Daily Archives: November 17, 2025

The Glassing of the Drones and the Future of those Regions

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“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

One of the crazy aspects of the collapse of Pandemic Horde as an alliance has been how suddenly everything fell to pieces for them.

As with the Hemingway quote, they seemed to be failing slowly for quite a while… pulling back as we moved forward, giving up whole regions without a fight… and then everything fell apart.

I have a post in mind to trace that path, to put a timeline and some structure around it.  But that is something for another day.  This past week saw the Imperium wrapped up in taking apart the Drone regions, one structure at a time.

That started with the Keepstar in R-AG7W, which feels like it blew up ages ago, but it was just last week.

The Keepstar finally boiling over into a wreck

Then there was a brief respite or maybe a day or two when people moved back to Insmother after the big event when we were deploying back again to the Keepstar we dropped in the system, or to the Keepstar that Solyaris Chtonium sold us, to start setting timers on structures.

I got out there on my main and my alt, each in a Kikimora, each loaded up with Occult, the high damage, short range ammo preferred for structure bashing, and then started going on structure shoot fleets.

My Kikimora on its way

For a few days it was almost bizarre out in the Drone regions it was so quiet.  We had fleets moving all over, but there were almost no hostiles to be seen.  We had temp blued Solyaris Chtonium as part of the Keepstar deal so they could move north to setup shop with Fraternity as WinterCo without us shooting them.  Likewise, Northern Coalition, NCDot, also betrayed by Pandemic Horde, was focused on move ops out of the Drones and into the north.

There were regular camps at a couple of the regional gates getting into the Drone regions, but within the regions itself it was often safe to simply move around on your own.

That changed as the weekend arrived and other groups saw some opportunities to camp gates within the Drones and drop on unwary Imperium pilots lulled into a false sense of security after a few days of quiet.  That led to a titan out shooting structures getting dropped on and destroyed.  Pings went out to remind people not to randomly drive caps around in space where hostiles were hunting.

I was in a fleet of Kikis shooting a Tatara that got hot dropped by Hard Knocks Citizens just as we were almost done.  They blew up a couple of our ships as we warped off, then proceeded to finish off the structure for us, so we all got on that kill mail.  Our job done, we moved on to the next target assigned.  They didn’t follow, but they had a fax in tow, so they weren’t going to chase a bunch of destroyers around.

Kikis moving on to the next target

Target assignments were often a study in chaos management.  There were a couplel hundred timers reports to be on the tracking board that our operational coordination group was using, and as new timers came up we often had to split our fleets or get a timer deep enough in so that we could run off to the next timer and let somebody else follow up and hopefully pick up where we left off before the structure self repair finished.  This meme was posted during one of our fleets on Saturday morning my time.

We were certainly in demand

I have been in more system in the Drone regions in the last few days than I have probably been in the last decade.  And we kept on rolling, gating to the next location and shooting to set the next structure timer.

Kikis orbiting the FC in a Monitor

Even in the chaos, a lot of structures went down.  The Imperium killed five Keepstars on Friday the 14th..

The Keepstar Count for November 14

That is the most Keepstars killed in a single day that I can recall, something that seems confirmed by looking down the list of Keepstar losses over on zKillboard.

I wrote about us blowing up three in a single day back in 2023.  Now the benchmark is five, so it wasn’t as big of a deal when we blew up four more on the 15th I suppose.  We did manage five more within a 24 hour period starting Sunday and ending today.

I did not get on any of those kills.  In fact, I spent so much time on Saturday setting timers that I was starting to think that “No killmails for Kikis” might be on the coord guidelines.  But there was so much to be done that there was no way to keep up with all the timers and get everybody on the big kills.  And I did end up getting on a few.  All I need is a few explosions to be happy.

Another fiery structure death

Overall, a crazy amount of stuff has been destroyed.  More than once we found ourselves shooting the wrong structure because there were so many possible timers.  I burned through at least 15K rounds of Occult, the close range, high damage small Trig ammo.  I saw somebody out in our fleets with a laser fit Gnosis and was jealous.  Lasers are the way to go.  We need a laser doctrine for bashing.

Laser Gnosis shooting a fort

As for the destruction, I haven’t seen a total count yet.  There was a battle report put together for late Thursday to early Friday last week that showed 2.9 trillion ISK destroyed… and less than a billion of it was ours.

Battle Report Header

If you go to that link and scroll down the list, you will see a lot of dead structures.  And that sort of thing carried on all through the weekend.  Somebody will calculate a total at some point I am sure.

Meanwhile, Pandemic Horde has been slimming down to become that smaller, elite PvP organization that was promised in past announcements from their leadership.

Top Ten Alliances – October 15 vs. November 15

Fraternity, Insidious, and The Initiative seem to be the biggest recipients of PH refugees.

I suspect that the outflow isn’t higher because the corps that could negotiate a move because they had a reputation or record to recommend them did.  That left behind smaller and more casual corps, plus all the characters in the PH run corps like Pandemic Horde Inc, A Blessed Bean, and Horde Vanguard have to move on their own, and other alliances are busy with corporation moves and probably ignoring single players.

Then there are the AFK players who are going to come back to a surprise.

And then there is the future of the Drone regions.  Asher posted an update to Reddit last night that said the following:

Here is the path going forward:

Sov: We intend to hold the ihub in G-QTSD and nowhere else. Please start attempting to take sov on Wednesday, we kindly ask if you are taking sov ignore the Imperium glassing fleets, they will do the same to you. The slower it goes for us the longer we’ll be in your future space.

Structures: We have glassed many trillions of isk in structures, at one point our timerboard had 635 timers on it. The majority are dead but many still remain which we will be destroying over the next week. If you want to move in – any structure that begins anchoring Saturday the 22nd eve time 00:01 will be considered safe from glassing. We will not destroy any structure that begins anchoring after this time. We may still finish up previous timers after this date expires but we plan to undeploy from the dronelands by the end of this coming weekend.

Freeports: Freeport keepstars are in LXQ2-T, 9WVY-F, and F9-FUV. These will contains markets but not jump clones. They will be freeports open to all alliances except Pandemic Horde. You may use them for logistics security, to stage out of, whatever you desire. We are intentionally not putting cloning in to make them less desirable than setting up your own citadel. We will not be holding sov in these freeport systems, you are free to take the sov, moons, etc but not cyno jam the system. We will defend the keepstars from refs – we will reset sov/destroy cyno jammers as needed, so that general logistics security is assured in the dronelands.

Overall our hope is that you can find a space where you can grow and flourish. We have burnt down the old monoculture renting forest and we hope a thriving ecosystem will grow. We will not be enforcing byzantine agreements or trying to force people into a fake nullsec with rules meant to keep you from playing the game. Good luck in the dronelands!

So we will continue burning things down until we’re done.  Some groups have already started moving into the region.  We actually hit Keepstar in a system that Brotherhood of Spacers, who used to live in Venal until WinterCo pushed them out in the B2 war, and they pulled out a titan and gave us a ride to our next destination.  We were clearing out their future home after all.

A B0SS titan waiting to give us a ride

We did get a little frisky when Asher warped us over to one of their structures and some people started shooting it… I mean, it is what we had been doing for days, right?  No harm no foul though, it was just the shield that took a few hits.

Overall it has been a busy few days… week… however long it has been since we jumped into the region feet first.  My participation count is up considerably from past months.

What have I been up to?

That number isn’t a brag… I’d get laughed out of any contest with just that number given how many ops some people are running.  I went on fleets with Reageaan at opposite ends of the clock where I slept in between and I am pretty sure he did not.  And we get credit for every account that goes along, so I dual-boxed some fleets.  But that means that guy with 6 Catalysts in every op I went on was getting 3x to 6x the credit.  The number is just an indicator of how much time I’ve spent playing relative to the past couple of months. (That number went up to 50 as I went on ops while writing this, but didn’t want to take a new screen shot.  Also, coord gives us bonus credit occasionally for long or annoying ops, so that Woosi fleet where we were sent all over space got us triple credit.)

Soon enough we’ll be done, the Drone regions will be clear and we’ll head home and see what develops in this new open section of null sec.

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