Talk has already started about what various groups are going to do after the war in the north lapses. In part this has been predicated on the assumption that once Circle of Two has been driven out of Fade and their structures destroyed that victory will be declared and the Imperium will go back to accumulating its huge pile of wealth in Delve. However, during The Meta Show on Saturday The Mittani did suggest that we might stay in the north so long as we were getting fights in the Fade region, so we may be sticking around for a while.
Fade forces disposition… for the moment
Either way we have a couple of tasks left. Back in July the CO2 Keepstar in DW-T2I was saved from destruction when the Imperium apparently didn’t know who cynojammer mechanics worked.
I guess we know the answer
That was a setback to the Imperium drive to hit CO2. There were other targets though, so the Imperium went after the NCDot staging Keepstar in X47L-Q where the armor and final hull timer battles saw dozens of titans die along with the citadel.
There were also NCDot and PL allied Keepstars in low sec that were take out.
On the southern front, the was seems to have petered out with Fraternity attempting to anchor and subsequently losing a Keepstar of their own. What with all of that and the two Keepstar battles in the south earlier, it has been the war of the Keepstars.
During all of that there has been an ongoing entosis campaign in Fade as the Imperium has attempted to remove cynojammers as a factor in the region, allowing it to drop its super captial force at will. The pressure has been on and the north has formed up to defend the critical infrastructure hubs that allow cynojammers to be anchored. But the Imperium has pushed forward, system by system, until last week when the ihub in DW-T2I was finally taken.
With that task complete, the CO2 Keepstar was reinforced very shortly there after.
On Saturday fleets assembled for the second of the three events needed to take down the Keepstar, the armor time. Most of this had been happening in EU prime time during the week, when I have been at work. But on Saturday I was able to get to the staging system in 6RCQ-V. With the ping fleets were assembling and filling up.
I managed to make it into one of the Baltec fleets, with Thomas Lear in command. Asher the Sky Marshall was in overall command of the multi-fleet operation. We started moving out in a relatively short time span given that more than a thousand characters were logged in and in fleets. The captial ship component jumped off on their own while the subcaps flew off to titans for jump bridges.
Waiting for our turn to bridge
With no cynojammer available to keep us out, we bridged straight into DW-T2I. Looking over at the timer on the Keepstar, it was clear we were there early.
Armor Timer Counting Down
We were clearly not leaving anything to chance.
In previous Keepstar fights the armor timer had been heavily contested, so we were there and on grid with the structure to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues on that front.
On arrival we tethered up on the friendly Fortizar that had been anchored on the same grid as the Keepstar and waited for instructions.
Watching the Keepstar
We had not been hanging off the Fortizar for too long before Asher announced from the command channel that the locals were not going to defend the timer. There would be no fight, no tidi, no clash of capital ships.
It was also about then that I think people began to notice that Asher had the Real Ultimate Power theme song running on speakers in the background throughout the operation, as every time he keyed up it was there to hear. The YouTube version of the song had been discovered earlier in the week and I am pretty sure he had been playing it non-stop ever since. Like ninjas, Sky Marshals are also mammals and are also fight all the time.
Except when the enemy doesn’t show up.
While the enemy was now not expected to take the field we still piled into the system, likely both as a show of force and to keep the locals from changing their mind.
A few tasks were handed out as we waited for the timer. Our fleet warped over to an Athanor mining platform in the system to reinforce it.
Baltecs shooting a structure
Being in Reavers, shooting structures is practically a way of life. With a full fleet though that did not last very long. Soon we were back hanging off the Fortizar on our tethers wondering if anything would happen as the timer for the Keepstar counted down.
A supercarrier fleet jumped to the Fortizar and tethered up above us with heavy interdictors putting up defensive warp disruption bubbles around the supers to keep anybody from warping directly on top of them.
The supers in their orange hictor bubbles
Fighters from the super fleet were tasked to do the actual attack on the Keepstar and most of the voice coms traffic involved getting their fighters deployed and to the right location. Even that coms traffic died off after not too long and things were pretty quiet.
I took off my headset and let coms play through my speakers while I made a snack.
As I ate that I started to sketch out some ideas in a blog post draft that eventually took form and became the post about acquisitions and CCP that went live on Saturday. I suppose it is a productive fleet if I end up with two blog posts out of it.
The timer came out and the supers hit the Keepstar. As expected, there was not much in the way of resistance. A few CO2 pilots undocked to try for targets of opportunity and a Pandemic Horde interceptor fleet shadowed us coming and going, but neither were going to change the expected result. The Keepstar itself was gunned and managed to pick off Xenuria when he strayed too close and got hit by the PDS. But the fighters were successful in getting through the armor of the citadel and the timer for the final event was set.
Count down to destruction
That timer puts the final fight on this coming Thursday Wednesday. With the timer set in DW-T2I we withdrew back to our own staging in 6RCQ-V.
Rumor has it that the final timer will not be contested either as CO2 is already well under way evacuating assets to the Keepstar in DO6H-Q. However, the ihub in DO6H-Q was also taken by the Imperium over the weekend, leaving the Keepstar there unprotected by a cynojammer. It seems quite likely that we will stick around until that too has been destroyed.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 