my first major cock-up

I'm sure I've probably made others, but just not realised it yet! However, last night I made a bad call, then reacted too slowly and lost my first expensive (for me) ship.

I'd been doing other stuff the last few days (some scanning, data & relic sites, working on L3 distribution missions for SoE with my alt) whilst waiting for my training to get me to the point where I could fully fit a L3 running Vexor.  I was specifically waiting for Tactical Shield Manipulation 4 so that I could fit an Adaptive Invulnerability Field II.

I had the T1 variant on there, but missions required a bit of warping in & out, still.

Skill finished training Monday morning, but I didn't get a chance to login until Monday evening, I swapped out the Invulnerability fields and headed out to test my Vexor in a L3.

Oh, and Avengers Assemble was on the TV.

I forget the name of the mission now, but it had some towers that repaired the NPC ships, plus at least one Stasis tower.

The stasis tower was quite a distance past everything else and webbed me pretty early on so I headed in it's direction intending to take it out asap (though only moving at about 60m/s) I started taking down the other ships on the way.

My shields were dropping slowly, but everything looked manageable.

I was getting distracted by AA on the TV, but paying enough attention to swap my drones onto their next target when each ship went down.

I realised that I wasn't going to take out the stasis tower before my shields were gone so I started to recall my drones with just under a quarter of my shields left, selected a station to dock up at, and then my final shields evaporated! Turns out I'd missed that there were a couple of Heavy Missile towers too and they'd started firing on me.

Drones were in, armour was dropping, so I hit Dock and watched nervously as my armour disappeared.  I've been in this situation many times before I gotten out in 15-20% structure.  This time I was soo close.  I'm pretty sure I got to warp speed just as the last sliver of hull vaporised - "Capsule Ejected" flashed on the screen and then immediately warped to the station.

Poor Vexor.  Poor mobile tractor unit which I'd forgotten to deploy when I started the mission.

Bugger.

Luckily I had followed the golden rule of EVE "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose" and I had a replacement Vexor already fitted in my hangar, I jumped in, renamed it "Vexxed" and headed back into the mission.  This time I paid full attention, warping out as my shields dipped to 50%. I finally cleared the field, looted and salvaged all of the wrecks (including my own).

A valuable lesson learned I hope.

It's still another 4 and a bit days before I get Mechanics 5, another 4 days or so to get T2 drones, but in the grand scheme of things that isn't so long.

I'm still under 2 million SP, I still have over 700 million ISK of the 745 million ISK I started this game with.

And I'm still having a blast :)