PAPI’s “last push” into the O-EIMK constellation was on Monday, August 2, 2021. By the end of the day, all major PAPI partners had announced and begun withdrawals from Imperium space. Over the next two weeks the Imperium routed PAPI out of the four Imperium home regions: Delve, Querious, Fountain, and Period Basis.
During that period INN provided daily reporting of the progress of the “Regoonquista.” Now that reconquest activity has largely subsided, INN is providing in this report a summary of the data from those daily reports.
Included in this report are data from Tuesday, August 3 through Sunday, August 15.
The Pace of Reconquest
4) TCUs (blue line)
The Imperium’s reconquest of its space proceeded in four waves dictated both by strategic priorities and also by the pacing set by the various timer windows.
Reconquest Wave 1: Ansiblex Jump Gates
In the first wave was PAPI’s transportation network–the Ansiblex Jump Gates that would aid their escape from Imperium space. These strategically important assets have only a single, 24-hour timer between initial reinforcement and the window in which they can be destroyed. As a result, the Imperium destroyed these assets first. This activity is represented by the grey line in the chart above, which rises early and then falls. Within two days of the beginning of the Regoonquista, PAPI’s ability to move subcaps and freighters without Titan support was severely degraded.
Wave 2: IHUBs
While the Imperium was destroying PAPI’s jump gate network it was also reinforcing IHUBs throughout the four regions of Imperium space. These sov structures are critically important strategic assets because they enable the anchoring of permanent cyno jammers. In order for the Imperium to rapidly project power across four regions of space simultaneously, the Imperium needed access to cynos, and that meant the IHUBs had to come down.
IHUBs have a longer timer to wait after initial reinforce, which explains why it took longer for them to start to fall, but as the orange line in the chart above indicates, the Imperium wasted no time in reinforcing IHUBs, and by the third day of the reconquest and spiking quickly over the next few days, the Imperium very rapidly killed most of the IHUBs in the reconquest regions.
Wave 3: Structures
Structure timers take even longer to pass than IHUBs. Each Upwell structure requires two timers to pass–an armor timer and a hull timer–before they can be destroyed. Therefore it took several days for structures to begin to fall, and the bulk of the structure bashing was completed in the second week. Strategically this sequence worked well for the Imperium because it enabled them to clear the IHUBs first and enable a full projection of power across large distances.
Upwell structure kills are indicated by the block columns in the chart above, with each column subdivided into colored sections based on structure type.
Wave 4: TCUs
Strategically, TCUs are the least important asset to take, and accordingly, they were the last to start falling in significant numbers. They are indicated by the blue line in the chart above.
The Cost of Retreat
The pell-mell retreat from Imperium space proved costly for PAPI. In the first two weeks of the Regoonquista, PAPI lost something like 6 trillion in ships and structures. Most of these losses (particularly the structure losses) occurred in Delve, Querious, Fountain, and Period Basis. But as time progressed and PAPI move ops took their moveable assets farther along the path of retreat, more and more ship losses occurred outside of the four reconquest regions—particularly in the system of UQ-PWD in Catch, where a Dreadbomb. bait cyno caught hundreds of billions of PAPI ships, including a Titan, Supercarriers, and many Dreads.
(Note, these counts do not count highsec or lowsec ganks of alt corp ships)
As the chart above showed, over the course of two weeks, PAPI paid a significant price in capital ships. Worth noting is that many of these ships were being used as “suitcase” capitals to transport a significant portion of the pilot’s personal assets as part of the retreat. Such losses are significantly more costly than a typical combat loss because of the large amount of collateral material that is lost with the ship. It is unclear whether SRP will be provided by the PAPI alliances for such losses, but in many cases they may not be as the pilots presumably should have been part of an organized move op, or else their alliances and corps may not have the funds for reimbursement. In either case, such losses could well represent a tremendous blow to the pilot involved.
As this data shows, the Imperium’s reconquest of its space was effective and swift, and PAPI’s losses were extensive. As the Imperium continues to rebuild its space and PAPI’s former members continue their long treks home, it remains to be seen when and how swiftly the second phase of the Beeitnam War will begin and bring with it the Imperium’s promised mission of vengeance.
