It was announced at the Imperium fireside meeting this past Saturday that the coalition had taken 69 systems since the opening of the offensive against Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and the assorted members and hangers on that make up their coalition.  Sniggering about the obvious number aside, we have been busy.

These gains include systems beyond the Catch region, extending out to Tenerifis, Immensea, and Impass.  So the sov influence map… you can see the latest one here or the full historical directory here… has changed.

Here is the pre-campaign state of the map.

And here is where things stood on Sunday, August 18th.

Our foes have been pushed back and you can see systems in Immensea lit and ready to be taken from Legion of xXDEATHXx.  The enemy is mostly busy trying to reorganize their holdings further back to accommodate refugees and retreats from the front.  The alliance they created, Goons Failed to Defend This System, which was put together to goad the Imperium into attacking, has been wiped off the map.

All of which is less a chest thumping declaration of triumph than a cold statement of fact.  Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and their gang has proven unwilling or unable to defend the space taken and has been sending messages out to its members and allies that they will just take all the space back once Goons get bored and go home.

In their narrative this has been a success in that they did, in fact, goad the Imperium into attacking.  Their claim is that on their side the whole thing was just a couple of SIGs.

A little more substantial claim on the Imperium side is the structure kill count.

• 2 – Keepstars
• 21 – Fortizars
• 1 – Tatara
• 2 – Azbels
• 59 –  Astrahuses
• 2 – Raitarus
• 22 – Athanors
• 23 – Metenox Moon Mining Drills
• 35 – Skyhooks

That list gives lie to the claim that this was just a couple of SIGs on their side.  I mean, when I go out on operations with SIGs on the Imperium side we try to live out of an NPC station, or maybe a Raitaru or an Astrahus.  We do not drop two Keepstars.  Keepstars are a commitment, targets that attract hostiles and which, if you are not out in force, will be attacked.

Dropping a Keepstar means serious business.  And two Keepstars on one grid… a potential clash of titans… I mean, unless one side just doesn’t show up.

Then there was the great hell camp of Utopia.

After blowing up the two staging Fortizars in the system of Utopia in Curse, we were told that Fraternity, Horde, and their allies had moved all of their capital ships to one of the NPC stations in the system.

We dropped a Fortizar of our own in sight of the undock and setup a hell camp.

A hell camp is when you have your foes in a single location and you bubble them in and put up a guard fleet around the clock to catch them if they try to break out.  Hell camps are a thing of legend, especially in Goonswarm, as they demonstrate the sometimes stupid lengths we will go to in order to best a foe.  Hell camps can for run for days, weeks, or even months if the goal is clear and the foe well and truly trapped.

The hell camp of the battlefield after the clash at M2-XFE during World War Bee was a classic example.  While likely a strategic mistake… to do the hell camp we had to let down the watch on the wall of Helm’s Deep, the protected industrial region we had held against overwhelming odds, and in doing so those three constellations were lost and all of our structures purged… it was tactically a very popular operation and did demoralize our foes for weeks.

You could log in and sit around for an hour or two and suddenly some foe would get impatient or log in the wrong character and a titan or a super carrier or a fax would appear in the bubbles and a hoot would go up on coms and we’d dog pile on the unfortunate for another easy kill.

I got on a few such kills.  We were all working from home during the pandemic, so I would just leave myself logged in and coms on a speaker so I could turn from my work laptop and join in if something came up.  Good times.

The hell camp in Utopia though… that felt a bit weak to me.  Unlike the M2-FXE hell camp, hell camping a station requires the hostiles to log in, see local, and still think they can undock.  You aren’t going to get very many accidental kills and the whole thing is prone to station undock games and what not.  I’ve been there and done that.  I remember us bottling up the Southern Coalition at the station in 319-3D in Delve a dozen years back.  As a tactic it has its place.

But this hell camp didn’t feel right to me.  It wasn’t clear that the enemy was bottled up or that they cared if they were.  They hadn’t bothered to show up for more than a couple of fights and their stated goal was to bore us to death, so why would they care if they couldn’t undock?  They were not going to do so anyway.

I nearly wrote a post about the hell camp, but my attention was elsewhere.  I did go out and get a few screen shots of it and our Ferox Navy Issue fleet hanging out, ready to unleash their aimbot accurate railguns on anybody dumb enough to show up, but I didn’t join the camp.

Certainly Gobbins made hay about us and our hell camp.  Apparently he openly and repeatedly pinged out on Discord to all who were listening that the Imperium were fools, that there was nothing there, that the capital ships had been withdrawn previously, and that they were gone, safely back in home space, out of reach of the Imperium and were not coming back.

The Imperium could go pound sand with their hell camp.

The Imperium took screen shots of those pings… we all have enough low level spies in each other’s organization that no general ping goes unread by all… and the coalition diplomats brought them to organizations in the area of operation who had previously declined to cooperate with us because they have assurance from Gobbins that Pandemic Horde would totally be there to help defend their space.  This did not bolster confidence in PH and their promises and we now apparently have cooperation from groups who were previously willing to defy us based on the backing they assumed they had.

This was all part of the plan, or so we were told, so the hell camp served a purpose, if not exactly the expected one.  And they probably got a few random kills in any case.  If you wait long enough anywhere in null sec somebody will eventually blunder in and get caught.

Which brings us to the other part of Saturday’s announcement, which was that the Imperium is expanding its space.  We have groups that want more space and we have a vested interest in preparing for however CCP’s plan to reinvigorate null sec with the Equinox expansion… launched back in June and expected to be a thing… maybe by November… turns out.

I previously wrote about how Equinox seemed to be the end of farms and fields, the old goal of being able to make any null sec system useful and able to support players, to the old pattern of some systems having value while others did not.  This was surprisingly… to me at least, I am not used to getting the point of things without having them explained with small words… taken up by the Imperium and other null sec entities and became the wide versus tall argument.

Farms and fields was a “tall” view of null sec, where a large group could provide for itself in a constellation or two.  The “wide” view of the world has only some systems providing enough value to fully upgrade so a large organization needs to grab more space to ensure it has the resources it needs to support its members.

So the Imperium is expanding as a hedge against that, getting the timers started on things because the sovereignty level take 60 days to get to five and you can’t do all possible upgrades until you get there.

We will likely be taking more than the 69 systems already acquired… and if Pandemic Horde and Fraternity want to take them back like they have said they are going to do, they might have to undock and put some effort into it.

Also, by the time this posts the Fortizar kill count will have gone up by at least one… assuming PH doesn’t come to defend it.  But that has been a very safe assumption so far.

When I checked in the week before last about null sec, the Imperium had just successfully dropped a Keepstar in the system U-QVWD, on grid with Pandemic Horde’s Keepstar, leading to an unprecedented situation, and one with only a single possible conclusion: One of those Keepstars needed to go.  Story about that here.

The led to a dramatic call from Pandemic Horde’s leader Gobbins, who declared they were going to… fight?  No.  He called for a general evacuation to the Keepstar in 1P-WGB, ceding the field to the Imperium.

The Imperium Keepstar onlined successfully with minimal Pandemic Horde or Fraternity interference and the Imperium moved into it, making it our staging station in Catch.  The story up to that point here.

But we still had to blow up the Keepstar in U-Q.  The battle over the armor timer happened during the work week, during working hours for me, so I missed out.  We won the objective while our foes patted themselves on the back for actually putting up a defense and inflicting some losses.  That set the final timer, after which their Keepstar could be destroyed.  This timer, as is their habit, was set in the Chinese time zone where PH and Frat are strongest.  That meant an early morning event.  But it was on s Saturday.  I could manage that right?  It was just going to kick off at… 5:00am?

My alarm went off at 4:45am for this fight.  My wife had been teasing me the night before about this, asking, “You’re getting up before the sun to do what tomorrow?  Explain this to me again? There is going to be a big fight?  No?”

The sacrifices one makes to live in California.  But that was 12:00 UTC and the rest of the coalition to the east of me was able to rise at a more reasonable time.  Also, the joke is on my wife, because I wake up between 5:30am and 6:00am on my own anyway, so it wasn’t much of a struggle.  She remembers me when we first met, when getting up before 10:00am on a Saturday was something of a chore for me.

It probably also says something that I know which alarm to use on the iPad to keep from waking her up.

I think I last used that alarm… set for 2:45am… when we beat PH and Frat at X47L-Q in a battle that had to straddle downtime about a year and a half back.  That event ended the same way this one was expected to, without a fight.  For the structure, the battle is always over the armor timer, because the defenders can still evac at their own pace if they need to.  The hull timer, which ends with the destruction of the station leaves you hanging in space with the might of your foes already massed against you.

I got up when the alarm went off and started up my computer and logged in.  The forming up of fleets had already begun, the first being called at 4:09am my time.  By the time I logged in the Raven Navy Issue fleet was full.  I was planning to try and get into that, because you might as well shoot the biggest weapon system you can.  There was a Rokh fleet as well, but I didn’t bring a Rokh because you can only fit so much in a fax SMA.  There were two Ferox Navy Issue fleets, one was full and the other was struggling to find any logi.  I didn’t want to fly logi.  I need to get on a kill mail every month before I swap over to logi… and I wanted to be on the Keepstar kill mail.

Then I noticed there, in the middle of the pings, a fleet on Asher Elias using our Flycatcher doctrine.  That doctrine is an experiment to find out what happens when you give everybody a chance to bubble the fleet.  But I’ll always pick Asher if I have a choice of FCs, and it turned out to be a good pick.

Most people were just going to be sitting around waiting for the timer to down to a point where they could warp over and get on the kill mail.  There is a damage cap, so anything beyond that is wasted effort unless there is a fight.  However, no opposition was expected, and none was offered.  But being a weekend people were piling in to get on the kill.  There were about 3K people in system when I logged in, and that number climbed past 3.7K over the course of the morning.

I did a dscan at one point and counted 641 capital ships on grid.

While so many people were hanging around, our fleet had a job to do.  We flew on out to the gate that led into the system from the far side of Catch where our foes were staged and camped the gate… which, in a fleet full of interdictors meant deploying ALL the bubbles.

So we got to goof around and try to put bubbles in dead spots… and we even caught a few people coming and going.  There was an Arazu that was dead set to get into the system.

There was also somebody in a Jackdaw… who showed up twice.  So it kept us busy while we waited.

When the Keepstar got down to 15% we warped back over to that and joined in with everybody trying to get on the kill.  There were ships all over.

With everybody shooting the tidi ground right down to the 10% mark and then some, but the end result was preordained.

So far the kill mail hasn’t showed up on zkillboard.  I’ll link to it when it does, but sometimes when that many people get on a kill… and the server also has to process all the asset safety changes… and a staging Keepstar will have a lot of leftover stuff… it takes time and sometimes the kill mail doesn’t generate at all.  This won’t be the first Keepstar kill mail of mine that was swallowed up by the server, never to be seen again.

There was some cleanup to do after, some bads to chase down, but for the most part it was just a standard structure shoot… where 3.7K people want to get on the kill while the hostiles stayed away.

There were some other things going on while we were focused on that.  Fanatic Legion ran around while all eyes were on the Keepstar and finished off three Astrahus, an Athanor, and a Fortizar on their own.

But we were not done for the day.  Shortly after the Keepstar shoot was done our Flycatcher fleet, now under an alternate FC and Asher had to get on and deliver a special early Fireside address, was bridged over to the EM-L4K constellation where there was a sovereignty contest kicking off for the sov hub in 1P-WGB.

I mentioned that system above because that is where the next hostile Keepstar is anchored.  We went and covered those operations as the coalition turned the system.

Out there we were less of a blocking force and more in the traditional role of interdictors, which is warping into the middle of hostiles to pin them down so some big guns can show up and finish them off.

I got on a few more kills there.  But, if you’re flying an interdictor you are exposing yourself to the enemy who very often would like you to stop bubble and takes it personally that you’re doing that, so you move way up the priority list of things to shoot.  As such, I ended up getting popped after a couple engagements.  It happens.

That was the end of things for me.  By the time I was back in our staging… because I forgot to move my death clone… the sov battle was over and fleets were just covering the sov hub deployment.  Op success.

The next target is the Keepstar in 1P-WGB, which already had a timer counting down when we passed by it, stopping on the Fortizar anchored on the same grid.

That will be another armor timer, so may end up actually being a fight.  We shall see.  However, that fight, which will have kicked off before this post goes live, would require me to get up at 3am… and even I have limits.  However, if it does turn into a contested armor timer, the fight will drag out so I will be able to join a reinforcement fleet if it is still going when I do get up.

Our foes have already set their plan in motion… which was the same as the last plan… retreat.  This time they are falling back to the Utopia system in Curse.

No Keepstar to kill there and no sovereignty to lose.  I guess that is a plus.

Anyway, we shall see what the next operation brings.

Update:  Pandemic Horde and Fraternity opted not to contest the Keepstar armor timer in 1P-WGB.  No fight today, so I was good to sleep in.