MTU Hunter Becomes the Hunted

It isn’t often that your friendly, local MTU Hunter loses his MTU Hunting ship, but it does happen from time to time. In this post I would like to tell you about an encounter in which I was hunted-down whilst out hunting for MTUs.

MTU Hunting is a profession that comes with certain risks, you spend a vast portion of your time in space under Suspect Status, meaning that if you’re in highsec, anyone can shoot at you freely without the intervention of the space police. Also, when you have the yellow flashing skull next to your name in local, it lights you up like a Christmas tree, and it will draw other pilots to you, looking for prey.

There are players out there who specialise in hunting down Suspect-flagged players, and I ended-up encountering one such hunter who was very good at his job. I had scanned down an MTU in Ruvas, warped to it, and started firing upon it. I pulse D-Scan constantly while bashing the MTU, to check if anyone is dropping probes on me, and to see if the MTU’s owner is on his way back to collect his MTU. I saw nothing out of the ordinary this time, and the MTU popped, as they usually do:

Kill: Toha Hinken (Mobile Tractor Unit)

After I’ve popped an MTU, sometimes I linger around in the site to wait out the 1 minute Weapon Timer, before heading to the nearest NPC station to deposit any loot I’d gotten from the MTU. That is what I was doing here, and in fact, I’d set my ship on a course in a random direction away from the MTU wreckage with my MWD active, whilst waiting for the timer. Suddenly, an Orthrus piloted by Trigger Liu lands in the pocket with me, and he sets his long-point on me. With his drones now eating through my ship’s armor, I made a snap decision to burn towards him and unleash my ship’s 800 DPS upon him. It wasn’t enough though, I’d taken his shields down to maybe 50% before my ship exploded.

Kill: Pix Severus (Hecate)

After I died, I warped my pod out to a nearby planet, only to find Trigger’s alt sat there on the planet at 0 waiting for me, thankfully I was alert, bounced to another planet (at 100 this time) only to find yet another one of his alts sat there waiting too. This man meant business. I did eventually get my pod back to station, I have at least one docking bookmark in the vast majority of highsec systems, and it’s a good job I had, because he had yet another alt there waiting for me. Sheesh.

If you remember, I had set myself MWDing away from the MTU wreck, and was still burning away when Trigger landed, if I had continued burning away, it is possible that I would have pulled range on his point and escaped with my ship intact. Hindsight is a useful yet cruel mistress.

A few days later, my corpmate, Oylpann Kumamato also ran into Trigger, but thankfully managed to escape his clutches.

Trigger Liu
From: Oylpann Kumamato
Sent: 2017.05.30 07:17
To: Pix Severus,
The guy that got you with the Orthrus the other day landed on grid with me. I was in a safe in Kappas.
I was lucky I wasnt scanning or he would have got me. As soon as he landed, I turned and warped out.
I’m guessing he has a hard on for us.
I messaged him and told him he’s got a quick scanner alt and gave him props for killing my CEO (you lol).
No replies yet but I’ll let you know if he does.

Needless to say, this Trigger fellow is now set red to the corp, so that we can try to avoid him in the future!

There are a number of other suspect hunters out there that I have had near misses with, and it certainly adds a lot more excitement to the risky pursuit of MTU destruction. I learned a lot from this encounter, but I’m very sure I will lose a number of other ships as my journey continues!