In the early hours of April 22, a Moracha, one of the various Alliance Tournament vessels known for their enhanced stats and extreme price tags, was destroyed in Syndicate. The pilot was Radakos of Goonswarm Federation.
The pilot who organised the drop, Frederick Vonhole, is renowned for being a scourge to black ops and special edition ships across the galaxy. Vonhole is known to create entirely new characters for each gank, usually training them into Asteros and in some cases creating false zkill profiles for them by going through the motions of running sites and allowing his ship to be caught by other site runners.
In this particular instance, Vonhole used a pilot with no prior zkill record, flying a Stratios, to decloak near Radakos, who did not slow his ship nor turn away from the pilot as he was already engaged with a Brutix Navy Issue and a tackle Nemesis. Vonhole had no difficulty getting the Stratios into scram and web range due to a piloting error, and Radakos’s Moracha was easy prey to the carriers that came through the Stratios’ cyno.
ZKillboard initially valued the Moracha’s destruction at only 3.996B ISK as not only were many of the fittings transformed by abyssal mutaplasmids – for which zKill cannot ascertain the price – but the Moracha itself was valued at only 7m on the killboard, likely due to scam buy orders in Jita affecting the established price. That valuation has since been corrected, and zKillboard now shows a more reasonable 503.99B ISK. Even then, the value of such limited edition ships is always up for debate and exchange, with the most recent price for a Moracha hull being 650B ISK.
Vonhole’s already impressive kill is not the first. Just last month, Vonhole baited and killed a Virtuoso AT stealth bomber in Querious, as well as getting the first legitimate kill on a Gold Magnate in Black Rise. He is also responsible for ambushing Bombers Bar in Perrigen Falls last year, destroying several dozen bombers with a pair of cloaked smartbombing carriers waiting hidden next to a bait Rorqual.
This particular Moracha, only the sixth to be destroyed on Tranquility, was on loan to Radakos from Casper24, who has previously lost a Moracha personally. Radakos apologized for the loss in an AAR on Reddit, stating his inability to fully reimburse the loss. Casper24 has yet to comment publicly about any agreement with Radakos as of this article’s posting.
