Tag Archives: KVN-36

Seven Weeks of World War Bee

This past week saw CCP take some official notice of the war. We didn’t get a dev blog or a news item. Instead CCP sent out a press email to some gaming sites announcing that $112,000 worth of ships and structures and what not have been destroyed so far in the war which has involved maybe 130,000 players/accounts/capsuleers. Some examples of sites running with that:

And then there are sites who couldn’t even copy the email successfully, like MMOs.com that attributed that destruction amount to the Triglavian invasion of high sec. Or maybe they got it right and the others were wrong. I haven’t actually seen the email that CCP sent out.

I do wonder what the distribution list looked like, as I haven’t seen PC Gamer, where Steven Messner has done a bunch of in-depth coverage of the game over the years, mention this. The email must not have had enough to build a story of much substance around.

I am disappointed that CCP didn’t publish a Dev Blog or a news item on their site, but you can figure out what it said based on what got repeated over the multiple stories. I am curious as to how they came up with that 130,000 number. Hell, I am curious as to how they came up with the $112,000 amount. Back at the end of week four it was estimated that ten trillion ISK worth of ships, structures, and modules had been blown up, an amount that, with even the most generous PLEX package they sell (who spends $500 on PLEX?), comes up to nearly that $112K figure. Maybe that count at four weeks was wrong, but that just makes me want to know how CCP counted all the more so.

And then there is the World War Bee site which is trying to log all the losses, and it tallies up to more than that as well.

I am also a bit surprised they went for the ISK to real world dollar measurement, which generally hasn’t been their thing. But I guess it does get headlines.

We also saw some action in high sec as Legacy Coalition went into Niarja to defend its supply lines from the Triglavian invasion. The Imperium pushed back and now Niarja is a free fire zone with no CONCORD there.

EDECOM gives up at this point

Haulers will want to bypass that system, which means taking a lot more gates between Caldari and Amarr space.

Northern Front

PandaFam has turned their attention to Imperium structures in the Fountain region. They had killed a number of smaller structures, but the attention has mostly been on the Keepstars The successfully reinforced then destroyed the Keepstar in O-PNSN and had the Keepstar in KVN-36 in their sights. However, a server crash interrupted things during the fight for the armor timer. The clock reset and they now have to start the process all over again. That moved the fighting to social media, forums, and Reddit, as people tried to blame one side or the other for the crash. It is all about the smart bombs people say.

PandaFam is momentarily stalled them on the road to Delve. But they still have four Keepstars in the bag already.

The Fountain kills

The Keepstars in KVN-36 and Y-2ANO remain standing, waiting to for the coming assault.

Southern Front

It is difficult to sum up what TEST and their Legacy allies have been up to for the last week. I mean, sure, they showed up at the Keepstar fights in some force and managed not to get bombed off the field, though their leader seemed to have problems fitting the rigs on his ship, as I mentioned in my post about the O-PNSN Keepstar fight.

They were, of course, part of the fight at Niarja, where Brave and TEST both declared they were going to help EDENCOM defend the system. And Brave actually showed up. But I mentioned that at the top of the post.

And then there is Queirous, where one can describe efforts as dissolute at best. In order to prove that nobody really wants to hold that space, a bunch of systems now sit with no ihub installed. Neither side wants to defend ihubs in eastern Querious, but neither can they abide the other side holding an ihub.

Querious ihub map – Aug 22, 2020

So the Legacy ihub count is down to 18, but it is clear they are not really trying any more, so the count is more an indication of that.

There have been the usual range of skirmishes at the gates between Legacy and the Imperium, but the war is happening in Fountain right now and the south is just a side show at best.

My Participation

I managed to get in on a couple of big ops, including the two Keepstar battles, but otherwise it has been a quiet week for me. A massive heatwave out here, plus the state catching on fire (smoke from two of those fires are visible from our house), work, and getting ready for our daughter to head off to college has kept me from doing much gaming at all over the last week. And this week will likely see me even less focused on gaming.

I did manage to lose at least one ship on every fleet I went on however. My ship loss count for the war so far now stands at:

Ares interceptor – 9
Atron entosis frigate – 5
Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
Malediction interceptor – 2
Scalpel logi frigate – 2
Ferox battle cruiser – 2
Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
Cormorant destroyer – 1
Purifier stealth bomber – 1
Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
Sigil entosis industrial – 1

Overall

As I mentioned at the top of the post, CCP half-halfheartedly tried to drum up some press interest in the war with an email that got a few takers from second tier gaming sites. I guess our fights are not big enough to be worth a dev blog yet. But they at least put a little effort into some publicity.

But, after last week, I guess CCP doesn’t want to go bragging about a server crash.

Of course, CCP has been all about EVE Echoes since it launched the week before, putting out some odd adds. But they are justifiably proud of the millions of players who have signed up for the game. Now they just have to buy some stuff.

And then there was the fight over Niarja, which pulled null sec into the Triglavian invasion event. I’m not sure everybody is happy that we showed up.

Anyway, another week of war has gone by and a victory for the attackers, or an accord between the belligerents seems a distant hope.

If the word is right, the invaders are moving their titans and supers from FAT-6P, where they have been sitting since the war, idle behind the 49-U6U – 4-07MU gate connection, to come around and approach Querious from a low sec direction to get them into the fight. Apparently we’re too formidable for them to gate through directly into the region, so they have put down a chain of Keepstars to avoid that gate.

Maybe that is what drove the peak concurrent users up to 38,299, up from 34,974 last week. Still not up to the first week peak of 38,838, but close.

We shall see how the move op turns out and what the invaders plan to do with their 1,000 titans.

Addendum:

INN: World War Bee Week Seven

The Node Crash at KVN-36

After we lost the Keepstar in O-PNSN on Thursday, eyes turned to the next target, the Keepstar in KVN-36. The armor timer was set to come out a day later, so both sides were ready to form up to contest that.

Again, the battle was going to overlap a bit with work, so I pre-positioned another ECM burst interceptor so that I could join in when time allowed. I saw pings and people forming up long before I was able to get in. But Kun’mi had another little ECM burst fleet going, so once I had the time I logged in and undocked to join in. I caught a warp into the fray almost immediately, landed in some hostiles, and got tackled. I set off my ECM burst, but couldn’t get away. My Ares went boom on the first run.

The hostiles were good enough to pod me though, so I was quickly back in 1DQ1-A where I grabbed my back up ship, a Malediction, and headed back to the fight. As always, since tidi was slowing the fight down, very little happened before I got back.

I made a perch off the Keepstar and rode the warps as Kun’mi launched us into the hostiles fleets.

Aligning out from a run

The hostiles were running the same basic plan as the day before. They had an Astrahus on grid with the Keepstar where they had tethered up their carriers. Those carriers disgorged a mass of fighters to attack the Keepstar.

The hostile Astrahus

Meanwhile, the subcap fleets from both sides set to shooting each other, while we zipped in and out trying to avoid getting tackled. Being hit with the ECM burst is annoying, I know this from having been on the receiving end a few times, and the enemy put a lot of effort into tackling and blowing us up. No doubt each kill gave them great joy. But we were close enough to home that the few of us in the fleet would just re-ship and fly quickly back.

There was also a lot of smart bombing going on. We had some success the day before the a Praxis fleet set up to smart bomb, and the hostiles picked that up as well, so there were smart bombs going off all over it seemed.

The Praxis fleet from the day before

Both sides seemed to using them with impunity. You can dig though kills and find ships that have smart bomb damage from both sides. And, of course, some doctrines, like the Feroxes, are not smart bombing platforms, but carry one fit. So it was a hazard and I had to warp off to repair a few times after flying into smart bombs.

Things seemed to be going with the attackers. They had quickly stopped the repair timer and had been steadily whittling away at the armor layer of the Keepstar. We kept doing our runs and our fleets in general tried to slow things down.

Another run in my Malediction

However, the system seemed more laggy than the day before. Commands were slow, especially when close in with the Keepstar, even though there were not as many people in system as we had seen in O-PNSN. But both sides persisted. It is just something you put up with and power through to win the objective. Then things got really balky and unresponsive and, suddenly, boom! We were all kicked out of the game.

Connection dropped at 21:31 EVE time

That happened to coincide with Dave Archer’s Jackdaw fleet getting smart bombed by NCDot, which seemed like it was going to wipe them all out. Kun’mi happened to be describing this action to us and the likely fate of the Jackdaws, and that was the moment when the server died, and so became part of the lore of the battle.

Of course, we all tried to log back in, but the server wasn’t having us.

Access denied

CCP tweeted out a link to a forum thread about the server going down. They were aware and working on the situation. That was at about 21:33, so they jumped on that pretty quickly. Meanwhile, both sides were anxious about what was going to be the state of affairs when the server came back up.

In the past, servers going down meant tough luck to one side and a saving grace to the other. I lived through the null sec era of server killing battles. I remember back in Fountain War at Z9PP-H when CCP remapped the node incorrectly and dumped everybody out, effectively saving the TEST capital fleet. I have posts about other crashes, like the one at HED-GP and the one at KW-I6T.

But that was all quite a while back. And the ability of servers to handle such loads have gotten better over time. The X47 Keepstar battle kept going despite a ton of ECM burst ships and a DDoS attack in progress. There were about 6,000 ships involved, with fighters flying all over and all the other usual stuff, during the so-called million dollar battle.

There was also a bit of the Imperium institutional paranoia about the situation, a worry that this time, when a crash would benefit Goons, that CCP might try to roll back the clock on the timer rather than let things ride as they had traditionally done.

We had about a half an hour to think about that. CCP said the server had been stood back up at 21:55, but by the time I got in and made it back on grid with the Keepstar… everybody had been warped off grid… it was 22:01. And there I saw the Keepstar timer had just a little over two minutes on the clock.

Just about two minutes left

Given that first screen shot at the top of the post, taken at 20:55, showed 13:37 (leet!) left on the timer, it looked like only 12 minuted had counted down during the approximate half hour that the node had kept us out, though the node was down and presumably not advancing the clock for part of that time. The downtime didn’t save the Keepstar completely, but the time left was so small that it ran down before the attackers could bring firepower to bear on the structure. Keepstar saved.

Timers reset

You see a repair timer there, but you’ll notice the damage indicators for the armor and shields were set back to their pristine state. The objective had been won, with some help from CCP.

We drew the card this time

Of course, recriminations were flying long before the servers came back up. Everybody was looking for somebody to blame. In the forum thread about the server outage somebody was trying to pin the blame on those Goon ECM burst interceptors, which made me laugh. If there were even a dozen operating at once I would have been surprised. We had about eight going at our peak when I was participating, and that isn’t enough to cause much of a problem. It certainly didn’t break the server during the last fight.

There were also fingers being pointed about who was running their smart bombs, though both sides had them deployed. Memes were being thrown around and Cryo, the official Imperium propaganda artist these days, even threw together a special piece for the occasion.

The smug is palpable

Meanwhile some people on /r/eve are claiming that the server crash was deliberately caused by “hundreds” of Goon smart bombing ships or ECM bursts or a Goon DDoS attack (evidence?) or anything else that their vivid imaginations could churn up, because Grrr Goons. Some things never change.

I personally don’t buy any of the finger pointing about the crash being an intended goal. We had more load on the server in the fight the day before and it made it, though at times things were marginal. (Note the problem I mentioned with my UI when I returned to the fight.) Sometimes things just fail. We should probably be surprised that this doesn’t happen more often given how much load we put on the servers. And nobody is going to stop using smart bombs, or ECM bursts, or masses of fighters on either side, so it seems like it will happen again during the war.

Anyway, the battle wasn’t over yet. Everybody was back on grid and there were people to shoot, so things kept exploding for quite some time. Kun’mi had lost his probes, so we just warped in on wrecks when we could.

Another run into the mix

I did get a couple of bursts off, but eventually got tackled again. They put everything on me they could.

A range of effects

From left to right I believe I was neuted, painted, nos’d, webbed, scrammed, tracking disrupted, and pointed. I like the tracking disruptor. Some zealous pilot in a Cruicifier hit me with one on a few runs. (So did somebody in an Eagle, though why they didn’t just shoot me…) Pity it doesn’t do anything to an AOE weapon. It will get you on the kill mail however, and that is the important part for all of us. I got my ECM burst off before I blew up, and was then able to warp off in my pod before the parade of effects were able to land on me again.

After that I docked up and waited around for people to clear out. I didn’t pad my kill board as gratuitously as I did the day before, but I got on my share and didn’t even get on any blue kills. A rare thing with the indiscriminate ECM burst module.

This time around, with no structure loss weighing us down, the battle report fell in our favor.

Battle Report Header

Plus, we won the objective. PandaFam has to start over again by setting the first timer again, which they did not bother with. They will likely want to set it to fall in EUTZ where they are stronger.

So it goes. They still have four Keepstar kills in the bag and two more left to kill in Fountain before the fun starts in Delve when supers and titans will start being part of the mix. I think they only have a few dozen there to kill. At a rate of about one or two a week, this could take some time.

Other coverage:

Imperium News

A Massive Move Op Gets Me Home from the War

The peace of the north, where the Imperium agreed to withdraw forces back to Delve and not bother the north of null sec for a month and GotG for a full six months, came into effect on Saturday. And with that began the first big move operation. It was planned for 18:00 UTC, 11:00am for me, on that Saturday.

The first call to form up came at seven minutes before the hour in a ping and I was ready for it.

The whole operation had been announced almost a week in advance, so I had plenty of time to prepare. As usual during a deployment, I managed to acquire a range of subcaps in my hangar. Actually, in both of my hangars, the one in the Keepstar in 6RCQ-V and the one in the station in ROIR-Y in Pure Blind, where Reavers had been based for almost a year.

Usually the accumulation of ships means flying my main and my alt together in multiple move ops and maybe finding somebody with a bit of space in the ship maintenance bay of their capital ship to carry a couple of bombers or such.

This time however, one of the ships I managed to accumulate was a Naglfar dreadnought, a prize from the race that Ranger Gamma ran back in late December. It was supposed to be a suicide dread, something expendable to drop on a valuable target like a titan I only managed to use it one, during the first Keepstar battle at X47L-Q, and it survived so I had it to move back.

That turned out to be a bit of a boon.

With almost a week’s notice I was able to pack my ships into the Naglfar and jump it from ROIR-Y to the Keepstar at 6RCQ-V. There I was able to stuff almost all of my remaining ships into the the ship maintenance bay along with the assorted modules and other stuff that ends up rattling around the corners of your station hangar when you stay in any one place for more than a week or two. So much nanite repair paste mocking me because I forget to overheat most of the time.

The only ships that did not fit were a couple of travel interceptors, which are easy enough to jump clone to and fly out, and a Megathron battleship for the Baltec doctrine that I think I flew exactly once. (But that was one more time than the Ferox I had there as well.)

The Megathron was problematic. A Battleship is big and takes up a lot of space in a ship maintenance bay, so I was reluctant to try to foist it off on another cap pilot. But tech I battleships insure nicely and I wouldn’t miss it if it was gone, so I decided to just fly it home on its own. I figure, best case, I might scatter a small gate camp and get a kill, while the worst case would be to lose it, collect the insurance, and not have to worry about it anymore.

Megathron in Cloud Ring

So on Wednesday night I undocked it and headed towards Delve. I knew the risks. The coalition had pinged multiple times “Don’t move yourself!” But I was going to go for it. I already knew the route home. Many trips over the years through the area hes left me with the lay of space. You get into Fountain, you take the jump bridge to the mid-point of the region, you take the gate that cover the mid-region gap, you take the jump bridge to the gate to Delve, and in Delve you take a jump bridge to where you want to be.

Megathron on its way

The trip went off without incident. It was even relatively quick. With the revisions to jump fatigue I only had to wait for a timer to cool down a bit before hitting the next jump bridge.

My small op was done. The big op was coming. I was on and ready to go before the first ping came.

The first ping was for four capital fleets, divided up by type, and an overflow fleet. Those quickly filled up and a second overflow fleet was called. Then two subcap fleets were called. If I recall right there was also an overflow fleet for subcaps eventually, and then a final fleet for people who could fly Apostles to help get the strategic force auxiliary reserves home. I got my alt in for that, so had two accounts running for the move op.

If I had know that was going to be a thing I could have shoved the Megathron in the Apostle to carry it home. Oh well, it was done already.

Move ops can be long and exasperating affairs, as demonstrated by the classic Endie “trail of tears” graphic memorializing an all day move to Delve from the north.

The Trail of Tears move op

That was back when capitals were rare and the pilots alleged to be the elite. Now almost any scrub who rats in Delve has at least one capital ship and many of them have supers or titans.

And now, on a Saturday morning I was going to move to Delve with more than 1,800 other capital ships and a couple of fleets of subcaps, all of us sharing the same voice coms channel. (For those interested, there were about 1,400 actual people in the voice coms channel for the ~2,000 ships being moved, so less than a 2:1 ratio of accounts to people.)

There was a non-zero chance of this becoming a nightmare.

Instead, it all ran surprisingly smoothly. People used all the advance notice we had to get ready, so a fleet of capital ships jumped to the first cyno just a little bit after 18:00. The dreadnought fleet went at 18:17, while the Apostle fleet, the last to go, was cleared to jump at 18:25, landing on a Fortizar.

About 1,800 capitals tethered

Our first jump was a few gates shy of critical gate to Fountain, but we had jump fatigue to burn off, so we were sent by fleet forward to the last system in Cloud Ring, then gated again by fleets in order to keep time dilation from going crazy. We held up together on a Fortizar in B-DBYQ, the last system in Cloud Ring, and the jumping off point for the Fountain War five years back.

Aligned in B-DBYQ

Again we were sent through the gate by fleets. That put is in J5A-IX at the top of Fountain, where we regrouped on the Keepstar there, docking up.

At 19:34 we got the call to undock and, in a moment of hubris, the command was given for all fleets to jump. That cranks up the tidi to 10% and ended with some disconnects, but for the most part it was just slow. We got through, landing on the Keepstar in C-N4OD to dock up.

By 19:50, once people got through and things settled down, we were again called by fleets to undock and take the gate to KVN-36, the place where we were ambushed on another move op back in 2015. It ended up looking like a stream of titans being fired from the Keepstar.

You could walk back to the Keepstar on those titans

There we aligned to the Keepstar, then were sent by fleets to dock up, the Apostles going last to avoid bumping.

Apostles aligned and waiting

That put us in the southern half of the region. We were told that for the next jump, which would bring us to the Delve gate in Y-2ANO, our arrival on the Keepstar would be recorded for use as a propaganda video, so we were all going to jump at once again, but this time we were not to dock up because that wouldn’t look as cool as all the ships arriving and just hanging on the citadel.

Again, lots of time dilation due to all of us going at once, but most people got through okay. Traffic control was up for a lot of people and was even giving positions in the queue to jump.

412th position in the queue

My dreadnought went through, but the jump by the Apostle was cancelled by the delay. I set it to jump again and it went through fine on the second go.

A batch of caps arriving in Y-2

I will be interested to see what the footage of us coming in looked like.

After that we all aligned to the ZXB-VC and waited for cynos to get in place in 1DQ1-A. Another chain of titans was then fired at the gate.

Once through we were cleared to jump to the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A. The cyno in the Apostle fleet disconnected, but by 20:41 the cyno was up again and I was docked in the Keepstar contracting the Apostle back to the person who handed them out.

Back at the Delve Keepstar

So from the time of the first ping at 17:53 to my being done and able to log off was just about three hours, which is amazing for a move op of this size and complexity. Pilots new and old managed to make it down.

I think we’ve gotten a bit better as a coalition, but also the leadership has gotten better at keeping these sorts of operations moving. For one thing, there were markers called at various points, that if you hadn’t reached a certain objective you were too far behind and told to log off and wait for the next move op. The whole move op didn’t stop people one person disconnected or didn’t follow instructions.

Of course, citadels have made this sort of thing easier as well. At every jump or gate there was a citadel waiting for us, usually a Keepstar, letting us tether up or dock.

And so it goes. I am back in Delve for the first time since November of last year. When I go back to put together all the posts for this deployment, this ought to be the final one.

A gallery of my screen shots from the op:

Leaving 6RCQ-V

Landing by fleets on the Fortizar

Caps landing in a batch

More caps arriving

About 1,800 capitals tethered

Aligned in B-DBYQ

Faxes in warp

Apostles aligned

A mass of capitals

Faxes and Titans

Fleets landing on a Keepstar

Apostles aligned and waiting

You could walk back to the Keepstar on those titans

Jumping from the KVN Keepstar

A batch of caps arriving in Y-2

Apostles undocking before the Keepstar has drawn

Back at the Delve Keepstar

The Doomed Convoy at KVN-36

How Welps Are Made: http://t.co/c3TsQRfPwS #tweetfleet #eveonline

— ~GOON-EMPEROR OF DELVE~ (@TheMittani) May 9, 2015

The convoy ops for the final evacuation out of Fountain had been posted on the forums and broadcast multiple times daily on Jabber over the days preceding this past weekend. Anybody who had been paying even the slightest amount of attention knew they were coming. We were headed for home in the seven regions.

CFC / Imperium Space

I mentioned having to get my stuff together last week. Well all that warning was sufficient. I managed to slip a couple of ships out and back to Deklein during the week, I moved the couple of ships I had in TEG-SD up to 4-EP12 (I put one Celestis up on contract cheap and somebody grabbed it pretty quick), and the night before the I got my main and alt accounts setup and in the two big remaining ships, a Dominix and a Megathron, ready for the move ops.

There were going to be three move ops on Saturday, at least from my time perspective. One at 4:30am my time, one at noon my time, and one at 7:00pm my time (which is actually Sunday EVE Online time, since the game runs on UTC), each passing through the same set of systems to pick people up along the way, starting in Sakht and ending in B-DBYQ, hitting each of the staging systems in between, before heading along the most direct path home.

The purpose of a move op is to for a fleet massive enough that it won’t be viewed as a target of opportunity at gate camps and such. ~200 ships makes for a tough nut to crack unless you plan for it.

I was tempted to try and get into the first move op. I wasn’t going to get up at 4:30am, but I knew from past experience that move ops tend to be slow. The idea isn’t just to get somewhere, but to get everybody in the op home safely. That means you wait for people who disconnect or who get lost or who somehow fall a system or two behind. It is a job more for a shepherd than a fleet commander. And 4-EP12 is one of the last systems on the list, so I would have a lot of time before the op got there.

I also knew that our cats would wake me up at some point around 6am because they still don’t quite get the concept of “weekends” and get worried I might miss work if I am still in bed then. And, true to form, our cat Rigby got on the bed and started meowing at me around 6am, waking me up. I immediately… okay, maybe slowly… got up, walked down the hall to my office, booted up my computer, and got into EVE Online. However, things appeared to be moving apace for the early op, as they had already passed my system and were actually only a couple jumps from home, all in about 90 minutes. Good speed for a move op and, I hoped, an indication of how things would go on the next op.

So it was back to bed for a bit more sleep.

I had warned my wife that there might be a two hour move op starting at noon our time, and she seemed to be okay with that. There was an event going on in our local downtown area she wanted to go to, but it didn’t start until 2pm and ran into the evening. Plenty of time.

Around 11:45am (18:45 UTC) I logged into EVE Online with both my accounts and started waiting for the fleet advert to appear. I had things ready to go and decided, since I would spend a good part of the op just sitting and waiting for it to get to me, that I would take notes with time stamps, just in case this turned into a trail of tears op.

The classic Trail of Tears move op

Game to blog, blog to game and all that.

So from this point forward, everything will be in reference to something I noted, with a time stamp in UTC.

Begin the move op timeline.

17:29 Ping goes out for a Harpy fleet under Ohno no borrox, a member of the TNT Alliance, for a Harpy fleet forming in YA0-XJ. It is going to fly down to Sakht in order to pick up and lead the lost sheep home. There is a warning that this op will take more than three hours. The fleet forms up and heads out. The fleet advert is removed to keep people from joining after it left.

18:44 First Jabber ping goes out for the return trip from Sakht, however the fleet not yet re-listed in fleet finder

18:46 Ohno no borrox gets inundated on voice coms (which was in the ping) about his fleet not being listed.

18:53 Fleet is now listed. I join along with a few score other people spread about the western arc of New Eden.

19:00 At the last moment the fleet is pushed together with the capital move fleet under Sebastien Saintfrusquin, but we remain we remain on separate voice comms. This made sense to me at the moment as caps move at their own pace and have their own procedures. No need to get caps and sub caps confused and wondering who said “jump” and what not.

19:03 Subcaps undock from Sakht. Time looks good. I am still sitting many jumps away.

19:05 Judging from coms, the first step was to bridge, however somebody on coms literally misses seeing the titan in space in front of them, and has to ask where it is in coms.

19:06 By this point about 9 people have said “The titan right there in space above the gate” in violation of all operational security/blue intel rules. We do NOT mention caps in voice coms, especially in a subcap fleet where spies are likely lurking. And we have be pinging about these move ops every day, six times a day, for a week, so the likelihood of spies in the op is exceedingly high.

19:12 The question goes out asking who has more than an hour of jump fatigue. This plays into how long the fleet might have to wait between jumps. Surprisingly, nobody chimes up with some obscene amount on their timer.

19:14 About the 4th person says they are in Sakht and asks if they can catch up. They cannot. The fleet has bridges out, and the bridging titan jumped to the cyno after them. Anybody who could catch up at this point has to be in a ship that doesn’t need a convoy anyway.

19:26 Question on coms, “Is this the Ishtar fleet?” It is not.

About this time Viserion Pavarius from Space Monkey Alliance asked in general channel for The Imperium if anybody needed some ships carried back, as he had room in his carrier. I gave him three stealth bombers I was planning to fly home later, saving me a trip. A great time to be part of The Imperium.

19:28 Destination for the op is currently Y-2AN0.

19:35 Fleet docks up in Y-2ANO to pick up those waiting for the convoy.

19:36 KVN-36 is the new destination announced on coms.

19:42 Jump into LBGI-2. The convoy is getting close and seems to be moving apace. They only have to get to C-N4OD, one system past KVN-36, and there is a jump bridge to 4-EP12 while the caps can make that jump themselves.

19:44 Warp disruption bubbles are reported on coms on on a gate in KVN-36. Somebody is messing with us. A Sabre is reported killed. We may have lost a Harpy and a Keres.

19:48 Combat reported on coms in KVN-36 while I am still sitting in 4-EP12. Ships reported down in fleet chat: Scythe, Harpy, Harpy, Harpy, Burst, Hawk.

19:55 Ohno no borrox says he was nearly done in but was saved by logi. Black Legion Tengus and dreadnaughts reported on C-N4OD gate in KVN-36. Voice coms become hard to follow.

19:57 Jabber Ping:

WE HAVE TITANS IN TROUBLE AND HOSTILE DREADS ARE ON FIELD. GET IN FLEET RIGHT NOW – HERE. WE. GOOOOOO

A Harpy fleet is being formed under Papusa in YA0-XJ to come to aid of the convoy now besieged in KVN-36. Subcap fleet sounds like it has to leave grid because of heavy losses.

Those of us who are sitting in 4-EP12 start asking what we should do on coms, as we are only a jump bridge and a gate out from KVN-36. We are told not to come in piecemeal but to join Papusa’s fleet if possible.

20:09 I join Papusa’s fleet and switch voice coms. Titans reported down in fleet chat:

20:13 Papusa has fleet free burn to a system to catch a wormhole into Fountain.

20:17 Papusa says, “We’re spinning up everything”

20:17 Jabber ping for additional fleet. This one is a Tengu fleet, again headed out of YA0-XJ, under Kathrine Wilde. The message includes, “Fuckloads of hostile dreads tackled GETIN!” That last is clearly the incentive for those seeking rich kill mails.

More super kills are reported in fleet chat.

20:23 Papusa directs units in Fountain to burn for JGOW-Y in order to meet up with those taking the wormhole. By this point I have bought a discount Harpy off of contract, re-shipped, and am ready to go. I undock and start to burn, but immediately run into groups of Black Legion ships.

However, they seem to be completely uninterested in me. They are burning to KVN-36 because there are titans to kill and shit.

As I travel, I become very aware of how much of Fountain Black Legion has claimed. My path (below, in red) passed through a lot of their systems. (Their ticker is MEN.)

The convoy and I head to KVN-36

The Brave Collective is supposed to be scooping up Fountain from us, but they have been clashing with Black Legion, who looks to be back in the sovereignty holding business for the time being.

And speaking of Brave, there were conflicting reports about how we were standing with them while this went on. We had set them to blue while we moved out of Fountain, but had apparently rescinded that. During the fight however, that supposedly got changed back, so it was said that Brave went from bubbling our supers and whoring on the kill mails to repping our ships and trying to help. I did not actually see any Brave ships, so I couldn’t tell you what our standings were. (I might not have seen them because my default combat overview doesn’t show blues.)

20:28 Ping from The Mittani. Brave is repping our last surviving super carrier in KVN-36.

20:32 Arrive JGOW-Y, those there are directed to head to C-N4OD to wait on the KVN-36 gate.

20:40 on the KVN gate in C-N4 waiting for Papusa fleet to catch up when a fleet of blue supers drops on the the gate to get to the fight. I want to describe them as “angry,” though that might be just because of the mood on coms. Still, when you are sitting in a wee frigate and a fleet of supers lands right behind you, you cannot help but think that the shit may well and truly be real.

Supers landing on… me!

Despite being told to wait on the gate for the fleet, I jump into KVN-36 because I want to see this.

On the far side of the gate I sit and gawk as capital ships decloak, align, and warp off to whatever it is they are after. There are approximately 900 people in local and time dilation is on, getting as low as 22% at times.

Papusa and the Harpy fleet arrive in KVN-36, though we don’t really have a target yet. We align here and there until somebody reports there is a Black Legion Naglfar tackled. Somebody else in the fleet finds the Nag and puts w’s in coms so we can warp to them.

20:58 Papusa fleet kills the tackled Naglfar.

Dead Naglfar on the field

Then there is something of a “what do we do now?” period. No more targets come our way. I switch to my alt, who is still in the move op fleet, to see what fleet chat says. People who want to convoy home are told to join the Katherine Wilde fleet. I decide to take advantage of the fact that everybody still seems to be headed to KVN-36 and move my alt out in the Dominix for home. I take the old jump bridge route from B-DBYQ to YA0-XJ, waiting for each jump timer to cool down. He is back in YA0-XJ and safe, with about 24 hours of jump fatigue, by 21:40. Not a single hostile spotted on the way.

21:14 Move op plans for sub caps are officially announced to resume under Katherine Wilde.

21:22 I head back to 4-EP12 using the jump bridge in C-N40D and drop Papusa’s fleet. I join the Katherine Wilde in 4-EP12 and swap to the Megathron for move. I now have a Harpy I am leaving behind, but I figure I can sneak that out later. I have a jump clone installed in 4-EP12.

We head out with the intention of taking gates all the way back to YA0-XJ. We are held together as we pass through an incursion, then continue moving on towards home. We hold up in KU5R-W to cover the capital fleet, which is also returning home.

21:55 I look at the clock and realize I am almost an hour beyond the time estimate I gave my wife. With the Domi home in YA0, Megathron able to dock up in KU5R-W, I drop fleet and log out.

Later in the day I log back in and decide to bolt straight for home in the Megathron using the route GARPA suggested. This was probably a bad idea, flying an out of date, fleet doctrine battleship, and all the more so as the run to the nearest jump bridge was through Sister’s of EVE NPC null sec, which tends to be populated with strangers… and in null sec, nobody likes strangers. I watch the intel channels and my luck holds. I make it to the jump bridge and am soon in the heart of Deklein.

One last moment of disaster loomed. I realized that I do not have our new Deklein intel channel open, so I bring it up and watch it for a bit. There is no history and nothing new pops up, so I figure I might as well continue. As it so happens there is a gang that just hot dropped on some people one system over from where I landed. I am already in warp for the gate when somebody mentions they are in the system I am headed for. However, I landed on the gate just as they were jumping into my system, so I slipped past and made a bee line straight for YA0-XJ to dock up. Later on Viserion Pavarius contracted me my three stealth bombers, so he got back okay. Aside from one Harpy, all of my stuff is out of Fountain.

This is, of course, my own little view into a much bigger battle, what I heard/read on coms and what I saw in person. Other people have covered he wider battle at the usual locations:

The balance seems to be about 460 billion ISK in losses for The Imperium with approximately 40 billion in losses for Black Legion and friends. A trail of tears in its own way. And, of course, if you read the link in the Twitter embedded at the top of the post, there are some institutional questions as to how this played out the way it did, with a big, well announced move op coming to ruin. All of that is way above my pay grade. I wouldn’t be surprised to find somebody has made a Hilter Downfall meme video about The Mittani hearing that a convoy op getting welped in Fountain.

Meanwhile, the 02:00 move op was cancelled, so I am not sure what happens with those who were left behind. There will probably be more ops this week, though perhaps they will not be announced quite so loudly in advance. I still have a Harpy to move, so I’ll keep my eye out for a ping, but if it doesn’t happen, I won’t care too much. It was a cheap Harpy.

And, of course, I have some screen shots from my move op adventures.