A five-hour fight took place in Detorid on November 25, over a Solar Fleet ihub in KZ9T-C, with the final losses coming in at 105b for Triumvirate & Fraternity, and 146b for XIX, TEST, Solar and friends.
We caught up with Cpt Patrick Archer from Triumvirate to get his view of what happened.
He told us that in addition to the ihub, Solar have a Keepstar in KZ9, which they had been evacuating to, and this was one of the reasons for taking the fight in the system. Triumvirate spread out over several systems using Force Auxiliary ships to hack nodes while camping the defensive Machariel fleets with supers and titans. XIX and Solar responded by bridging past the supers, to attack the entosising FAX. In response, Tri jumped groups of supers in on top of them. This leapfrogging went back and forth for the first 30 minutes or so and was one of the most fun parts of the fight.
The primary system, KZ9, had a cyno jammer active, and it had several of the initial nodes that needed to be attacked. As a result, Tri. and Fraternity gated into the system and began brawling with XIX & Solar. As the fighting escalated, Solar brought High Angle Weapon (HAW) Dreadnoughts onto the field from their Keepstar. As the attackers were unable to cyno directly into the system, they jumped supercarriers into a neighbouring system and then gated through to engage the dreads. The attackers managed to force XIX to leave the grid with long-range fighter-bombers. This allowed them to warp their supers over to the cyno jammer and incap it. Unfortunately, by this point, TiDi was in full effect and it turned into a 5-hour slug-fest of ganking nodes and skirmishing.
TEST assisted in the defense, harrassing the attacking fleets in Harpies and bombers. Unable to dock, the TEST bombers were resupplied by a Solar pilot in a hauler. The bombers were especially effective against the Tempest fleet fielded by the attackers, and by all accounts, the bombers & Harpies were one of the more interesting fleets involved in the marathon fight. Resupply was not only an issue for TEST, as the fleets trying to take out the bombers ran out of Torpedos, and the FC had to call for resupply at around the 3-hour mark.
‘Triumvirate’s partners in the attack, Fraternity are an alliance who have seen their numbers bolstered in the past few months. Much of this growth has come from players coming to Tranquility from Serenity (the Chinese server), amid rumours of it closing down.
At present, no official statement has been made on this, but the exodus from the server indicates that players feel a change is coming. The new players on TQ are currently mostly Alpha clones while getting ISK for PLEX, but they are already having quite an impact on traditionally quiet timezones in Eve. As these players settle into ISK making, it will be interesting to see how the influx affects the landscape in nullsec.
As for Detorid? There is due to be a rematch of the fight on Monday, and, we will bring you information from that as and when it happens.
A video showing a triumvirate view is below:
Editor’s Note: We reached out to Karer from XIX for their view of the fight, but at the time of writing, had not heard back from him. We will update this with his side if it becomes available.
