Two TTC Sotiyos Destroyed in Perimeter Brawl

There has been a low level conflict going on in null sec, with Imperium and The Initiative facing off against Pandemic Horde and Fraternity for a while now.  Neither side has been stoked for a full scale invasion… in part because CCP has said they will be making changes to null sec, something that makes everybody nervous… so there have been clashes in the southeast, where Pandemic Horde had already been in violation of the now lapsed agreement.  They and Fraternity have pushed into Catch, where the latter dropped a Keepstar then did a whole lot of nothing.

The Imperium, in a counter move, dropped a Fortizar on the grid with their Keepstar in F4R2-Q, which literally caused PH to evac a bunch of ships back to their previous forward base.  Both structures have been reinforced multiple times but neither side has managed to blow up the other’s citadel.

The stalemate in F4R2-Q

I do not have much first hand information about this conflict because it has primarily been taking place immediately after downtime, which is the only time zone PH can get Fraternity support, so is the only time zone they will engage in.   Since downtime is at 4am local time for me, I have been giving the whole thing a miss.  You can tell the conflict is mostly posturing because the propaganda on Reddit has been horrible all around. There really hasn’t been anything worth alarm clocking over.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I woke up and logged into various apps and noticed reports of a fight going on in Perimeter, a busy high sec system one jump from Jita and one time home of the Tranquility Trading Tower, the one time high sec Keepstar trading hub, the wreck of which still haunts the system.

Remember the TTT – Once it was anchored here

Even the official EVE Online Twitter account took a moment away from promoting Vanguard to make mention of the fight.  I knew that the Tranquility Trading Consortium’s structures in that high sec system had been one of the fronts that we had been pushing back against.  But now I saw there were something around 5K pilots in Perimeter and that the pair of Sotiyos the TTC still had anchored there were under attack.

Their two Sotiyos on the old Keepstar grid

For those needing to come up to speed, the TTC broke up when the Imperium pulled out of the agreement, which was supposed to lead to its dissolution according to TTC leader Vily.  That led to the destruction of their high sec Keepstar, but Vily wanted some more ISK so reneged on his statements that the whole thing would fold up shop.   That was all hot news last summer and I have a series of posts about it for those wanting a recap with links out to other stories.

• June 14 – New Keepstars and Sotiyos Banned from High Sec Space
• June 15 – The Imperium Withdraws from the Tranquility Trading Consortium
• June 16 –The Tranquility Trading Consortium is Closing Up Shop
• June 18 – TTC Allies Fumble War Dec Mechanics for the Perimeter TTT Keepstar Armor Timer
• June 23 – The Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter
• June 26 – With the Fall of the TTT What Comes Next for Perimeter and Player Markets?
• June 29 – The Shadow of the TTT and Other Updates
• July 3 – The Tranquility Trading Consortium Decides to Stay in Business
• August 2 – Pending Conflict in Perimeter and New Caldari

I was immediately looking for a character close by in a clean… thus expendable… clone that I could jump into the system.  As it turned out, my main had a clean clone in Jita.  I was able to get into Jita 4-4, pic up an Ares travel-ceptor I had sitting there, undock, and slip past the PH camp on the station and the Fraternity camp at the Perimeter gate, and jump into the system where the fight was going down.

That didn’t work out so well.

Things not going well

In EVE Online when you get disconnected you don’t disappear from the game.

I went to log back in and spent about 40 minutes waiting for that to happen, at which point I found that my ship had been blown up.  Oh well.  That put me on the battle report, a win of sorts I guess.

Proof I was there

They did not pod me.  That is fairly common in big tidi fights because it delays your ability to get a fresh ship and get back into the fight.  Even if you self-destruct, that two minute timer runs at 10% tidi, so it becomes a 20 minute timer.   Tidi does funny things.  I got a double notification of my destruction when I was back in the game.

I did not get two payouts, too bad

Having my pod still in tidi was fine with me.  I had no ambitions when it came to the fight, save for seeing a bit of it go down.  I had put on a couple of civilian weapons on my Ares in case there was an opportunity, but that was not longer in the cards.

My first move was to warp to a nearby neutral Astrahus at which I could tether.

Landing on the Astrahus

That was just the first place I could find to warp to.  There were still ~4,200 people in system and the overview was too long to find things since the whole thing was happening on the same grid as the Perimeter gate.  On the Astrahus I loaded up a structures only overview and found our Fortizar on the overview and warped to that.  That was on grid with the fight, so I could sit there and watch.

By that point PH had decided to take their remaining Paladins and leave, with a couple of those unlucky enough to be tackled getting worked over.

That one didn’t get away

By that point the first Sotiyo was already dead, it just didn’t know it yet.  As happened when we blew up the TTC Keepstar, the tidi and the need to process the kill and the asset safety moves meant that the Sotiyo just sat there for a while with zero hit points on the counter, untargetable, but claiming it was repairing.

When a Sotiyo doesn’t know it is dead yet

Eventually there was a wreck on the field where the first Sotiyo had been.

The other Sotiyo was now the focus of the attacking fleets, including a mass of Praxis battleships that were spread out on the field.

The Praxis fleet in the sky

At that point I decided to dock up.  While tidi was at 10% still, the player count was dropping and it seemed I might be able to dock up, get in a ship, then get in a couple of cheap shots just to get on the kill mail.

It took a while to dock, but it finally happened.  Once in the Fortizar I was disappointed to find that there were no ships available on contract.  What kind of a staging Fort was this?  In the end, I had to hit the “board my corvette” button and undock in an Ibis, the least imposing of all the in-game ships that can carry a weapon.

You go to war with the ship you have, not the ship you want I guess.  So I warped over to the remaining Sotiyo and got in there with the many Praxis battleships, set myself to orbit at 500m, turned on my civilian afterburner, and let loose with my civilian gatling railgun.

I’m in there somewhere… maybe…

“Pop! Pop! Pop!” went my gun as I circled the structure… or would have probably, if I had sound turned on.  EVE may have sounds, but I couldn’t testify in court to that.  After a bit of that, I decided to warp back to the Fortizar and watch things play out.  I did succeed on getting on the kill mail.  Way down the list of the 1,907 attackers you will find me and my Ibis.

I got in .0001% of the kill!

Things were still lightening up in system.  The defenders had all fled by that point.  Certainly nobody bothered with by little corvette.

Meanwhile, the battleships finished off the second Sotiyo.  Like the first, it paused for a bit, as if in contemplation of its end, as the results were processed, the changed over to a wreck.  Maybe there was an explosion, but if there was I missed it.  I looked over and just saw the remains.

The Sotiyo wreck

Since you can no longer anchor Sotiyos (or Keepstars) in high security space, there will be no replacement of thes losses.

The battle report showed 4,126 pilots counted as involved, with 1,020 kills.

Battle Report Header

The attackers, Team B, lost more ships, but the defenders lost both the objective and the ISK war.  That isn’t the best battle report.  There are a lot of third parties on it.  But that is the best you generally get in a busy high sec system.

There was a bit of chest thumping on /r/eve from PH about their Paladins taking out a lot of Imperium Rokhs.  And they did take out 131 Rokh battleships, which totaled up to 63.6 billion ISK in losses.  But they left out that they ended up losing 62 Paladins, worth 131 billion ISK.  Trading 2:1 against an opponent when your ship value is 4:1 against the foe isn’t the best trade in my book.

On a side note, Stargrace over at Nomadic Gamer, who has been playing EVE Online recently, stumbled into this fight and reported on what she saw.

I saw her mention the tidi lag on Mastodon and replied with the traditional meme for such occasions.

Time dilation is around our necks in every fight in null sec

MMORPG.com also has a post about the clash yesterday.

So it goes.  The conflict will continue I am sure.  The only question is where the next battlefield will be.  Maybe PH and Frat will attack that Fortizar in their Keepstar’s front yard.