Tag Archives: Fraternity

Ahbazon Fight Sees 100+ Dreads Destroyed over Fortizar Hull Timer

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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.

Related:

Two TTC Sotiyos Destroyed in Perimeter Brawl

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There has been a low level conflict going on in null sec, with Imperium and The Initiative facing off against Pandemic Horde and Fraternity for a while now.  Neither side has been stoked for a full scale invasion… in part because CCP has said they will be making changes to null sec, something that makes everybody nervous… so there have been clashes in the southeast, where Pandemic Horde had already been in violation of the now lapsed agreement.  They and Fraternity have pushed into Catch, where the latter dropped a Keepstar then did a whole lot of nothing.

The Imperium, in a counter move, dropped a Fortizar on the grid with their Keepstar in F4R2-Q, which literally caused PH to evac a bunch of ships back to their previous forward base.  Both structures have been reinforced multiple times but neither side has managed to blow up the other’s citadel.

The stalemate in F4R2-Q

I do not have much first hand information about this conflict because it has primarily been taking place immediately after downtime, which is the only time zone PH can get Fraternity support, so is the only time zone they will engage in.   Since downtime is at 4am local time for me, I have been giving the whole thing a miss.  You can tell the conflict is mostly posturing because the propaganda on Reddit has been horrible all around. There really hasn’t been anything worth alarm clocking over.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I woke up and logged into various apps and noticed reports of a fight going on in Perimeter, a busy high sec system one jump from Jita and one time home of the Tranquility Trading Tower, the one time high sec Keepstar trading hub, the wreck of which still haunts the system.

Remember the TTT – Once it was anchored here

Even the official EVE Online Twitter account took a moment away from promoting Vanguard to make mention of the fight.  I knew that the Tranquility Trading Consortium’s structures in that high sec system had been one of the fronts that we had been pushing back against.  But now I saw there were something around 5K pilots in Perimeter and that the pair of Sotiyos the TTC still had anchored there were under attack.

Their two Sotiyos on the old Keepstar grid

For those needing to come up to speed, the TTC broke up when the Imperium pulled out of the agreement, which was supposed to lead to its dissolution according to TTC leader Vily.  That led to the destruction of their high sec Keepstar, but Vily wanted some more ISK so reneged on his statements that the whole thing would fold up shop.   That was all hot news last summer and I have a series of posts about it for those wanting a recap with links out to other stories.

I was immediately looking for a character close by in a clean… thus expendable… clone that I could jump into the system.  As it turned out, my main had a clean clone in Jita.  I was able to get into Jita 4-4, pic up an Ares travel-ceptor I had sitting there, undock, and slip past the PH camp on the station and the Fraternity camp at the Perimeter gate, and jump into the system where the fight was going down.

That didn’t work out so well.

Things not going well

In EVE Online when you get disconnected you don’t disappear from the game.

I went to log back in and spent about 40 minutes waiting for that to happen, at which point I found that my ship had been blown up.  Oh well.  That put me on the battle report, a win of sorts I guess.

Proof I was there

They did not pod me.  That is fairly common in big tidi fights because it delays your ability to get a fresh ship and get back into the fight.  Even if you self-destruct, that two minute timer runs at 10% tidi, so it becomes a 20 minute timer.   Tidi does funny things.  I got a double notification of my destruction when I was back in the game.

I did not get two payouts, too bad

Having my pod still in tidi was fine with me.  I had no ambitions when it came to the fight, save for seeing a bit of it go down.  I had put on a couple of civilian weapons on my Ares in case there was an opportunity, but that was not longer in the cards.

My first move was to warp to a nearby neutral Astrahus at which I could tether.

Landing on the Astrahus

That was just the first place I could find to warp to.  There were still ~4,200 people in system and the overview was too long to find things since the whole thing was happening on the same grid as the Perimeter gate.  On the Astrahus I loaded up a structures only overview and found our Fortizar on the overview and warped to that.  That was on grid with the fight, so I could sit there and watch.

By that point PH had decided to take their remaining Paladins and leave, with a couple of those unlucky enough to be tackled getting worked over.

That one didn’t get away

By that point the first Sotiyo was already dead, it just didn’t know it yet.  As happened when we blew up the TTC Keepstar, the tidi and the need to process the kill and the asset safety moves meant that the Sotiyo just sat there for a while with zero hit points on the counter, untargetable, but claiming it was repairing.

When a Sotiyo doesn’t know it is dead yet

Eventually there was a wreck on the field where the first Sotiyo had been.

The other Sotiyo was now the focus of the attacking fleets, including a mass of Praxis battleships that were spread out on the field.

The Praxis fleet in the sky

At that point I decided to dock up.  While tidi was at 10% still, the player count was dropping and it seemed I might be able to dock up, get in a ship, then get in a couple of cheap shots just to get on the kill mail.

It took a while to dock, but it finally happened.  Once in the Fortizar I was disappointed to find that there were no ships available on contract.  What kind of a staging Fort was this?  In the end, I had to hit the “board my corvette” button and undock in an Ibis, the least imposing of all the in-game ships that can carry a weapon.

You go to war with the ship you have, not the ship you want I guess.  So I warped over to the remaining Sotiyo and got in there with the many Praxis battleships, set myself to orbit at 500m, turned on my civilian afterburner, and let loose with my civilian gatling railgun.

I’m in there somewhere… maybe…

“Pop! Pop! Pop!” went my gun as I circled the structure… or would have probably, if I had sound turned on.  EVE may have sounds, but I couldn’t testify in court to that.  After a bit of that, I decided to warp back to the Fortizar and watch things play out.  I did succeed on getting on the kill mail.  Way down the list of the 1,907 attackers you will find me and my Ibis.

I got in .0001% of the kill!

Things were still lightening up in system.  The defenders had all fled by that point.  Certainly nobody bothered with by little corvette.

Meanwhile, the battleships finished off the second Sotiyo.  Like the first, it paused for a bit, as if in contemplation of its end, as the results were processed, the changed over to a wreck.  Maybe there was an explosion, but if there was I missed it.  I looked over and just saw the remains.

The Sotiyo wreck

Since you can no longer anchor Sotiyos (or Keepstars) in high security space, there will be no replacement of thes losses.

The battle report showed 4,126 pilots counted as involved, with 1,020 kills.

Battle Report Header

The attackers, Team B, lost more ships, but the defenders lost both the objective and the ISK war.  That isn’t the best battle report.  There are a lot of third parties on it.  But that is the best you generally get in a busy high sec system.

There was a bit of chest thumping on /r/eve from PH about their Paladins taking out a lot of Imperium Rokhs.  And they did take out 131 Rokh battleships, which totaled up to 63.6 billion ISK in losses.  But they left out that they ended up losing 62 Paladins, worth 131 billion ISK.  Trading 2:1 against an opponent when your ship value is 4:1 against the foe isn’t the best trade in my book.

On a side note, Stargrace over at Nomadic Gamer, who has been playing EVE Online recently, stumbled into this fight and reported on what she saw.

I saw her mention the tidi lag on Mastodon and replied with the traditional meme for such occasions.

Time dilation is around our necks in every fight in null sec

MMORPG.com also has a post about the clash yesterday.

So it goes.  The conflict will continue I am sure.  The only question is where the next battlefield will be.  Maybe PH and Frat will attack that Fortizar in their Keepstar’s front yard.

Action in Cloud Ring at W-4NUU

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The two major null sec blocs, PandaFam and whatever we’re calling the Imperium plus The Initiative these days, clashed at W-4NUU up in Cloud Ring on Saturday over a Fortizar that Pandemic Horde had dropped in the system.

On grid with the Fortizar

During the whole fight, mistakes were made.  PanFam certainly made some.  But I made even more.  We’ll get to me in a bit, but first an overview of the fight.

With the collapse of B2 Coalition earlier this month, the situation in the north has been in flux as those B2 groups joining the Imperium have been evacuating down through Fountain and into Delve and the south while PandaFam, which is primarily made up of Fraternity and Pandemic Horde, have been attempting to consolidate their gains.  The current coalition map from the daily null sec sovereignty page.

The bi-polar state of null sec – Nov 19, 2023

The Imperium, through its new members like Brave and We Form Blob, still technically owns space north of Fountain, but is in the process of giving it all up to consolidate back in the southwest.  Cloud Ring, the last buffer region before Fountain and The Initiative is in the process of being drawn down.  Structures there are either being unanchored or sold to The Initiative, which has a vested interest in its norther boarder.

Pandemic Horde has been pushing ahead with a goal stated to their membership of bringing the Imperium to battle.  From Gobbins, the PH leader.

Gobbins states his intent

They want to drive conflict in the Cloud Ring and Catch regions.  They are looking for fights.  They want to “find ways to drag goons to the battlefield and kill them.”

Towards this end the dropped a Fortizar in W-4NUU, a system held by SL0W CHILDREN AT PLAY, who isn’t actually allied with the Imperium, but who is now in the way between two giant coalitions.  That developed into a fight on Saturday, November 18th, which went poorly for PandaFam.

They showed up early, in force, with capital ships on the field.  The Imperium and The Initiative arrived later, and bridged onto a neutral Astrahus that the locals owned and warped into tackle the Fortizar to deny PandaFam that foothold in Cloud Ring.

The Imperium and The Initiative brought with them one major advantage… about a thousand more people.

The battle report tells the tale.

Battle Report Header

PandaFam began to lose and then started trying to extract from the fight as the Imperium and The Initiative… can we call them I2 or IL2 or Sturmovik Coalition or something… tried to pin them down and destroy them in detail.  PandaFam lost both the objective… their Fortizar was destroyed… as well as the ISK war.  They were losing dreads long after they had given up.

After the fact Gobbins attempted to wave this away by saying that The Initiative formed unexpectedly well, though I might direct him to the DOTLAN alliance page that shows them being in the top five alliances by membership. (Also, what does it say when an alliance with less than half as many members out forms your alliance?  There is a rich vein of snark to be mined there.)

Top five Alliance by membership – Nov 19, 2023

Gobbins saying that Asher paid them off for a win to keep The Mittani from retaking Goonswarm (Mittens was on The Meta Show to talk about the Jay Amazingness betrayal) was clearly a joke, though a bit lame.

So PandaFam got its clock cleaned and and pushed back in Cloud Ring for the moment.  The saddest part for Imperium members was that, even though Jay’s Nightmare and Succubus were blown up, he escaped being podded by making it into tether range.

If there was a pod people wanted to destroy, it was that one

My own participation in the battle at 4-WNUU was perhaps a bit less glorious.

The whole thing kicked off in EU time while I was still asleep and by the time I was up and at my computer there was a call going out for reinforcements.  I got in that fleet and we made our way from 1DQ1-A up to J5A-IX and then into Cloud Ring where we bridged in on that Astrahus I mentioned.

Waiting to bridge, always the prelude to battle it seems… also, POS forever

I was in a hurry and didn’t have one of the main line doctrine ships handy, so grabbed an Oneiros that had just arrived back home in the SMA of somebody’s capital ship.

From the Astrahus we had to warp to the TCU and then to the fleet commander, who was NotAlvin.  However, when we landed in system… the servers were bearing the brunt of the fight.  It was time to get the server calls window up to see how long commands were taking to respond.  It took quite a while to even get on grid, during which time I posted a Tweet about the situation.

Let me tell you how it is going

In something of an experiment, I was posting to BlueSky and Mastodon as well.  That it got traction on Twitter and little response on the other services… because the EVE Online community is still heavily on Twitter… explains a lot about why I remain on Twitter.  (This Tweet got even more traction.  I feel like I could build a post out of that one.  Of course, I built a post out of the first one, this post.)

I managed to get on grid and tried to get myself anchored up.  Things were difficult because fleet chat was intermittently broken, broadcasts were taking a long time to get through, so my attempt to rep people who needed it was largely ineffective.  My contribution to the effort was minimal at best.

That is the sum total of my successful reps – 131 armor points repaired

Meanwhile, I was having trouble staying with the fleet.  I seemed to be about 40-75km away, only catching up when myself and the fleet commander ended up on reciprocal courses.

Here they come!

It was about then that I decided to check my fit.  Like most of our doctrine logi fits, the Oneiros is supposed to carry with it both afterburner and microwarp drive fits.  Apparently the last time I used this ship it was for an AB doctrine.  I was never going to keep up with the MWD Sacrileges.  So, after having flown so deeply into the bubbles on grid, I turned around and headed out again.  That took a while, but I was eventually able to warp off.

Heading away from the battle

Getting docked up in the Astrahus was its own test of patience and refitting… oh my, let me just say that the server was not happy with the fact that I had repackaged and stacked three modules I wanted to fit to the ship after unfitting what was in the high slots.

Finally refit, it was time to undock and warp back to the battle.  Somewhere in there I took a break to take a shower and get dressed for the day.  I left myself on grid, burning to catch up with the fleet, half hoping somebody would pop me and I could get a quick ride home.  But you can never depend on your foes for even that.

I never really got caught up again, and our fleet stopped taking so much damage in any case, so there wasn’t much to help out with.

Meanwhile, real life was looming.  We were now past noon at my end and I had things to do.  Once again I pointed myself at the Astrahus and motored through all the bubbles until I was able to warp, dock up safely, and log off.

The neutral Astrahus

Things went on from there.  I missed the delayed Imperium fireside where Asher reviewed the battle and made announcements about changes to doctrine and such.

Later in the evening I got back online.  I was still in 4-WNUU and local was still broken, but it seemed quiet enough.  I decided to exit through the back door to Okagaiken because Cloud Ring is usually full of camps, especially on a Saturday night with 25K people online.

This violated my usual personal rule of never trying to do this sort of thing unless the online count is under 20K and, to punish me for ignoring this, and for foolishly warping straight to the Okagaiken gate, I got caught up in a drag bubble.  Well, I figured at least I had insured.

But the bubble was being run by the locals and they opened up a chat and wished me a safe journey home after the big fight of the day.  That was very kind of them and I wished them luck and happy trails in return.  Once in low sec I set my course for home.

Going through high sec a lot of the way

I made it out of low sec and into high sec, when I was held up at the expected choke point of Ahbazon, the low sec choke point between The Forge and Genesis region.  It is that first orange square on my route.

Again, a busy hour, so of course somebody was camping the gate, but I saw them as soon as the overview loaded and was able to MWD back to the gate with my hardeners overheated.  I docked up back in Hykkota and did something else for a while.

On returning I found the gate in Ahbazon clear and made it to the other side safely and began heading towards Querious.  But in the pipe between Kihtaled and Badivefi I got caught by an interceptor with a war dec against us.  Him I was not too worried about.  One again I turned on my hardeners and MWD and headed back to the gate.  He forgot to web me until I was almost to the gate, something I commented on in local.  But even had he done that, he was never going to peel away the armor on the Oneiros with just his ship, and if he had friends they were late coming.

Off to do something else for a while, then back to it.  Once I was into Querious and onto the Ansiblex network, it was smooth sailing.  I was back home and safe, ready for whatever was next.

All of which is another example of how, behind every big battle or event, there are a thousand tales like my own about what happened to each and every one of us who, however briefly, came into contact in our journeys.  My tales are just more mistake prone than most.

Related:

Collapse in the North: B2 Joins the Imperium after 18 Months Under Attack

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But once again, there were four major powers in the game.  We had PanFam. We had Winter Coalition, we had Imperium, and we had B2. After that, PanFam and Frat decided to try to force B2 to bend the knee to them, and then began what would be a year and a half long campaign against them.

-Asher Elias, Imperium Fireside Nov. 4, 2023

Saturday saw announcements in multiple corp and alliance meetings that B2 coalition was no longer able to keep resisting the now 18 month attack by Fraternity and its PanFam allies and would effectively be dissolving.

While I do not know the disposition of all groups within B2, many of them will be joining the Imperium, which acted as an ally during the struggle against Fraternity and PanFam.

B2, which was the youngest of the large null sec coalitions, was supported by the Imperium in an attempt to keep null sec from becoming a strictly bipolar proposition yet again.  This desire for a more diverse set of alignments in null sec was also the stated reason for The Initiative leaving the the Imperium back in June.

Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, said on Saturday’s fireside that he had felt is was important to try to help B2 establish itself, but it had barely had time to settle after the end of World War Bee/Beeitnam in 2021 before Fraternity set upon it.

While the war in the north did see some epic fights… the peak for me was when we destroyed Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47, which required the attackers to win the armor timer through the downtime outage, even if they did just anchor a new one… much of the war was prosecuted by the attackers in what Asher described as “the most boring way possible.”

I know this was meant as a dig at Fraternity and PanFam, pointing out that they were not interested in fun or good fights. And there is the whole time zone effect of Frat being heavily in Chinese time while much of the Imperium and B2 live in EU and US time zones.

For me though it is really more of an indictment of CCP’s Aegis sovereignty system, which has historically been so tedious that the way to win wars is to be able to endure things like six hour see-saw ihub fights ,chasing nodes back and forth across a constellation hoping to simply outlast your opponent.  Maybe they’ll finally get tired and go to bed and we’ll win… says both sides as they work on hacking the next node.  If you want to win a sov war, you have to weaponize the tedium.  We’ve done it, they’ve done it, and we’ll all likely do it again.

B2 hung on and managed to defend its space for well over a year without losing one of those grinding ihub fights.  But every tank has its limits and the last couple of weeks saw Fraternity and PanFam start to make headway against B2 in Deklein.  Things were starting to come apart for B2.

It wasn’t what The Mittani used to like to call a “failure cascade” yet, but the writing was on the wall.  B2 was tired of the war and Fraternity, sensing the inevitability of their victory, would only offer extremely bad terms for peace.  Fraternity was reported to be demanding that B2 pay reparations, give up territory, and forswear any cooperation with the Imperium, in return for which Fraternity said they would stop the war for now without even the most superficial guarantees on their own future behavior, such as a non-invasion pact.  It was an offer to become Fraternity’s pet in the most degrading fashion.  They would be required to respect and obey Frat, but not be an actual ally so they would be open to being farmed for content by Frat and PanFam whenever either was bored.

B2 chose to leave their space, and much of the coalition will fold into the Imperium.

Brave, Severance, We Form Blob, Scumlords, and Fanatic Legion will be joining the Imperium as alliances, or as corporations to be part of the Goonswarm Federation.

Having destroyed their former PAPI ally FI.RE in the south earlier this year, some of which joined B2, Fraternity and PanFam have now secured a bipolar null sec once more, where all the major powers stand on one side or the other.  There are, of course, the usual complaints about null sec devolving into a dual opposing coalition situation once more, with the recent round summed up nicely in this cartoon posted to Reddit.

Posted to /r/eve by AMD_Best_D

Looking at the sov map, the only truly unaligned space in null sec right now is in the the southeast, in FI.RE’s former territory, which was left open by an agreement between the major null sec powers in order to be a place where new alliances could try their hand at null sec… oh, and Providence, where CVA and Provibloc have once again established themselves.  Good for them.

Null Sec Sov – Nov 4, 2023

Now the evacuation begins.

For those of us in the Imperium the matter is fairly straightforward.  We have been stages in a Brave Keepstar in DO6H-Q in Fade for quite a while now.  We need to collect up our belongings and bring them back to Delve.  After a quiet time we had ramped up our participation up north, bringing capital ships into play again, so there is a lot to move.

Dreads undocking for the first jump from DO6

Getting back to Cloud Ring and the front line of Imperium space is the first step.  As always seems to happen, a couple weeks after I decided to commit some more ships up north it is now time to bring them back home.

A move op fleet landing at our front line Keepstar in Cloud Ring

For the B2 coalition members, the effort will be much greater.  They have to pack up their lives and move them out of the space that is being abandoned.  Structures will end up being lost and there will be piles of stuff moving to asset safety as stuff gets left behind.  People taking a break from the game will find their stuff in a low sec station at some future date.  While better than having it all locked in a station deep in null sec, the way it used to be, having to reclaim a mountain of goods from asset safety can be demoralizing in its own way.

Though, who knows, maybe Fraternity will pull The Initiative’s play and let the fuel run out on some of them to create loot pinatas… though Frat would at least not be doing that to their allies.

There is a lot of work to be done, both by the attackers and those leaving the war zone.  That will keep everybody busy for some time.  But the new front lines have been drawn.

After things have settled, after our old and new friends have gotten themselves set up in the coalition (Brave might have a choice of old stomping grounds to choose from for a home in Imperium space) the friction between to the two major blocs will begin again.

Maybe conflict will resume in the north where the two blocs are face to face.  Maybe the unaligned space in the southeast will become the next battleground.  Or maybe we’ll go back to trying to take down what is now the PanFam trading tower consortium in the systems around Jita.

People often proclaim in times like this that null sec is dead, that war is over, that hegemony has set in.  (There are half a dozen new posts on r/eve right now with that theme.)  Bad historical analogies are trotted out.  EVE Online is declared, once more, to be dying.

First known occurrence of “EVE is Dying”

But no situation remains static forever.  We have been forced into these situations before.  At the end of the Halloween war, after the collapse of the Russians, it was the Imperium and PanFam/NCDot rental empire.  The Moneybadger Coalition unified much of null sec during the Casino War, only to turn and eat its own.  Back in 2018 Fraternity pushed Legacy Coalition to ally with the Imperium, creating another bipolar null sec which eventually changed up.  And that change up was when almost the whole of null sec blued up as PAPI to make a costly and eventually unsuccessful run at driving the Imperium out of null sec.

All of these situations passed.  War always finds a way.

One thing is different though.  In years past I would have linked out to a few blogs and a couple of EVE Online focused news sites for other perspectives.  Amusingly, I saw in the Down the Rabbit Hole documentary (which I posted about on Friday) a quote complaining that consolidated New Eden news sites like what is now Imperium News killed EVE blogging.  A bad take even when it was made (if nothing else, such sites pre-dated TheMittani.com), it would be nice if we actually had posts from Imperium News, New Eden Post, and EN24 to compare and contrast.

These days, a few threads on Reddit is all one can count on.  That is where the news and the propaganda war collide for New Eden these days.  The real worry, for me, is that the player infrastructure around EVE Online, is wasting away.  That, more than any momentary situation in null sec, is a far more dire sign in my book.

Addendum: No doubt that B2 and the Imperium starting to move out of the north contributed to Sunday, Nov 5, being the peak concurrent day for players in 2023 so far.

Related:

Some Days You Just Sit on the Titan

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We had been warned over the last couple of weeks that a push might be coming from out foes in the north.  It is a holiday week in China and we were told that Fraternity would be trying to harness the free time of the core of its membership in order to make gains in Pure Blind and Deklein.

So it was no surprise when the call for fleets popped up on Sunday morning while I was finishing my breakfast.  Okay, maybe it was a bit of a surprise because I had forgotten about the whole thing, but I remembered when the fleet ping arrived.

There were a couple of fleets up, Supertrains, our Rokh doctrine, and Techfleet, which has been refined to a Tempest Fleet Issue doctrine.  I had one of each up in Pure Blind, so jumped into the Techfleet clone… it requires some implants… got in the TFI, and joined the fleet.

There was the usual fiddling around and waiting for people who were trying to join from Delve to get on up to Pure Blind.  But eventually we had critical mass, over 200 pilots in fleet, and it was time to undock and head towards danger.

TFIs undocking

We took gates into Deklein and got ourselves setup on a titan tethered on a Fortizar and waited for our time, knowing we would soon be dropped into battle.  Things were happening.  We saw the Rokh fleet get bridged out and made sure we were within 2,500m of our titan.

There they go, I’m sure we’ll be next

And we sat there… and sat there… and sat there.

At one point another fleet of Rokhs showed up, out titan changed to their fleet, and then sent them off into battle while we continued to keep at range.

Hey… when will it be our turn?

We did get occasional updates about what was going on.  An ihub had been saved, a structure reinforced, somebody made a mistake, the enemy had at least two more fleets out in where ever things were happening than we did.

What about us?  We were being held for just the right moment.  Mike Flood, our FC, went through the doctrine fighting plan.  TFIs with artillery are an alpha strike doctrine.  A target gets called and we all lock it up then put an “x” in fleet chat.  When enough people have x’d up, the three, two, one, fire count will commence so that we will all activate out guns as close to the same moment as possible.

Done right, with sufficient numbers, one shot is all it takes to blap a hostile and leave a wreck where their ship was just moments ago.  No time for repairs to land if they don’t notice they are being locked up early enough.

We sat there for a while longer.  At some point after the three hour mark we were told to set destination back to our staging Keepstar and align to the out gate.  The fight was over.  We would take a couple of gates and an ansiblex and be back where we started.  The time was never right for us.

Heading home

We stood down and were given and extra fleet participation credit for the effort.

The time wasn’t wasted.  I wrote yesterday’s post about the future EverQuest title while we were waiting.  Paid some bills online.  Listened to most of the latest Folding Ideas video about the GameStop stock play from a couple years back.  It is 2.5 hours long, but I had the time.

It was another time when I was logged in and technically “playing” EVE Online, but was tabbed out for so much of the fleet that ManicTime didn’t even register an hour of play time.

That is the way it goes some days.  My wife was just leaving the house as I was getting into fleet and wished me good luck.  When she got home later she asked who won.  I had to admit I wasn’t really sure, not having seen any of the fight.

This, naturally, seemed crazy to her.  How could I be logged in for more than three hours and not do anything?  What kind of game is this?  I tried to explain that with a PvP title, where you have to depend on other players for content, things do not always work out on demand.  A dungeon in Azeroth is always waiting for us, ready to go, if we can get the instance group together.  But you get 230 people in a fleet and sometimes you just sit there.

All the same, it did seem to be a bit of a banner day for New Eden.  The daily peak concurrent user count hit 31,100 at 18:18 UTC.

The word from EVE Offline

It hasn’t been a good five months… since early May of this year… since the PCU went over 30K.

And it was pretty good yesterday too, passing 27K, which isn’t bad for a Monday that isn’t a holiday.  There were, according to pings, more fights to be had.  But there was also work.  So maybe next weekend.

Addendum: I used this title back in 2017 for a similar situation.  Wait long enough and I will probably use it again.

Fraternity Wins Alliance Tournament XIX… Also, Twitch Drops Arrive

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Alliance Tournament XIX wrapped up this past weekend, with matches on Saturday winnowing down the pack to compete on Sunday, which led to a final best of five match up between The Tuskers Co and Fraternity.

Alliance Tournament 19

That could be viewed as something of a David vs Goliath match up, the Tuskers being an alliance of just 200 members while Fraternity boasts 30K characters.  That, however, ignores the pedigree of each, with The Tuskers being a small, hard driving low sec alliance while Fraternity is a sprawling null sec power.  But in the tournament you cannot bring numbers, so skill and knowledge of the game wins out.  Small elite groups tend to win out in that situation.

The Tuskers have a history in the Alliance Tournament, having won ATXIV in a very close set of matches against Pandemic Legion back in 2016.  Fraternity, on the other hand, while competing previously, has not been seen as a contender and I would guess that very few people had them flagged for possible victory this time around.

I am not at all an expert on the Alliance Tournament.  You will have to go elsewhere for analysis of the matches and comps.  I generally watch it sporadically in its final two weeks, as much to gain channel points to earn a SKIN as to see the actual matches.  But I tab over into the tournament now and then, and for whatever reason I seemed to catch most of the Fraternity matches, including their slow 8 to 0 win over No Vacancies, a round where the audience wasn’t sure if the match had started a good two minutes into it.

But I wandered in for the final matches, the best of five versus The Tuskers, and after the first two rounds I thought it was done and dried, that The Tuskers were going to take it.  Then Fraternity proceeded to win the next three matches, including the final battle, which ended with a lopsided 100 to 1 victory for them, with The Tuskers only able to take out a single one point ship in the fight.

The score of the final match of ATXIX

So congratulations to Fraternity for their win.  They came through the winner’s bracket and won all of their matches.  Their team will take home 80 prize ships, 40 cruisers and 40 frigates, the kind of bounty that can sustain, has sustained, whole alliances in the past.  The Tuskers Co will have to salve its pride with 40 prize ships, 20 of each.

Fraternity will also be added to the Alliance Tournament Monument in the system of Manarq in the Genesis region, the in-game record of winners.

Meanwhile, I did, in fact, get my 10K channel points while watching the tournament, so I was able to claim a random GalNet SKIN, drawing the Muninn SKIN.  Not the worst result.  They are not currently active in the null sec meta, but that will turn around with some future balance pass I bet and we’ll be back to Muninns Online once more.

The pretty pink GalNet SKINs are find by me

But that wasn’t all to be earned while watching the tournament.  CCP, of course, had some give aways during the broadcasts.  But the tournament also saw the inauguration of the Twitch Drops program for CCP.

While you might characterize Twitch Drops as paying for views, they are a mechanism that other online games have used in the past to promote their titles by providing an incentive for streamers to play their game by practically guaranteeing a boost in viewership via the reward drops.  I’ve been on about Twitch drops before, and have left a tab open watching a number of streams to get rewards in Lost Ark, Albion Online, and even World of Warcraft.

If WoW is doing it, it must be mainstream… mainstream or an act of desperation… one of those two I am sure.  Anyway, the second weekend of the tournament was the first for EVE Online Twitch drops, which included a jacket for your character as well as another SKIN.

Alliance Tournament XIX Twitch Drops

I welcome any enterprise that will increase my stock of ship SKINs.

Anyway, none of that has much to do with the Alliance Tournament, but does represent something I am more engaged with than elite PvP.

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Pending Conflict in Perimeter and New Caldari

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We are returning once more to the tales of the still existent Tranquility Trading Consortium and their high sec structures.  The TTC, as I shall call it, has had an odd history since it became a thing back in 2018., being an ISK generating consortium of convenience for null sec groups that were ostensibly foes and who were actually at war with each other for a over a year at one point.

The TTC Logo on their structures

It remained in place until June when CCP pulled the plug on new XL structures in high sec and the Imperium gave notice it was leaving.  This was all covered by this series of posts.

In short, the Imperium pulled out, Vily decided to shut down the TTC, the Imperium decided they want to blow up the only remaining high sec Keepstar, hilarity ensued, the Keepstar went pop, and then Vily decided to keep the TTC running to support manufacturing and have a market, but to keep the tax rate at 0%, which would not make for a huge money making venture.

And then this happened.

Announced on the TTC Discord Server – July 27, 7:33PM Pacific Time

They were going to make some money.  I suspect that this had been discussed before it was announced on the TTC Discord server because earlier in the day I happened to be online when I saw this pop up in my in-game alerts.

GSF declared war

Why is the Imperium hot to go back to high sec, endure the war dec mechanics that prevail there, and shoot structures again?

Right now the beneficiaries of the TTC are the two blocs, Winter Co and PanFam, led by Fraternity and Pandemic Horde respectively, and we’re still in a low key, but possibly heating up, war with them in and around Pure Blind.  So hitting them where they are making ISK makes sense.

The fact that Gobbins, the leader of Pandemic Horde, is now speaking for the TTC rather than Vily (who was both literally and figuratively the legacy head of the venture) is a sign that the TTC is pretty much an arm of their coalition.  And the fact that the flurry of groups joining the TTC as allies were all the usual suspects in those two groups pretty much confirms it.

I don’t want to drag out the individual notifications

What is at stake?

Well, the TTC has two Sotiyos in Perimeter.  Sotiyos are the XL engineering complexes, and like Keepstars, they can no longer be deployed in high sec space.

The Two Sotiyos in Perimeter

You can also see the monument to the destroyed Perimeter Keepstar in the background, as they were all on grid together, along with a Fortizar.

As of this writing, one of them has an armor timer set.

In addition, there is another Sotiyo in New Caldari, another system that connects to Jita, that has also been hit and is counting down to the hull timer as I write this.

Subtract one day from when this post goes live for the battle time

This shows all the signs of being another high sec battle in the making.

TTC Allies Fumble War Dec Mechanics for the Perimeter TTT Keepstar Armor Timer

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In a completely expected move, the Tranquility Trading Consortium Keepstar in Perimeter was reinforced pretty quickly after Vily began the unanchoring sequence for the northern TTC structures.

If you are not sure what I am talking about, you can catch up on the sequence of events that led to this with these three posts.

There are lots of links in that third post to fill in any gaps.

Goonswarm Federation (GSF), along with some other alliances including The Initiative and Brave declared war on the TTC with an eye towards blowing up those structures before they could unanchor.  Somebody got in and set the first timer right away, so that the battle over the armor layer fell on Saturday night my time, or at about 01:30 UTC on Sunday EVE Online time.

Tranquility Trading Tower

It seemed pretty obvious that we were going to go up to Perimeter and shoot the Keepstar.

But before that kicked off, Gobbins, head of Pandemic Horde, sent out a ping to his alliance declaring that GSF had made a “little oopsie: with its war declarations.

One of the classic blunders, declaring war in high sec against Vily or something…

Gobbins plan was to NOT ally with the TTC against GSF, but rather to just ally with TTC for the war decs of GSF allies.  Then they could shoot all of our allies and we wouldn’t be able to shoot them.  That was his master plan!

So that happened and was noted on Reddit.  Meanwhile, when the time came around there were pings for two fleets, with Asher Elias leading a Rokh fleet and Alterari Phoenix leading a Ferox fleet, Perimeter as our destination.  But the pings insisted that the only GSF members join.  We ended up with 250 people in the Rokh fleet and about 150 in the Ferox fleet.

None of the people in those fleets could shoot the alliances that had not joined the war as allies of the TTC… but that also meant that they couldn’t shoot us.

Even as we were forming up and changing fits, notifications came in that Fraternity, Pandemic Legion, Pandemic Horde, and Slyce, were signing up to be allies of TTC against GSF.  They seemed to have recognized their mistake, if a bit late.

The notices arrive

As noted by Gobbins, when you join a war as an ally there is a four hour cool down before you can actually start fighting.  The last of those war decs were about an hour before the battle for the armor timer would begin.

We would start shooting the structure at about 01:40 UTC, but they couldn’t shoot us until three hours after the armor timer fight kicked off.

So we made our way from Delve to Perimeter.  I was in the Rokh fleet and we landed on a Frotizar to wait for the timer to come out.

Tethered and waiting

That gave us some time to change our fits from travel to the siege… which went rather comically as it turned out that about half the fleet did not read the MOTD or didn’t understand it, because people didn’t have the fit or the right extra ammo.  Fortunately, we were right next to Jita, so somebody went over and bought us modules and ammo and we got ourselves squared.

(I was among those who missed 2 out of the 3 requirements, though I am going to claim that I was busy trying to get the travel fit together for a Rokh that had been sitting around since the final months of World War Bee when we were expecting to fight to the last on the Keepstar and would need back up ships.)

When the time came we warped to the Keepstar, landing at a bookmark between the uprights, waited a little bit, then commenced shooting it.

My Rokh with the Ghostbird SKIN

Meanwhile, Fraternity and PanFam were there with fleets that they couldn’t do much with.  Gobbins had pinged for “max dudes” and ended up being unable to shoot us. They flew around, warping in on us as we sat there shooting Keepstar.  But they couldn’t touch us without getting CONCORD on them, and we all had our safeties set to green (or most of us did) so we couldn’t even shoot them by mistake.  So we just shot the structure.  A few people… ours and theirs… managed to bring CONCORD down on themselves.  But mostly it was just us shooting the Keep.

CONCORD hanging around after zapping somebody

The only opposition we had throughout the fight was from TEST, which we had war dec’d earlier and which had allied with the TTC well in advance, and from Vily who was manning the Keepstar defenses.  TEST was out in force… which for them these days means about 20 people… so they were not much of a threat.

Our fleet between the uprights

Meanwhile, a Keepstar in high sec doesn’t have a bomb launcher or a PDS to swat away drones.  So Vily was targeting individuals and trying to blow them up.  I am pretty sure he killed a Vigil at one point, but wasn’t doing well against anybody who was paying attention.  I had my turn as a target but called for logi as I was red boxed by the structure, so never got under 80% shields.

Eventually, as the armor layer had less than 30% left, Fraternity hit their timer and was able to attack us.  They warped an Eagle fleet in on us, along with some of the few TEST people who had been hanging around.

But we had been expecting to be fighting hostiles from the get go.  So we dropped drones and put them on the Keepstar, which was enough to keep the timer paused and keep damage ticking down, and turned our guns on the fleet that warped in.

They stuck around for a few minutes, took some losses, then warped off, leaving the battle.  The highlight for me was getting the final blow on a TEST Catalyst, which put a kill mark on my Rokh.

And that was pretty much the battle.  We turned our guns back on the Keepstar and at almost exactly 04:00 UTC we finished up the armor layer.  The sturcture pulsed and we got the timer for the final fight, 4 days and 20 hours from the end, which puts it at around 5pm Pacific time on Thursday for me, or just after 00:15 UTC this coming Friday.

When the next fight will happen

After that we gathered everybody up and made our way back to Delve.

The battle report for the whole thing was a mess because it was in high sec and a lot of random people showed up and only people who got on kill mails or who were blown up were counted, so the numbers shown do not represent the numbers present.

Angry Mustache broke the report out into four groups, but I cropped down the header to the key players and so it would fit on the page here.

Battle Report Header – Cropped

The peak numbers I saw in system never made it to 3K.

The peak I noted

Time dilation hit 10% at times, but was usually in the 20-30% range, which made the client pretty responsive, with commands getting handled quickly, even if everything was moving at 20-30% of normal speed.  I thought we might have to go to downtime with crushing tidi all the way, instead we were back home and docked up 5 hours after the first ping.

Now to get ready for the return bout on Thursday night, when Fraternity and PanFam will actually be able to shoot us for the whole fight.  In the mean time Gobbins is getting dragged pretty hard in r/eve for failing on remedial high sec war dec mechanics.

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The Tranquility Trading Consortium is Closing Up Shop

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@everyone with the TTC treaty coming to an end i have begun unanchors on all TTT structures. Multiple entities will likely come kill them long before the unanchors complete however. No service modules will be turned off. Thank you all for your patience and your trust over these years and i hope our services have helped you through your time in eve.

also be noted, ill be closing this server in 7 days or when the TTC structures die. Not that there is much value here

-Vily, TTC Discord server

The Tranquility Trading Consortium clearly saw the writing on the wall.

The TTC Logo on their structures

The above message went out on the TTC Discord server a little before 16:30 UTC.  All of the northern structure run by the TTC, including the Keepstar, the Tatara, and the two Sotiyos in Perimeter are currently unanchoring.

The tower is currently unanchoring

Traders had already begun moving their product from the TTT Keepstar to Jita 4-4 as soon as the news of the Imperium leaving the TTC broke yesterday.  No doubt that pace will quicken now that things are clearly winding down.

As noted, it is expected that somebody will try to show up and blow up some of the TTC structures before they are brought down, so if you have something there, best remove it sooner rather than later unless you want it to go to asset safety.

There was some wishcasting about letting the TTT run out of fuel so it could be turned into a giant loot pinata, with all the contents spilling out into space rather than being moved to asset safety, but that level of fuckery was never seriously on the table.

And there is some question about what happens to the southern TTC structures, including a Keepstar in Domain that the Imperium holds.  Gobbins is upset about that.  We’ll see if that leads to any action. [The Imperium retorts]

All in all, the TTC era was an oddity in the game, bringing together some strange bedfellows who stuck together on this one issue even when those involved were on different sides in a null sec spanning war.  Gevlon predicted this sort of trading scheme would come to pass, but he never predicted how it would end.  He would scoff at the idea of giving up ISK like this.

Last look at the Tranquility Trading Tower

The TTC Discord has some interesting chat in the General channel, including a visit from Aryth, who talked over some old times around CCP and Goons.  Take a look if you have a chance.  I scraped some of it, but Pastebin’s content filter prevents it from being shared, so it will be lost once the server is disbanded.

Related (updating this as new items show up):

The Imperium Dials Back Operations in Pure Blind

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I made it to the weekly coalition fireside talk on Saturday, and it was a good thing I did.  I haven’t done much since I alarm clocked for that last Keepstar kill.  The word passed down was that we were pulling back in our commitment to the war.

We are not done up in the north, but rather than having capitals and a half a dozen or more doctrines to hand and everybody’s death clone set in the DO6H-Q Keepstar, the whole thing was going to be reset to be a jump clone effort with two doctrines left behind and everything else being hauled home.

And move ops home were to commence after the fireside, once a cyno vigil to a fallen member of the coalition was concluded.  That gave me enough time to get back to the Keepstar and get packed, because I had parked my main and my alt out Venal at 92D-OI and WLF-D3, a good dozen gates away from our staging, in anticipation of there being another set of Keepstar fights.

But Fraternity has been getting its act together, working to get gate and grid control going in advance, making it unlikely for us to succeed.

Warp bubbles deployed in WLF to hinder attacker movement

That and the whole time zone difference… you can only get your coalition to alarm clock so many times before it becomes a real drag… were big parts of why we were dialing things back.

I got both my characters back to the Keepstar safely, the route home being fairly empty.  I was even back in time to fly around the cyno vigil for a bit.

When the ping for fleets went up there were three, which filled up pretty quickly.  I had to leave one to get both characters in the same fleet.  We were told to have at least 60K of isotopes, the fuel that capital ships expend for jump travel, to be sure we could make it home.  I had 100K on each of my capitals, because I had TWO capital ships up in Pure Blind, an Apostle and a Ninazu.

The Apostle had been in Pure Blind for a Reavers deployment that never really came together.  It turns out that if your SIG leader is also the coalition leader, then your SIG doesn’t end up doing much… though we are always around for special tasks.

The Ninazu, meanwhile, is what I flew up to this deployment, a fleet hangar full of sub caps, most of which I never undocked.  So it goes.

The move op home was… well… exceptionally smooth.  It is almost like we’ve learned something since the trail of tears and the doomed convoy op at KVN-36 back in the day.

The classic Trail of Tears move op, an obligatory reminder for every cap move op

Once in the fleet there was already a cyno target in the MOTD.  We were told to undock and jump right away.

That put us at another Keepstar where we waited a bit for red timers to count down, then it was time to undock and jump again.

Jumping from the undock

We had to stop along the way at a couple of Fortizars, which meant that the supercarriers and titans had to sit out on tether while the rest of us docked up.

Landing on a Fortizar

Fortunately, the capital ship bumping mechanics have changed over the years.  I remember back in Delve in 2012 witnessing two titans bumping at a POS and that causing one of the titans to be flung more than a hundred of kilometers out of the safety of the forcefield.

Sent way down town

Now, while there is still bumping and you can get pushed off of tether quite easily, bumps are not that crazy.

Supers around a Fortizar in Cloud Ring

The whole thing was very low key, though I was sitting in the No Chatter channel which meant I only heard orders from the fleet commander, Apple Pear, about when to dock, undock, and jump.

I spent the intervals while we waited for jump timers to run down playing Civ II.  ManicTime says I spent a lot more time playing that than in EVE Online during the move op, which is a good sign for a move op in my opinion.

Apple Pear was encouraging people to get at least as far as J5A-IX in Fountain on the move, because that would put them back in friendly space.  Also, there was a surprise for us once we gated from Cloud Ring into that system in Fountain.

We got through and were bubbled on the gate, which is usually a serious faux pas on a capital move op.  Cap pilots get very anxious when unexplained bubbled pop up.  And then we were told to lock up a titan with the pilot Voltran and shoot him.  He wasn’t broadcast in our fleet and I couldn’t find him, get him locked up, and drop some drones because he was dead before I cold get my act together.

Voltran destroyed

Apparently Voltran was one of Pandemic Horde’s big spies in our super capital group and we were using this moment to purge him.  The bubbles were up to keep him from getting away.  It all happened so fast I didn’t even get a screen shot of the explosion, just the greasy smudge of smoke in space where his Avatar had been.

What remains of Voltran is a dissipating cloud of black smoke

If you go find his character in game you will see that he did, indeed, end up in Pandemic Horde once he was purged.  I would link his EVE Who profile, but the API end points are still disabled, so nothing is getting updated.

Other spies were reported purged as well, but none so dramatically.

Then it was to the Keepstar to wait for another jump timer.  We had two more jumps until we ended up in Delve on a Keepstar one jump from 1DQ1-A.  We were left there, but that was fine.  I had a long jump timer at that point and there is a safe cyno on the 1DQ Keepstar most days.  I came back later that evening and jumped myself home.

I ended up using about 47K isotopes, oxygen for the Ninazu and helium for the Apostle, because each NPC empire powers their jump drives with their own special fuel.  I am sure that makes logistics lots of fun.

Now we are back at home.  I have a couple of ships and two jump clones still up in Pure Blind should something happen, but most of my assets are now back down in Delve.