Pool's Now Open

Hellcats has reopened recruitment.

People make a big deal of the Hellcats being a women-only corp. It's what attracts many of our applicants, and you know what? Everyone's got their focus wrong. We're pirates. We may be all female, but we are pirates first. We've had to put strict regulations on our application procedure because too many women simply wanted to be in a corp with only other women. This is the wrong reason for wanting to join us, and so many of the recent applicants just do not seem to understand that.

In the early days, Hellcats got our applicants from women who heard about us and had already been in the action for a while. The corp was an unknown and didn't have a reputation beyond Mynxee's public journal; women applied because they wanted in on the action, not a place to knit and gossip. Mynx and I had both been yarring it up for ages before Hellcats was even on the radar. It's only been in recent months that we've had women asking to join because their husbands/brothers/male friends have said, 'It's an all-female corp! you'll fit right in!'

Words cannot express the frustration.

It is from this 'recommendees pool' that we get the sorts of applicants we really don't want in the corporation. YES, I said there are people we don't want. What do we look like, Mrs Biddle's Happy Tea Society?

We get the sorts of women who are accustomed to leaning on others and letting them do all the work; the types who make their way through life by wrapping others around their delicate little fingers and whining for 'help'; the ones who'd rather sit around gossiping and painting their nails whilst riding on the credit of the group. These women are useless, or worse than. We may take raw rookies from time to time, but only if they show initiative and are willing to follow instructions; we are not a training corporation. We do not teach women to fly their ships; they should already know this. We do not accept women who can't bear the risks involved in an outlaw lifestyle or who simply want to wear the corp logo on their flight jackets.

We've even had a few applicants who detest the idea of working with men, which is so wrong I don't really know how to express it. Hellcats is not anti-male. We've been proud members of The Bastards. alliance and Doom Armada, and our more experienced members have previously served cheerfully in corps in which they were the only woman. We have husbands and boyfriends and generally get along better with guys. When an applicant says she doesn't want to fly with men... we really don't know what to say, because we can't understand why someone would not want to work with them.

An applicant walking into my office and being pushy, self-centred, passive-aggressive and trying to jump our now standard recruitment steps is not going to get into Hellcats. Someone who asks to join, then ignores all the relevant Read This First! information I give them whilst acting like they're already in and talking about how awesome they are is NOT going to impress upon us that they will be a benefit to the corporation. I'm a diplomat, and what that means is that while I'm smiling, nodding and being helpful, I'm making a note on our management boards that that woman is never to be accepted to the corp.

Yes, NEVER. She has wrecked her chances forever based on the first impression she has presented.

How many times do we have to say this?

So you want to go kill stuff? Go! Fit up a ship and run rampant through lowsec, you don't need a corp to do that. In the meantime, you'll have to go through the process like everyone else. If a girl simply cannot wait, then she lacks the most vital attribute in a pirate's arsenal: patience. Without that, a pilot is useless and a liability.

Hellcats recruitment is open. Please see the information here if you have any questions. If you wish to be considered as an applicant, by all means, join us in the Hellcats Pub comms channel, express your intentions and we'll see about getting you started!

Lurking for Fun and Profit

You know... I'm not really certain how last night happened.

The corp has had a lot of recruits in the last couple weeks, bringing the Hellcats membership up to eighteen. We've come a long way in the eight months since I joined, but it means extra work for the Hellcats command staff -- Mynx and I had a chat the other day and we decided that Venom Orchid had earned the trust and responsibility of being a corp director. Not bad for a girl who joined after hearing I'd shot and downed her sister in a baiting attempt!

I was working away in my office making up for the time I'd lost on Saturday and listening in on voice comms when I heard 'sniping Abaddon in Las', 'mostly tackle, here' and 'need more dps'.

Without hesitation, I turned my transmission on. 'You guys want me out there in the Myrm?'

What followed was a bit confusing, but the sniping battleship seemed to disappear, there was a gang in Todifreauan we thought we could handle which suddenly decided to go somewhere else, and then there was a Dominix in a mission who had a scout sitting on his entrance-gate. We did pick up a load of free t2 heavy drones there, but it was a somewhat disappointing evening. Especially sitting in a battlecruiser: it means that all those targets you have to let pass you on the gates are suddenly viable because your tank can take the damage from the sentry guns.

Piracy is a very hit-or-miss profession: either you get it and go home with fat pockets or you go hungry another day.

I ended up on the Lasleinur gate waiting for the go to jump in and in the end a Caracal got tackled by Bastards recruits Jmarr and Happy San and the call was made to leave it to the smaller ships -- something I agreed with, because it feels just plain wrong to send against a target any amount of ships that total more than the target's hull-mass, a sentiment I picked up from Tical31 in Doom Armada. The Caracal ceased to exist, and then the pod was caught.

And then someone had the brilliant idea of seeing how long they could just hold the pod in space. I'm not certain what the point was; maybe just milking the smack cow, or maybe it was a personal challenge. In the end, someone got an itchy trigger and the pod popped after eleven minutes while we waited to see how many of his mates would come to the rescue. None arrived, however, and we returned to Evati.

I swapped to my Taranis. I've been loving flying interceptors lately; the size and agility make things fun, and at the end of the day, I've always been more of a small-ships pilot.

Flash decided it was time to range further afield in our search for a fight; he sent me out towards Otosela. I had a close encounter of the Blinky Thrasher kind on the Akkio gate in Todifrauan; not fancying my chances -- Thrashers, when properly set up, are fearsome frigate-killing platforms -- I jumped in and picked a safespot to warp to.

My spot just happened to be in line with the Tama gate, and it was clear the destroyer pilot did very much fancy his chances taking me out, because he warped to Tama, hung about at the gate for a bit, jumped in, then came back. By that point we had RoninData in Akkio too, with me playing bait on a planet for his Rapier, but the destroyer pilot I think knew trouble when he saw it and left.

Otosela, when I checked, didn't look like a very pirate-friendly environment: twenty in local, mostly members of Rote Kapelle alliance, several of whom were waiting out GCCs somewhere in the system. I may still be on speaking terms with members of Stimulus, but I know better than to test my luck.

Just about then, someone spotted a mission-running Rokh in Evati. The pilot had been drifting around for a few days, but this was the first time we had seen her actually doing anything -- and in such a juicy ride, too. The pilot entered and left the system a few times, with everyone desperately checking the nearby systems to find out where she was going, until one of our newer members who hasn't yet lost all her security status checked Anher and caught the Rokh returning.

The tankers huddled around Anher gate, awaiting the telltale flare of the returning battleship. When it finally appeared -- 35km from the camp! -- the pilot beat a blazing trail away... towards the top asteroid belt. The gatecamp split as pilots went to either the belt or the planet, just in case, and the rest of us waiting in Todifrauan jumped in and aligned.

Jmarr hit the belt first, and there was the Rokh, sitting at 0 to the beacon, fresh out of warp and too slow to get away. Tackle was called, and we quickly surrounded the battleship, pinning it in place while the confused pilot was offered ransom terms. In the end, she had only 147 of the 150 million demanded, but this was considered an acceptable compromise.

Guess it was a fat-pockets day, after all!

Announcement

We've mentioned before that we might do this, but now it's a definite:

The Hellcats Pin-Up Calendar is in the works, and with any luck should be available in time for Christmas!

I'm really looking forward to working on this, since it'll be a huge challenge, and hopefully will be a lot of fun ^_^

See ya in space, cowboys.