The Stain Fraggin Coalition has been making large advances in Catch as part of their plan to take new space in the south. The past few days saw several brawls totaling over a hundred billion ISK lost on both sides.
Both the Imperium and Test Alliance Please Ignore lost a Titan minutes apart—a Ragnorak and a Leviathan, respectively. The TEST Leviathan was caught warping to a POS. Meanwhile the Imperium Ragnorak jumped instead of bridging. Bill McDonough has a write up on that fight here.
The stage set for fighting in ZXIC-7
The 64 billion fight for ZXIC
ZXIC-7 saw several notable fights after an Entosis operation conducted by the Stain Fraggin Coalition on the 11th. The losses total 10.87 billion ISK over 372 pilots lost for Stain Fraggin coalition; Soviet Union and friends had 218 pilots totaling 63.98 billion ISK lost. Check out the full battle report found here.
At first glance it appears that this was one fight, both sides reshipped several times to counter their opponent. TEST Ruptures alongside CO2 Omen Navy Issues and Lumpy Gilas engaged the Soviet Union Gila fleet on the F4R2-Q gate. As this was happening, TEST formed a Hurricane fleet to assist the Ruptures who were already out. As the Hurricanes arrived, Soviet Union escalated to Rattlesnakes supported by triage FAX. TEST once again formed a new fleet, this time Nightmares, to fight the Rattlesnakes. Soviet Union’s heavily outnumbered fleets were annihilated.
9KOE-A had a very similar breakdown
Battle for 9KOE
On the 12th both sides showed up to the 9KOE-A system—currently held by Against All Authorities—in order to contest entosis. The defenders, Stain Wagon, brought 100MN Gilas while TEST brought Hurricanes. Both sides had even numbers but TEST did not fair as well as they had previously. The ended up losing losing 6.2 billion ISK and 51 Hurricanes, while Soviet Union lost 4.9 billion ISK and 14 Gilas.
Gilas are an extremely effective doctrine when flown properly because they are unable to easily be stopped. The oversized afterburner makes scrams useless and gives all the benefits of high speed without the sig bloom caused by an microwarpdrive. There are downsides: turning is slow and accelerating to full speed can take upwards of 20 seconds—an eternity in combat. Again, we have an adjusted battle report of the fight here.
There are sure to be more skirmishes in Catch in the next few days. 37 sovereignty timers come out of reinforced over the next two days, to say nothing of POS and Citadel reinforcement timers as well.
