As so many of my New Eden tales begin, I dropped into the chair in front of my computer at just the right moment to see a directorbot ping
(7:35:49 PM) directorbot@goonfleet.com: NOT A DRILL, THERE IS A 2000 MAN BRAWL IN LOWSEC AND YOU ARE NOT HERE YET JOIN THIS FLEET
That was just the sort of adventure I was up for on a Friday night. My wife and I had eaten an early dinner, watched a show, and now she was looking at TikTok on her phone and I had time to join a fleet headed for danger.
Dave Archer was our FC and we were heading out in a Sacrilege fleet almost immediately after I got into game and into the fleet. There was adjustment to the default fit for the Sacs, but we were undocking before I could get that sorted so I just went along as we burned into Aridia where a wormhole awaited us. Dave had us offline our armor plates, a bit of magic that reduces the mass of our ships even though the plates are still with us, before we passed through to make sure we didn’t collapse our route too quickly. Then it was into the hole.
Wormhole travel time
That dropped us into The Citadel region, where we headed for Tama and the boarder with high sec. We then had to run the high sec gauntlet to our destination. I used to laugh when we had to go to high sec because somebody always has low sec status or shoots the wrong person due to null sec standings, which mean nothing in high sec. And then there was the Triglavian invasion and now high sec has an annoying number of EDENCOM gunstars that will shoot me because I sided with the Trigs in one fight ages ago and carry a -0.02 standing with EDENCOM. Life in New Eden.
Our destination was Ahbazon, a choke point low sec system that is always in the top ten locations for destruction when I look at the MER every month. My alts have died to smart bombing gate camps when taking a shortcut through that system more than once.
We were going into Abhazon because Deepwater Hooligans had reinforced a GSF Fortizar anchored in the system, no doubt objecting to the obnoxious paint scheme some director had chosen for it.
At least it wasn’t pink this time
The Hooligans had won the armor timer earlier in the week so this was the final fight. We had formed up in Rokhs and Brave came along in Tempest Fleet Issues, with dread available if things escalated.
And things escalated. Hooligans brought dreads, while PanFam and Frat showed up in subcaps. Then more dreads showed up. Then Snuffed Out showed up to kill Hooligans, and soon the system had about 2K people in it.
All that happened before our fleet even formed, so we got to skip the preliminaries. Meeting engagements are always bloody. We had made a quick stop along the way in a low sec station to update our fits, so I was aligned with the fleet… though in my hurry to swap modules and undock, I left the modules I removed behind in the station. Oops.
So when we finally hit Abhazon everybody had settled down into a close range slugging match near the Fortizar. There were also more than 2,300 pilots in system and, even though Abhazon had been clearly put on its own server in anticipation of this fight (no tidi in adjacent systems) those numbers were still enough to bring everything down to 10% time dilation and make command responses sluggish.
The situation as we entered
I joked on Twitter, when I posted that image, that I am so bad at EVE Online that I only play in max tidi because I can only keep up when the game is running at 10% of normal speed. I do certainly seem to spend a lot of my combat time in tidi.
Once we loaded in, we pointed at the ball of dreads and Dave warped us in.
Into the brawl we go
You can see a mix of hulls and the red flashes of more capitals dropping into the fight.
One of our refits had been a warp scrambler II and our instructions were to get in, pick a hostile dread… being careful not to shoot any of our temporary allies in that fight… tackle and neut it while shooting the called primary and putting drones on whatever else seemed opportune.
Then it was targeting and shooting and watching things blow up. Somebody even brought a some big toys to the party.
Is that a doomsday or a lancer dread? I can’t tell
At one point Dave too particular exception to a Phoenix near him and we spent some time burning that down.
Phoenix becomes the focus for us
That Phoenix seemed particularly sturdy and it took a while to neut his capacitor down, though once that happened he quickly succumbed to our fire.
Phoenix brewing up
Also, I have to say I do like the alliance logo placement on the Revelation. You can see the Brave logo on the back of that Rev in the foreground.
At one point a third party in a Scorpion warped into the middle of the brawl and, fit with a mix of smartbomb, just sat there hitting everybody close by in hopes of padding their kill board with some high value kill mails.
Scorpion sits and lighting everybody up
They happened to be close to me so I started to neut them and put my scram on them just because I found them to be annoying. Not long after they were called as a target and were blown up. Somebody linked the kill mail in fleet, but did not post it to zKillboard, so it doesn’t appear there. [Addendum: The kill finally showed up.]
After a bit Dave had us anchor up and we swept around the grid shooting at targets.
Exploding dreads and wrecks dotting the field
By that point the objective, the Fortizar timer, had been won and the structure saved and the hostiles were evacuating the field. Some stragglers were caught, but things quickly went quiet, with the numbers in system dropping and the tidi relaxing.
The battle report shows about a trillion ISK destroyed in the fight.
The battle report header
Battle reports in a low sec system with a lot of third parties showing up or passing through always have some issues as not everybody on the report was in the fight or necessarily on one side or another. But the bulk of the participants were in a few obvious groups, and over 800 billion of that loss number was made up of 111 dreads from those groups.
We hung out for a bit as the capitals withdrew and people looted the field.
Tethered on the Fort waiting for the trip home
When we did finally turn for home, we were given the first free burn destination as Tama, but when jumping into Hykkota, the first high sec system on the gauntlet, we found Pandemic Horde and Fraternity waiting on the other side, camping the gate, ready to shoot us.
My Sac got tackled and popped… I had been pre-aligned to the gate out, so I was one of the first through and into the camp. Fools rush in and all that. So I didn’t have to worry if the wormhole route home had collapsed.
The view of the gate from my pod
I docked my pod up in a station and clone jumped home. It is sometimes handy to have a pod stashed somewhere close to a flash point like Ahbazon.
The gate camp was perhaps less successful than PH and Frat had hoped. They apparently shot a TNT pilot, and alliance they hadn’t war dec’d, and that brought CONCORD down on a chunk of their fleet, so they lost ISK war with their surprise according to the battle report.
The other Battle Report header
All in all a bit of fun on a Friday night. Like any decent party it was best to arrive fashionably late so that all the warm ups were done and everybody was down to business.
A few more dread kills on my record, and another loss as well. But the alliance gave me 260 million ISK to replace the loss and I turned around and spent that and my insurance payout and bought another Sacrilege off contract back in the 1DQ1-A Keepstar. Ready to go for next time.
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