On August 20, a huge brawl erupted in Nalvula in Lonetrek. The fight was short and sweet, and by the time it was over, just over 700b ISK had been lost.
We spoke to Pandemic Legion FC Killahbee, who was the cause of the entire fight, to get his view on what happened.
He told us Pandemic Legion was scouting a Goonswarm fleet consisting of Carriers and Hurricanes that had been reinforcing POCOs, and had ended up in Nalvula.
Killahbee, along with fellow Pandemic Legion members Dancul and Headliner, decided to hop in with a fleet and doomsday the carriers. So far, so normal. Killahbee is known for applying Bosonic Field Generators liberally to targets, with the usual result that they end up as wrecks on the field. Today he had brought his Vanquisher, the Serpentis titan, to doomsday the unsuspecting fleet.
The doomsday weapons went off, and this time, none of the carriers died. Killahbee and his fleet were suspicious about this, and so started aligning out, taking shots at the subcaps as they did so. Suddenly they saw a cyno beacon light up, and 30 HICs jumped into the system.
At this point, he knew he had been baited, and started pinging every channel he had access to. He pinged PL, NC., PanFam and GoTG with urgent calls for fleets to form up and jump into Nalvula. Not many other details were given, as he was busy trying to save his ship on field. By this point, SNUFF Dreads had arrived on the scene and he was being called as primary.
He was down to around 80% armor, and starting to get extremely nervous, as he knew there would be Goonswarm dreads coming shortly.
Around three minutes after the SNUFF dreadnoughts arrived, Goonswarm came into the system. Fortunately for Killahbee, by now rescue fleets had arrived, including large numbers of Force Auxiliaries. He told us that it would take approximately nine dreads to out-DPS the reps from 1 FAX, and he had 30 FAX repping him, so this would need 270 dreads primarying him to out-DPS them.
SNUFF had begun to deactivate their siege modules (cycle red) and left the system once it became clear that the Vanquisher would not be going down. This left the Imperium fleets to brawl with PL, NC., Darkness and everyone else who had jumped in.
When the smoke cleared, the bulk of the Imperium losses were 159 dreads. The majority of Panfam and friends losses were made up of 82 FAX. The final toll was 529b ISK lost by the Imperium, to 194b ISK lost by Panfam, GoTG and others who came to assist.
According to Killahbee, what made the difference in this fight was Imperium being a little late to jump in. This was because they were unable to pre-form the fleet without tipping PL off to what was going on. They could only flash form, and this caused the delay. Three minutes is not long, but in a fight like this, it makes all the difference.
KillahBee also gave a lot of credit to NC. and Darkness, who formed fleets without really having any idea of what was going on. He pinged GoTG with a very vague call for help, and Sort Dragon responded without asking questions. NC. also formed fleets without really knowing what was going on and bridged into Nalvula.
From what we have heard today, everyone had a good fight. Imperium got to use their dreads in large numbers and Panfam got to fight in their caps and supers against non-subcaps. Our thanks go out to everyone involved in the fight, and those who spoke to us about the battle.
