THE STAGE
On January 16, in the system of Nalvula, Imperium forces led by CO2 engaged NC, PL, Mercenary Coalition, Project Mayhem, and TRI over two Project Mayhem staging towers as they were coming out of reinforced mode. The engagement lasted around two hours, and resulted in nearly 75B ISK worth of kills.
THE FLEETS
One thousand pilots took part in this throwdown. The Imperium brought at least 623 pilots, while NC and friends defended with 341 members. Imperium forces attacked with thirty four dreadnoughts, thirty carriers, 129 Machariels/Bhaalgorns/Armageddons, 105 T3 strategic cruisers, with Hurricane, Cerberus, and electronic warfare support. The defenders fielded nine dreadnoughts, eight Machariels, 162 T3 strategic cruisers, and a 40+ man Sleipnir/Hurricane Fleet Issue fleet.
THE FIGHT
Several FCs were reached in order to put this fight into perspective, including Poision Kevin of NC, WOLFPACK10 of RZR, Apple Pear of GSF, and Sebastien Saintfrusquin of CO2. The fight, as stated above, was over two reinforcement timers. The Imperium killed the first tower with no response. However, as the second tower’s timer still had twenty minutes on it, defending forces had plenty of time to call in help.
“PM bathponed all of EVE: PL, NC, TRI, MC, Snuff, etc.. probably more. Snuff were the only ones that didn’t end up coming…” said Sebastien Saintfrusquin of CO2
Whether ‘batphoned’ or not, NC fleet commander Poision Kevin also stated that they were told days in advance. “So yeah, we were told about the Nalvula timer, two days ago-ish and posted an Op,” said Poision. As the fight was in EU primetime, it was sure to be a big engagement. As the fight was winding up, pings for “max dudes in fleet” went out to everyone’s computers. The Imperium was already set in Nalvula with their fleets. As the second timer came out and as scouts reported the defending fleet next door, all hands were ready…
TMC: At this point, Poision Kevin, everyone is ready to fight and it’s a wild-west standoff on the gate. What happens next?
Poision Kevin: Well the Imperium was sitting in Nalvula and I didn’t want to jump into a huge group of fleets. We went from Hakkonen and set up along with PL/MC on the Nalvula gate in Taisy instead and we wanted the CFC (Imperium) to jump into us from there. Nothing happened and we hate to blueball the fight, so the call was made to go all in. We came in first and TiDi hit is really hard, resulting in PL/MC taking much longer to get through the gate. NC took the hits first.
TMC: Yes, many of the Imperium FCs stated that the lag/TiDi was terrible. I’m looking at the nine dreadnoughts that you brought in. Sebastien stated, “NC dropped them as suicide dreads on the CO2 triages to grab a few kills, but were met with heavy neuts rendering the Moros dreads useless”. What were they for?
PK: Yes, we planned to drop blap dreads to kill some Machariels and/or kill carriers before their triage finished. We brought nine though, which is a bit excessive on our part. Five would have served the purpose in hindsight. The dreadnoughts served a great meatshield and once I pulled our T3’s away from neuts we were all good and had a fun time killing Jackdaws when they were in range.
TMC: At what point were you sure that you needed to disengage?
PK: When the Hurricane fleet died and warped out, there was not much left for us to shoot that we could break. Staying meant the Hawks/T3’s landing at 0 and Machs coming in. The Machariels can’t be broken easily by subcaps under triage reps so at that point we aligned all fleets out and left.
The road to the fight in Nalvula was not so easy for everyone. WOLFPACK10 told TMC of the trek RZR had to take to get to the brawl.
TMC: Folks are saying that you had to get through two fights to get to Nalvula. How was that?
WOLFPACK10: So RZR was calling a fleet for the lowsec fights that everyone was told about. We undocked with HFIs/Sleipnirs and warped to the BV- gate in 6NJ. At that point, OOS undocked as well with the same fleet, but as we jumped into BV-, OOS docked back up. As we kept pressing forward, OOS undocked again and bridged to a cyno in a bubble on the N6G gate. The BR can be seen here. We basically one shot each other until OOS started to lose more ships than us. At that point they ran off.
TMC: Well I am guessing you had to reship after that?
W: Yea we changed to Cerbs and we made good speed to low sec, but as we jumped into C2X, we found a TRI fleet jumping into us. We moved off the gate and set up boosts. After a couple of good kills, we were losing ships and hostile logistics was starting to hold. We then pulled range and warped off grid and disengaged. Only then could we make to the fight we were supposed to be at! Below is a video of the fight in C2X.
TMC: Wow. All that just to get to the real fight.
W: Yeap. All-in-all it was about a four to five hour op with three good fights.
THE COST
During the huge fight, the defenders (NC/PL/MC/16-13/TRI) took the brunt of the damages, losing just under 53B ISK. Of the five alliances on the defending side, NC and Mercenary Coalition took the lead in losses, mostly in the form of dreadnoughts, HFIs and Sleipnirs. Imperium forces managed to win the ISK war, losing 18B ISK, and the strategic objective.
TMC is still reaching out to involved players and will update this article if new information becomes available.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Lemba.
