On December 12 at 20:14 EVE time, in the system of 1-3HWZ in Cloud Ring, a wonderfully fit Rattlesnake Victory Edition (RVE), belonging to Admiral Blue of Catastrophic Overview Failure (..VOV), was destroyed by Imperium forces in the area. While the hull alone is only worth about 5B ISK, the nearly full officer-fit RVE was worth 23.2B ISK.

The Rattlesnake Victory Edition skin was a runner-up prize given to the players who won a series in the 2014 Alliance Tournament. The details on the skin were released by CCP in a post on AT XII:

“This year we will be adding a completely new prize category, a cosmetic ship skin that can be applied to Rattlesnake pirate battleships to give them the same visual style as the Chameleon and Whiptail Alliance Tournament prize ships (more on those later).We will be awarding 10 copies of this ship skin for each series won by a team. This includes the single match series’ that make up the bulk of the tournament. This addition provides an exciting reward to help make each match more meaningful for every team.”

PREVIOUS RVE LOSSES

Admiral Blue’s loss is the second most expensive of the Rattlesnake Victory Edition lost so far. Since the release of the skin, only five of the RVEs have been destroyed in combat. The most expensive RVE lost was on January 1, 2015. Rupee Rue completely fitted his RVE with officer modules and the loss was worth 23.3B ISK, beating Admiral Blue’s loss by a 100 million ISK.

PERSONAL ACCOUNT

TMC reached out to one of the pilots on the kill, Mtakahashi Yiorkin of I’m Fine and You (DOKDO) of Goonswarm Federation. Mtakahashi, who was flying an Archon during the engagement, agreed to reveal the details of the exciting kill.

Mtakahashi Yiorkin: Our cap and ANI fleet was slowly burning towards a fight. I was in command comms so I heard that we were to stall a bit to see what hostiles would do.

TMC: Did you kill him during the fight or was he just a speedbump on the way out?

MY: Well, we jumped through the gate into 1-3HWZ and when we loaded grid, there was a small gang of battlecruisers and smaller. All that was left was a cyclone. One of the caps refit to a point and tackled the cyclone and just before the cyclone died a rattlesnake appeared. We all yelled out rattlesnake tackle it.  Sure enough we tackled it.  Few seconds later it died and nobody really noticed that it was an RVE.

TMC: When did they notice it was and RVE and fit with officer mods?

MY: When one of the folks linked the killmail in fleet. Somebody is like “GG BOIZ. We got purples!”.  And sure enough, the damn pilot thought he was raiding in world of warcraft or something.

TMC: Who ended up looting all the modules that dropped?

MY: I am not sure, but we were really happy that we killed one.

TMC has reached out to Admiral Blue for comment and will update this article with his comments.