long 26 jump roams we want to be able to get to gates quickly. With the armor ship we are not able to catch cruisers class ships and or burn back to gates before we are webbed and bumped off gates.

The Man Comes Around....

So we began our roam from Nisuwa, 26 jumps through Black Rise, Placid, and Essence.  There were three of us with a Tengu Booster scout.  Six jumps out in Aivonen our scout comes across a Myrmidon that is looking for a fight, we send the booster and two "Piranhas" into the system next door Pavanakka while the "bait" waits at the stargate on the other side.  The Myrmidon lands on the gate and our bait jumps into Pavanakka with the Myrmidon following where we are ready. The Myrmidon pilot is thinking this will be a easy kill Myrmidon vs Brutix, but when he finds three of us there now he is not as excited. With 3v1 he holds his cloak and sends an message of help to his alliance. Being at 0km on the gate we wait for him to uncloak, once he does he becomes the primary. As we apply DPS and move to bump him away form the gate, he has a Loki booster and two Tornado Attack Battle-cruisers jump in. We are unable to make it the Tornadoes as they pull range to apply their high Alpha Damage nearly 13k a volley. 

Quickly we switch back to the Myrmidon hoping that at least we get him down before the High Alpha eats through our low tanks. We are successful killing the Myrmidon usually fast for a hull of its class.  Myrmidon down we began to burn away from the Tornadoes hoping to get out of warp scram range, but with the Loki on the field and their Warp Disruptors over heated they manage to grab one of us before we get out. 

 Minmatar Attack Battle-Cruiser Tornado  

        Caldari Tengu Strategic Cruiser      

 Minmatar Loki Strategic Cruiser

                         

20 more jumps...

The downed pilot reships to a "Piranha" Thorax and we continue our tour of Black Rise. The rest of the flight we don't meet any more pilots that want to fight our small gang even in one case where they had 14 pilots in system to our 3.  Ending the roam, we finally look at the kill mails to see how we fared. Our Burtix lost was 80mil isk while their Myrmidon netted 90mil so the isk war was won. But looking Myrmidon I start shaking my head as I see why it died so fast to our gang. Only two reps and no Ancillary Armor Repairer this ship was lost before the fight started. If it would have dual repped and ARR it would have been much harder to kill and could have killed at list one of us before going down.

I like flying the "Piranha" Brutix and want to do more of them in the future. They lay out nasty DPS and in larger gangs can really ruin peoples days. Here is hoping for more of these gangs.