Lesson One: Correct Use of Shovel...

"'Chapter Fifteen, Elementary Necromancy'", she read out loud. "'Lesson One: Correct Use of Shovel...'"
-- (Terry Pratchett, Jingo) 

Last night, in the afterglow of an epic bit of Piracy and a billion ISK payday for each of those involved, I decided it a good idea to tangle with a small gang that had set up shop on the Gusandall gate in Eifer, in all my genius I decided on taking a new ship out to play and promptly losing it. The rest of the locals with no co-ordination whatsoever followed suit and it ended up being a little farcical with two battleships and three strategic cruisers lost, but we didn't really care, had a laugh after and carried on with our lives

Here are the lessons learnt

•Intel Intel Intel

For fucks sakes, when you have intel, like the fact that there's at least 3 Caracals, 3 Moa, a Gnosis, 2 Ishtar, 3 Scythes and some tackle, jumping in all gung ho is not the smartest move. 
Sometimes being a solo pirate leads to some communication problems and combining forces doesn't always work out as hastily planned
We had sufficient intel and decided to jump in anyways, believing we were that good that we could clean up a remote shield boosting gang with a mix of ships, no voice comms and no fleet setup.

•Active Tanking 101

I haven't active tanked a battleship in a while and I was rusty, a dual rep AAR tank should have lasted much longer than I did, but I failed, the incoming damage was high and I didn't activate my reppers early enough, thinking I could bait tank a bit, but by the time I got them going it was too late.
I'm not a novice at active tanking, I just went full retard thinking I could just pull it off easily.

Dual Large Armour  Repairer or Single rep and single Ancillary rep?  The jury is still out for me, I'll have to play with it more and see which I orefer. I have dual repped in the past and had much success and I feel the boost rep of the Ancillary might be a bit more useful in the type of fights I would take in my right mind

•To MWD or not to MJD

One of the things I was toying with was the Micro Jump Drive, a new unit and one I had never used in combat. 
I was debating the Micro Jump Drive over the Micro Warp Drive and reasoned that I could just jump away if there were no scrams on me.

Were there any scrams on me? 
No, no there weren't
Did I just activate the MJD and jump away?
No, no I didn't

•Smartbomb over neutralizer

I'm undecided on this, the smartbomb could come in useful, had I had time to make best use of it to kill off drones and in this fight the neutralizer wouldn't have saved me, but what it might have done is break the rep chain of the Scythes a bit.

I did get one Moa before they could set up their reps properly but that was it, once they got going I wasn't going to break them, all that was left was for me to explode, even though I could have tanked better and simply micro jumped away.

All in all an expensive lesson, not as expensive as some I've had this year but not going to deter me, I shall still try this out, and maybe, just maybe, not go full retard and ruin what was an epic day :)