Well, I expected that stratop to last 60, maybe 90 minutes tops.

That was 6 hours ago.

Now as we withdraw from the field and I try to unwind from what is possibly the most intense fight I've had in EVE yet, it's time to go over what happened as best I can so soon after the battle.

After we won the defensive timer for HED-GP (one of our major trade systems) as detailed in my last post about a Titan kill, Pandemic Legion hit the system again. Tonight was our first defensive timer for the system's Infrastructure Hub; not an urgent priority (there's 3 more defensive timers the attackers need to win after that to get the system), but it's one we wanted to win, so BRAVE called all hands on deck for this. PL was confident they had this, so they fielded a moderately-sized fleet of Apocalypse Navy Issue battleships (one step short of actual Titans on the lethality scale) supported by 1-2 dozen carriers and supercarriers. It looked like an even fight at first...

And then 2-3 waves of bombs hit PL's battleships in rapid succession. The BRAVE fleet took the opportunity to start melting the Apocs. Suddenly the PL capitals found themselves alone on the field against 800 BRAVE ships.

The destruction of PL's Blockade Unit was an afterthought. The brawl proper had begun. Warp disruption bubbles popped up everywhere around PL's carriers as Cyno Jammers went up in system to keep them from jumping out of system. They were trapped, and their fighters & drones were being obliterated by the massive BRAVE force on field. However, they had enough remote repair beams to keep each other from dying to our assault. We needed some help.

We called up Black Legion again and told them we had a whole slew of PL carriers and supercarriers trapped and ripe for the taking. They just needed to provide the firepower. They agreed, but they couldn't take their own supercapitals through a wormhole like they did for the last Titan kill; they had to take the long way in.

It would be 2-3 hours before they arrived. We needed to keep the PL carriers trapped until then.

Ragepings went out over our alert systems: we needed every pilot that could drop a warp disruption bubble to log in and get to HED-GP. Warp bubbles (and the ships that could deploy them) sold out rapidly; more were shipped in via Jump Freighter. The carriers were trapped, and although they managed to shoot down 100 or more ships, BRAVE just kept bringing more of them in. Their fighter stocks dried up, so they resorted to deploying regular drones. Word was spreading of the giant fight; other parties were slowly streaming into system.

The Kadeshi were the first ones in with their own capital fleet. Then BRAVE brought in their own capital fleet. Finally, the Cyno Inhibitors were dropped so BL could jump in their supers and capitals. PL took the opportunity to jump in their own group of titans, trapping them along with their previous capitals in the hopes they'd have enough repairs to survive the assault. Things had escalated royally, with a few hundred Titans, carriers, and dreadnoughts and over 1500 ships total in system. Time dilation (slowdown) dropped to 10% as the servers "caught on fire" from the massive load of people in system.

The BL Titans focus-fired their Doomsdays, blowing a PL Ragnarok titan to smithereens. (I will link the Ragnarok killmail later; apparently the aftermath of HED-GP blew up zKillboard.) PL responded with their own Doomsdays, blowing up several BL dreadnoughts. It looked like we were getting ready to kill more PL supers...

Then Northern Coalition jumped their own supers in right on top of PL's supers and began remote-repairing them. There was no way we could outdamage their repairs now. Our forces began withdrawing off the field, letting PL escape, although they got a bloodied nose in the process.

However, NC jumping to PL's aid against the Kadeshi and BL could lead to some interesting diplomatic repercussions. While NC and Pandemic Legion are old allies, NC and Black Legion have been fighting a two-front war against Goonswarm and the CFC up north, while PL has been busy using their fleet of supers to harass BRAVE/HERO and help the Russians (who are allies of the CFC) conquer the Wicked Creek region. NC taking the field to help their old allies against their current allies could have serious consequences in the war against CFC and PL's skirmishes with BRAVE. Will tension build between NC and BL over NC siding with PL over them? Will NC demand that PL help them more against CFC in exchange for saving their fleet here, causing them to abandon their assaults on BRAVE space? We'll have to see what diplomatic fallout results from this in the coming weeks, but for now HED-GP is safe and we've caused one of the biggest fights this year on EVE.