Dust Outtakes

            I have seen quite a few crazy things during my time in the open beta for DUST.  Some caused by player error (or great skill) and others caused by the ‘beta’ status of the game.  These "Dust Outtakes" posts will just be story time, a series of small stories of either player error or skill resulting in hilarity from games that were otherwise unnoteworthy.

Be careful trusting your hard earned ISK to this man.

            One thing that many beta players are familiar with is the “drunken RDV pilot.”  Rapid Deployment Vehicles (RDVs) are the VTOL craft that come in and drop off vehicles that players have requested.  Light Assault Vehicles (LAVs, basically your standard Jeep-like vehicle), Heavy Assault Vehicles (HAVs, or tanks), Drop ships, you name it.  If you can call it in, you’re going to see one of these come in shortly after with your vehicle suspended below it.  So far the only RDV in the game is the Caldari “Bolas,” and I don’t know what they’ve been drinkin’, smokin’, or snortin’, but sometimes they botch the entry or exit of the battlefield – badly.  I once saw an RDV drop off a LAV and then smack into a big support structure, causing it to fall out of the sky and right back onto the LAV in a nice fiery explosion.  The poor guy who called it in was left standing there with his dick his hand.  Quite a few other RDVs just fly into the sides of buildings and slowly scrape along the side until they either reach the end or are shot down.  Sometimes RDVs didn’t quite seem to get your coordinates down when you called them in, and you can find your supplies dropped onto the top of a shipping crate or structure a good 20ft from where you called it in.  I had one son of a bitch drop my LAV right on top of me as I was making a quick check downrange with a sniper rifle.

            Speaking of LAVs, they must be electric because they are quite the silent runner.  They’ve got to be rather close for you to hear them drive by, and with the speeds they go, that can be too late.  Lots of splatters going on in the public matches, and if no one has eyes on it, the only warning you have is the split second of its whine before you’re suddenly kissing dirt.  I've seen quite a few sudden and funny hit-and-runs during my playtime, but the one that tops them all was the misplaced air-drop.  My team was running up the large map-spanning hill in a game of Ambush OMS on Manus Peak, heading towards the small complex where the enemy was hiding out.  Around the side of one of the large skyscraper-esque buildings comes an enemy drop ship, heading right towards us.  The blaster turret installation behind me starts lighting it up, and just before it explodes into a fireball and crashes to earth, one of the passengers inside makes a drop, jumping out the side and turning his inertial dampeners on to land at the crest of the hill.  Maybe he planned on gunning a few of us down before retreating a bit, but what happened a second after he landed was one of our LAVs came screeching up the hill, jumped the crest, and landed smack dab on top of him, driving away like it didn't even notice the human speed bump.

            I had another instance of a LAV trying to run me over, and just before he reached me my forge gun hit full charge and destroyed both the vehicle and the driver.  Unluckily for me, however, the burning wreck was still subject to inertia and no amount of armor plating could have saved me from the blunt force trauma as I was forced to boot up another clone.  Another "outtake" could have been a case of "skill" had I meant to do it, but while trying to kill yet another pesky LAV with my trusty assault forge gun, I instead shot one of the passengers right out of the passenger seat.  I made sure to hit the LAV itself with the next shot and take care of the two players left in it.

The Ford Pinto of the skies

            "My First Day At Drop ship School" is another source of hilarity.  Through the optics of one of the rail gun turrets I observed one player call in a drop ship and get a little too anxious about liftoff, causing a "premature elevation" and smack right into the underside of the RDV that had dropped it off.  Suffice to say, he went right back down to the ground, his landing accompanied by a pretty little burst of flame.  Of course, most DUST players and all pilots know that drop ships are painted with nitroglycerine, and that any contact with any surface will cause acute structural failure.  Most new pilots don't lose their training drop ships to the enemy; they lose them to the small bumps and collisions that mar the early aviator's career.  Ships may bump off of each other in EVE, but any sort of contact between ships planetside just causes destruction.  Cheap drop ships are used as piloted missiles to be flown into the more expensive vehicles.

            Sometimes there just aren't enough people playing the game to fill all of the automatches that are generated for the instant battles.  One such case had me appear into a half-over Ambush OMS all by myself.  I took to just running from structure to structure, hacking everything for the free war points.  With about 6 minutes left in the game, the server gave me an enemy to play with.  Unfortunately, this enemy wasn't a single player, but a single squad.  Four red names appeared in the upper corner as their arrival was announced, and a quick check of the player list revealed that they were all in the same corp.  Maybe, if the game had decided to give me four random players, I would have stuck around and shot at them, possibly coming out on top.  But four, coordinated players who were likely talking to each other over some VoIP program who would be able to effectively out flank and out maneuver me?  No thanks.  I found the furthest, safest hiding spot I could and sat there for the next five minutes until the timer ended, silently weeping to myself.