Covert Tackling: Putting Theory to the Test

My last post contained advice on fitting a Covert Ops ship. There have been some really good suggestions in the comments, so make sure you check them out.

In one comment REve Blogger mentioned 'I never really considered the use of cov ops as a tackle.', and it just so happened that yesterday I had the opportunity to prove that a Covert Ops can do precisely that.

A Dominix, a Gallente Battleship, warped into one of our gas mining fleets yesterday. Everybody that was harvesting managed to extricate themselves, but the Dominix, instead of warping straight back to the hole he came from decided to hang around in system. Suspecting the Dominix to be bait, I hopped into my Helios and jumped through the only other active wormhole in the system.

Sure enough there was a fairly large PvP fleet on the other side. I quickly cloaked up and we started to get a fleet together to deal with the threat. This can sometimes take awhile, so by the time our fleet was prepared a number of the opposing ships had come and gone.

When our fleet finally got around to warping to the wormhole that was being camped by our opposition, they had either already noticed our fleet and started to run or thought that we weren't going to take the bait. Either way, I was left sitting at a wormhole with the Dominix, who was about to warp back to his POS - with our fleet fast approaching.

It was the work of a moment for me to uncloak, lock and tackle the Dominix. Then I flew towards the wormhole, just to make sure that I would be able to jump to safety if he started spewing drones at me. As expected, he popped out his sentry drones and proceeded to take me down to 25% armour before I jumped through. But by that time the rest of our fleet was on grid and they made short work of the target.

All in all, I probably tackled him for about 15-20 seconds - but without those seconds we wouldn't have got the kill. It's also very nice to appear on the killmails as well! So there you have it - a fortuitous textbook demonstration of tackling in a Covert Ops ship.

I should imagine many of you have similar stories, where you just happen to be in the right place, at the right time. But in this case I should also add, with the right ship fitting!