260M Drake, say what?

Every once in a while, something happens that makes you look twice. You just have a hard time accepting what your eyes are telling you on the first look.

One of our scouts reports some activity in a C4 with a static C2 farther down our chain. Two drakes warp away from a tower and disappear into empty space. Since we know ships need a cloak to disappear and that most drakes would not have a cloak fitted, we theorize that their is a wormhole in that vicinity and that they have went to run sites.

Since we want to catch them as they return, I jump in a heavy interdictor and the fleet gets in a variety of dps ships plus an oneiros. Kitchen sink armor fleet as there is no one around to tell us to fly something specific.

Once we are in position on the C4s > C4a wormhole, the scout deploys probes and quickly locates the wormhole right where the ships disappeared. Once he lands, we move the cloaky ships and the phobos forward and have the scout jump through the wormhole.

Sure enough, the drakes are on dscan along with several wrecks. A check of anomolies shows them in a site and our scout warps in but there is no easy way to get close to them. There is a planet out of dscan range though, so I have the scout warp to the outer planet and drop combat probes. Instead of us going to them, we are going to make them come to us.

The scout drops probes and warps back to the wormhole. He arranges the probes and scans. Since he knew exactly where they were, the 100% result on the first scan was expected. However, the drakes are not reacting as expected. The probes do not seem to scare them. Maybe we will have to go to them.

I have two of the proteus pilots jump, the scout rescans and then warps the proteus pilots to the drakes. Assignments are made about who tackles who so that we get both of them. The proteus pilots land, but there are no drakes. The drakes have finally reacted and run back to the wormhole. They jump on contact appearing in the middle of my bubble.

Both pilots immediately jump back to the C2 polaring themselves. Fantastic! I jump the phobos and immediately put the bubble up on the other side. By the time, the pilots we used for the flush are back at the wormhole. Points and webs are put on both ships. I call Dr Hart as the primary and we dispatch both his ship and capsule. Next up is Narayan Yamaradj. We take down his Drake and capsule, loot the field and head home.

Once we are back, I pull the kills and see that Narayan's capsule was worth 270M and his drake was worth 260M. Say what? How? Why? After looking twice, I realize that he has 3 tech 2 shield rigs, each of them worth more than the hull he is flying. ^-^