Not an unexpected outcome. As I noted in the post about Friday morning’s fight, the second timer, the armor timer, is viewed as the make or break battle in these situations where an alliance has a lot of assets on the line.
The start point for the final timer was around 09:30 UTC, which put it at 2:30am local time for me. But I set a quiet alarm (hoping not to wake my wife, though I warned her in advance) in order to get up, see if there was a fight, maybe get a couple of screen shots, then to head back to bed. It was, after all, Monday morning and not a holiday.
The alarm went off, barely audible, just enough to wake me up and leave my wife asleep. First success of the op! I had left my computer on and myself logged into the game. After Friday morning’s fight I had just docked up at one of the allied Fortizars on the Keepstar grid, so I just had to undock to see what was going on. There were about 3,200 characters shown in local when I sat down and I undocked to see the Keepstar under attack with no defenders to speak of.
The Keepstar abides for the moment
There were a few hostiles on the undock, some in shuttles, there to watch the kill, and a few in small combat ships looking for opportunistic kills. The structure was already below 70%, so I figured I could warp over, get myself in another 28km orbit, target the Keepstar, and go back to bed and I would get on the kill.
But things were moving along pretty quickly. Tidi was less than 50% and the hit points were getting peeled away. I was getting deflections on about every other shot, which meant that we were putting in close to the most damage that we could. So I decided to sit and watch for a bit.
And, while I was there, I logged my alt in as well, also in the Fortizar, and put him in orbit shooting as well. The could both be on the kill.
As 3am hit at my end, 10:00 UTC, the game popped up the warning that downtime was coming, the daily restart that CCP performs.
An hour away, plenty of time
Things were moving along so fast it looked like events would be done well before downtime hit.
I had a Jackdaw break tether and target me at one point, but we also had people looking for opportunistic kills. He went red box, so I fired at me, but I was moving at 5km a second, so ran out of range long before the missiles could get to me and he disappeared, so I assume somebody got him. One of us, maybe the PDS, I couldn’t find the kill, but not every kill gets posted.
Most of the damage was being done by fighters sent from one of the two Fortizars that we had anchored about 1,500km off of the Keepstar.
Carriers and supers controlling the attacking fighters
So the brackets on view (and graphics off, a unique EVE Online option, as I was trying to keep my alt from taking up too many system resources) showed lots and lots of the small caret symbols that represent fighters orbiting the target or flying over from the Fortizar.
Brackets only view
Those two Fortizars represent the greatest failure in the defense of this Keepstar.
View from the second Fortizar
It was bad enough that Fraternity and PanFam let us have a Fortizar in their staging system. If you were part of World War Bee two years ago you may remember the ferocity with which the Imperium resisted allowing structures being anchored within their primary defense, with a series of ongoing battles over Azbels in 3-DMQT, not to mention the trillions of ISK we burned to destroy four anchoring Keepstars in NPC Delve.
They should have aggressively gone after these structures. But, while they set the first timer a few times, their follow up was not very active considering these Forts were anchored within sight of their staging Keepstar.
And, yes, Fraternity has the opposite time zone problem from us, but they have US/EU allies in PanFam. Oh well.
The damage continued to pull down the structure hit points at quite a clip until about the 30% mark, at which point various groups started cynoing in and getting on grid to get their hits so they too could be on the kill mail.
The Initiative’s Navy Apocs arriving on the Keepstar
That dragged tidi down to under 20%. It was starting to look like downtime could be an issue.
At around 12% hull left another cyno was lit and the big toys dropped in, titans landing between the Keepstar uprights to add their firepower to the attack.
Titans landing and opening fire
That dragged tidi down again and the last 10% took what seemed like a long time to go by… though I was also kind of eager to get back to bed.
But the firepower was enough, and the Keepstar exploded, with the kill recorded at 10:51 UTC.
The explosion dwarfs our titans
The value on that kill mail on zKillboard is way too low, as it values the Keepstar itself at .01 ISK. Add two hundred billion to that total and we’re probably closer to the mark. Over all we’re probably past three trillion ISK destroyed in Pure Blind in March and April. Not a minor war.
Then, even before the after effects of the explosion could finish, the downtime clock was up and advising everybody that the server was coming down.
Better log off or you will be logged off
By that point I had docked up and logged off my alt and was doing the same with my main. It was time to get back to sleep.
Reddit has naturally lit up with propaganda about this, heightened by the fact that Brave is hitting its 10 year anniversary.
Now, with the final of Fraternity’s four Keepstars in Pure Blind destroyed, their year long attack on B2 Coalition has been pushed back to its starting point. Those that could have pulled back into Tribute, forming up in the Keepstar in UMI-KK. But those who could not get all of their stuff out of the Keepstar in X47L-Q, they will have to wait for the 20 day journey to asset safety. Once there in a low sec NPC station (X47L-Q goes to Iitanmadan in Lonetrek, if you want to camp them) they will have to pay 15% of the assessed value of their stuff to unlock it, then move it back to where it is needed.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 