What is the right way to fight against a Stealth Bomber? This question kept turning over in the Admiral’s mind as he read the pilot’s report.
== Pilot’s personal log extract ==
Fuel on the tower was running low, and the run was meant to be routine logistics: sweep the system, check a couple of neighbours, come back with whatever turned up, and swing by a trade hub on the way. That was the rare flight, which I took no solo, but with the partner. Home system gave little. The C1 static gave less. Another C2 further down the chain wasn’t much better: barely nine million ISK for the whole run.
However, the run had hardly been quiet. Foreign hulls kept surfacing on d-scan the whole time: a scanning frigate, a Buzzard, a pair of bombers, a Manticore and a Nemesis. The last system had several data sites at once, so we took a chance in tandem: my partner cracking containers, me holding the perimeter.
The doubt was there from the start. My ship was built for close range: burn in on the MWD, work the target up close. A Stealth Bomber prefers to reveal itself at distance, and its damage scales directly with the target’s signature radius, and a micro warp drive inflates that signature fivefold, which would have made lighting it a mistake I couldn’t take back. But the risk seemed worth taking.
We cleared every site. The loot was embarrassingly low, and we were already heading home.
The enemy showed up on the last container. Manticore, right there on grid. I sent my partner into warp and locked the bomber, but the range was too long for a scram, and I didn’t dare light the MWD: with the signature inflated, one alpha strike would have settled it on the spot. The pilot got the turn he needed and warped to a bookmark a few hundred kilometres out. Planned ahead!
His wingman interceptor landed on grid almost immediately. I switched fire onto him. Down to the bottom end of his armor, he settled into a thirty-kilometre orbit, right where my missiles stopped mattering much, and started patching armor. When the launcher cycled into reload a second time, the outcome was obvious.
But no one opened fire.
A minute later, the interceptor pilot messaged. Wingspan couriers, as it turned out, a name with plenty of stories attached on both sides of known space. Officially, they run “deliveries”: contracted removals almost anywhere in space, wormholes included, mostly flown on Stealth Bombers. But there’s an unwritten code behind the trade: a target that puts up a real fight can be offered a different kind of payment: not ISK, but entertainment. That’s what they offered me. Cancel the order, in exchange for entertainment.
I stalled just long enough for my partner to grab the loot and get clear, before replying that I’d rather fight. By then another bomber and a couple of escorts had joined the grid, but their Nemesis drifted in too close. I locked it and fired one last time: it went down almost the same instant my ship did.
The day’s balance was almost symbolic: nine million in loot, minus twelve for the ship, plus a modest three-million insurance payout. Close enough to zero. But the Nemesis they lost was worth several times that, and we parted on good terms in local: they thanked me for the entertainment, I wished them good hunting.
As my flight academy instructor used to say: when capsuleers meet in combat, the winner is whoever achieved their objective, regardless of what got destroyed along the way. Does that make it a win for everyone here?
== End of pilot’s personal log extract. ==
== Tactical Department Assessment ==
Two points from the run were flagged for review.
Pre-engagement risk. The pilot’s own estimate against the bomber was roughly fifty-fifty, in the open, without a scram or MWD. That is assessed as sound. Committing under those odds is not treated as recklessness: the loss of the ship was priced in before the encounter began, not the result of a miscalculation mid-fight. The department notes this as a workable decision model: accepting the loss in advance removes much of the emotional weight from the critical moment.
Counterfactual: early MWD. Lighting the MWD immediately might have put the first bomber down before he reached his bookmark. However, the inflated signature would have raised incoming damage in the meantime, had it come to that. Even assuming the kill, pilot behavior afterward remains undetermined: an immediate disengage might have saved the ship, but any delay for a second target leads back to the same outcome as the run actually flown.
== End of assessment ==
The Admiral allowed himself a smile. “Everyone wins” had a naivety he did not expect from a seasoned scout, and yet, this once, it seemed to hold. But the rule still stands: never fly what you cannot afford to lose.