A two-man fleet is still a fleet.

I hope you all had a nice new year's eve, here's a cup of coffee to aid your perhaps-hangover.

A few days ago, last year (mandatory January 1st joke, sorry), my long-time Icelandic internet buddy RagnaR who introduced me to Eve (and got himself a nice Plex for getting me signed up, hehe) had a terrible dilemma. One of this 3 alts, Jackus Loftus was laying uselessly in a station, reading skill books and being bored to tears.

"Let's do some security missions!" he announced in a gruff voice.
"But I'm scared!" I whimpered in response.

He laughed at my weakness while stroking his space-beard and promised me everything would be fine: he was going to buy himself a ship designed specifically for helping me shoot rats. Aw shucks, how could I refuse?

I wrap up my mining, and we meet in Tash-Murkon Prime. Arriving a bit before him, I start a lvl 3 security mission as agreed. We are tasked with retrieving some cargo from deadspace. Against my better judgement, I warp out ahead to scout the location.
What horrors could be waiting for me? Even with my few new combat skills, my coercer is still a bit crap, and although my fitting is pretty good, it's not fantastic...I hope I have time to warp out before I get...wait...what? There's nobody here, not a single rat in sight. I just grab the cargo and bring it to my agent...well that was undramatic. I suppose that for a 300k ISK and 400LP payment, it's about right. I'm pretty sure I wasn't talking to a delivery agent, though. Jakus arrives and we go on a proper mission together.




The devious bastard had failed to mention that his ship was pure support: it had no weapons of any kind. Well shit, we'll have to rely on my 7 small lasers with faction IR crystals.
Turns out, everything play out fine, despite my being webbed by rat frigates & drones, Jackus' remote armour repair keeps my ship afloat, armour-tanking like nobody's business as I merrily scrap rat hulls. The mission takes mere minutes to complete. Okay! everything went even better than planned, and we got a nice warmup. We split the petty rewards from the agent, and it's off to more fighting.

Ooh! a 3 part mini-story, neat.
Fighting Gallente, eh? Whatever you say, agent-man. Long live the Amaar empire...and its...Emperor...or something.
I really need to read up on New Eden's lore.

Rinse and repeat, I shoot, he repairs, and tries to not get aggro'd. I'd be dead within seconds without him. After the fighting's done, not being in the mood for salvaging wrecks, I however pretend to take great joy in looting dogtags of the Gallente ship remains. What kind of screwed up place is Gallente, anyway, having dogs fly spaceships...pfft, barbarians.
Going for some slight roleplaying, my mocking of the puny Gallente federation jokingly irritates Jackus, as he himself was born there. I threaten to blow him out of the sky like the unarmed pigdog he is, but he could probably tank me so we instead resume the mission & I kidnap the Gallente space-marine from a cargo container as ordered. I'd sure like to know what on Earth he was doing in that thing, to which the marine answers we're not on Earth...smartass.
Jackus cuts my looting short by warping our fleet back to the mission giver's station. Damn that pigdog, I'd shake my fist at him but can't find the ingame command to do that.

Okay, enough silly role-playing, phase two of the mission arc: "investigate" Gallente activity in yet more deadspace. We warp in, clear maybe half a dozen of Gallente frigs and approach the nearby warp gate. Our minds are being readied for the next part of the mission as he transfers fleet command to me, since I'm the one being given the mission locations. I fumble around with the fleet commands for a few minutes before we realise that the warp gate is just a prop, it's not actually part of the mission. Oh.

On to part 3 then: ambush a Gallente convoy. Finally a real purpose!
With my buddy's help, I'm starting to get the hang of useful fleet features when fighting, like tagging ships and broadcasting pleas for attention. Of course, I'd done a lot of fleet-flying while mining, but that hardly requires any sort of communication apart from mentioning you're going AFK because mining is boring. (but it's my kind of boring!)

I tag Jackus' ship "Z" so it looks like he's asleep...hehehe, mildest case of griefing in recorded history.
It takes us quite a while to plow through the convoy's defenders, and Jackus even has to dispatch his drones to mitigate his aggro.
Another hit to my fighting self-esteem: his T1 scout drones do more damage than my 7 laser cannons...hell, I could have run these missions with my Retriever Tuggy's drones, it even has better shield and armour than my coercer.
Fortunately, with some suspension of disbelief, the so-called convoy just sits there next to a stargate prop, waiting for us to mow down every last escort frigate and cruiser. After several long minutes of pew pew, I finally loot the industrial ships. Oh what treasures might await me inside? Gold, maybe? Precious implants, perhaps? Tech II modules mayhaps!?

...scrap metal and 8000kg of dairy products.

For fuck's sake! We fucking murdered fucking dozens of fucking people for fucking milk? Fucking fuck! The great and bountful Amaar Empire seems to have its priorities screwed up, and I can't say much either for the Gallentes transporting that stuff in the first place. The agent who gave me the mission didn't even want the milk. So drop me, Cesare Romero, a contract if you want to buy milk.

After this not-so-epic yet entertaining adventure is done, RagnaR retires to play Crusader Kings II(R)(TM)(c). So next time you see Jackus Loftus in local, be sure to question his sexuality in the traditional juvenile internet manner, for the crime of playing another videogame than Eve.

Here's some more coffee to help stay awake. Now go blast some bandits!