Lets see... I was given this game less than a year after its release during one of its sales. One of my best friends (rl ones) who goes by the alias KitKatKitty managed to get a 4 pack and offered to play the game with me. We did and after stumbling through a mess of gameplay to get a grasp of it my game time started to exponentially grow over hers (mostly because it had and still does have a very attractive manner of gameplay) - we had initially agreed together not to join any clans but that ended rather quickly with TheRealDeadpool coming along and flying matches together (Sorry Katers!). Back then I was mainly interested in gunning but as he swept me up into his DPA clan (Deadpool's Army) I started weaving my way into position as a copilot shortly after the TFD guys that TheRealDeadpool played with started becoming less active.
So with all that going on about 5 months later I had gotten to know several players and one I was particularly fond of copiloting with, Ightrril, had this fancy idea of creating a 'sub-clan' - understand this was back before clan tags had requirements and invite only functions and all that fancy shizzlewizzle so swapping tags was much easier and fluid. This sub-clan was a way for specific players we both really enjoyed playing with to go under one banner when we weren't with our respective clans during down time. We decided to call it kTen (a play off k9) since we had a running joke about smuggling kittens in our ships and would accidentally fire them out of our lumberjacks which is why, due to their claws, balloons would collapse so quickly. Anyways this group swelled to 10 people (ironic to the name really) involving myself, Ighrril, Draaaaaaagon, Llamas Unite, HappyDoom, Blacklaserlight, SiepeAssassina, Almanium, Captain Seal and Kau - with our eleventh, The Squirrel, joining later. This was probably the funnest (unofficial) clan I've ever had the pleasure of playing with.
We eventually split up and went our own ways after we decided to not officially form kTen when the new clan system was implemented but we continued to do certain events together for things like the SCS. In fact that is why my ships' call sign has KTN in it now
it really was an amazing group.
The rest is history with the Storm Ryders and Muse