I am the man who arranges the nodes
That run the game of EVE Online
I spin them around and bring some down
Whoops! Was that a battle there?-CCP IT Song, sung to the tune from Tetris
One result of yesterday’s aborted battle at Z9PP-H was that when the reinforce timer for the infrastructure hub in 4-EP12 came up, TEST and friends could not muster a force to finish it off. Not the first time TEST has had problems mustering forces during the war in Fountain. This time though, there were special circumstances.
North Fountain – July 5, 2013
4-EP12 is an important system in that it has the only station in Fountain currently held by the CFC. TEST should have contested it.
The reason TEST couldn’t collect enough forces for a fight over 4-EP12 is that a lot of there fleet is still sitting, logged off, in Z9PP-H. When the node remap error happened, it logged everybody in the system off in place. TEST saved about 100 carriers and an untold number of battleships by simply telling everybody not to log back in.
Immediate problem solved! Though there were still a lot of ships blown up.
Ship kills in ZP99-H in the last 24 hours
Longer term, however, TEST still has to get all of those ships out of the system, which means getting people logged on and safely back to Karan, their staging system in low sec space.
This is not an impossible task. While we know exactly where they are, nobody is keeping a 24/7 watch on the location. As I understand it, they had already managed to slip about 30% of their marooned forces out by the time the CFC started assembling fleets for the 4-EP12 timer. So no joy for TEST.
And no fight for the CFC. We had three Megathron fleets out and about. I managed to get in the second fleet under Vily. And while we expected no battle, we still had to form up and be there to ensure that nothing went awry.
On the way we shot a couple of sovereignty blockade units that had been dropped on CFC held systems and we put the infrastructure hub in Z9PP-H back into reinforce. So there is another timer running and another battle coming.
The timer is counting down again
While we were shooting the ihub in Z99PP-H, one of the logged off TEST pilots decided to try and log in and escape. Some seriously bad timing. He tried to get away, but we caught him on the gate.
Smog890 loses a Vulture
After that it was off to 4-EP12.
In 4-EP12 we stood guard on the ihub for a while, where a TEST bomber fleet actually got a decent run at us. They didn’t kill any Megathrons, but managed to kill off some of our support ships. Their second run failed however and they lost a chunk of their bomber force. The irony of the whole episode is that, had the node remap gone off correctly and not ended the battle at Z99PP-H, TEST would have had a larger number of pilots available today and might have been able to fight for the timer at 4-EP12… though I am guessing TEST would rather have those carriers.
After that, we went off to kill the SBUs that were still on the system and then stood by in a POS while the ihub was repaired. Everything safe and back in place, we were bridged out to J5A. From there it was back to our own staging system to stand down.
Bridging Out
It was mentioned in coms that TEST was having a State of the Alliance meeting while we were out at 4-EP12. I imagine it opened with a prayer of thanks to the patron saint of server administration incompetence. I suspect there will be a recording of the meeting along with a summary up on The Mittani before the day is out.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 