andi_onthatop

“The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” Braxus Khan
Let the purge begin ...

This is the official AAR for the fight that happened on the night of 08/03/2020 during the hull timers for the main fortizars in TDSIN home, J164430.
 
THE SETUP
The days before the hull timer we had 2 big fights in which we killed a significant chunk of the hostile capital force, and podded out a lot of the reinforcements they got in thanks to frigate hole shenanigans on the first day of the eviciton. This, toghether with some intel we had, and the fact that most of the people defending were buisy evicting rage, lead us to believe that the chance for a fight on the final timer was very small, so we were all set up for a relaxing final structure bash and the loot pinata that would follow, but about 3h before the timer of the TDSIN staging fortizar, "The Kraken", a new signature spawned. After quickly scanning it down, we realized it was Q003 Frigate hole to nullsec, Vale of the silent specifically.
This was bad, really bad. we knew tdsin would batphone quite litterally anyone in nullsec that would listen, and the TDSIN eviction went from what basically was a guaranteed victory, to an almost guaranteed defeat almost instantaneously. 
We started gathering intel on who exactly was forming, and as the list kept growing from goons, to test, horde, brave newbies, bombers bar, basically the majority of big nullsec alliances where dropping whatever they were doing and pinging their members to form fleets to save TDSIN. 
The situation was pretty grim, and especially me and Loro were ready to just give up, and tell people to dock up and stand down, but after a bit of a pep-talk from Seth from Hc and bounty, we decided to look at the situation for what it was, and try and make the best out of it.
THE PLAN
The first thing we realized we had to do, was log in all of our rage alts, to keep init and the wormholers currently in rage from podding out to save TDSIN. Little did they know that all we had left was suitcase caps and sitters, and were under no circumstance ready to give a fight. with this we managed to get our numbers docked in rage up to about 100, and at one point even undocked 70 caps (of which a large chunk was unfit/rolling fit), to force them to keep their forces split. This worked wonders, and the only fleet that left rage, was a Goonswarm jackdaw fleet.
After that, we took a look: what exactly was forming to save them, what did they have, what did we have and who was coming to help us?
On their side:

Burning over from kspace:
-200 man goon jackdaw fleet
-120 ish TEST travelceptors, that would recieve handouts once in TDSIN home (tempests)
-70 man horde kiki fleet
-30 Brave bombers
-Assorted allies pinged togheter by bombers bar, which allowed us to get a neutral character into their fleet and get up to date intel on their comp and numbers
and Already in the hole:
-about 150 dudes, with roughly 30 carriers, 20 dreads, 10 faxes, 40 machs and various support ships

On our side:
Burning over from kspace:
-50 frat harpies
-about 40 dudes in a small snatch fleet from cones

in the wormhole:
-our 100 man Muninn/Tfi fleet (started out in muninns, reshipped into tfis)
-Inner hell with 40 ish 10mn arty lokis
-War and wormhole with 60 tempests
-our 30 ish carriers, couple of dreads and a few fax, which we had to use to pause timers, so we could not really commit to the fight

So as you can tell, it looked pretty grim. we were outnumbered and outshipped, and we were also forced to use our capitals to deal with timers, and having to do the actual fighting without their support. We needed a way to mitigate this advantage from their side, and gain any advantage we could. to this extent, Jimmy came up with a brilliant idea: Use our caps, to bait them into deploying on our fortizar, which was on the same grid as theirs, and then simply deaggroing and docking them up, trading maybe a few carriers for a fight right on top of our fort.
We would also start out the fight with our main fleet in muninns, to quickly and more easily deal with the various hostile frigate fleets, and to mitigate damage against both the hostile capitals and large artillery fleets. us/inher/frat would sit on the nullsec frighole, killing said fleets as they jumped in, and then turn around, and face the main enemy force all togheter, while our carriers took care of all the fortizar kill timers.
This was starting to look like something we could potentially pull off, and the prospect of a fight became more and more exciting.

THE FIGHT

The first timers passed away without shots being fired on either side. them allowing us to grind down an azbel and a fort with our carriers sitting on ours, while waiting for their reinforcements to come in. As the horde/gsf fleets came closer, we undocked in muninns and warped to the null, to await and fight them. 
the first hostile fleet to arrive were the test ceptors, that quickly docked up, and got handed mainly Tempests, and a few capitals they still needed pilots for. various other smaller groups had already been trickling in, so the core of their fleet was at that point ready to go.
When the goon jackdaws were almost in the target system, They undocked their battleship/capital fleet from their fortizar, and as expected, warped it straigth on top of our carrier blob, deep inside of our fortizar tether range. The bait had worked, and jimmy quickly deaggressed our carriers, only losing 2 of them in the process. We undocked the few dreads we had, and togheter with the fortizar they started chewing through the hostile fax wall, quickly all dying in the process.
in the meantime, we decided to let inner hell and their 40 lokis + minokawa face the horde of incoming nullseccers togheter with fraternity, and we burned our muninns out of the bubbles and warped onto the main grid. We told the war and wormhole tempests to also commit to the main grid, and start blasting

we started out grinding through their tempests, killing almost every single one that was broadcasted, Me and kappa alternating who was calling and who was anchoring based on which one of us was webbed by hostile bhaalgorns, which we could not clear with the muninn alpha, killing 58 of them and a few machariels in 9 minutes time, while only losing 7 muninns, and a handfull of kiki legion tempests. At this point, the goon jackdaws that had been fighting (and getting slaughtered by) the inner hell lokis on the frighole grid landed on the fortizar, in pds range. I started broadcasting them as fast as I could, not even calling out names, and between the 70 odd high tracking muninns we had and loro manning the fort pds, they lasted about 3 minutes on grid. It was a slaughter.
While all of this was going on, Jimmy was doing god's work, pinging our carriers between friendly astrahuses, avoiding getting caught (we had no fax to save him, and they had a couple of dreads chasing our carriers around). while grinding through any hostile structures that were vulnerable, basically treating our armor tanked carriers like you would nano supers, and with great success. 
After dealing with the hostile jackdaw wing, inner hell managed to land on grid, and started clearing even more tempests, while we were volleying off machariels.
Shortly thereafter, pandemic horde's kiki fleet landed, surprisingly, also in pds range. Their fate was the same as the jackdaw fleet that preceeded them, all of them getting sent back to their ns staging system within minutes.
due to some bad communication on our side however, the friendly harpy fleet was also in pds range at that time. and unfortunately 50 brave fraternity boys died for the greater good.
At this point of the fight however, we had cleared all the hostile frigate fleets, and we had slowly bled 20 ish muninns, meaning we did not have the critical mass anymore to effectively volley off the well tanked hostile armor battleships, so we made a call to all deaggress and get ready to dock. in what is possibly the fastest mid fight doctrine switch in wormhole history, and in the middle of one of its biggest battles, it took us only 2 minutes from the moment we started deaggressing, to the moment we undocked a FAT tfi fleet. 
first things first, with our more then doubled alpha strike, we started clearing the hostile webbing bhaalgorns fist, and then what was left of their armor fleet.  Even tho we had killed a lot of the hostile reinforcements by this point, the fight was far from over. The war and wormhole fleet was pretty decimated, and hostiles still had 50 capitals on grid, 40 machariels, and 40 odd tempets. Hostiles we killed before but not podded were also warping in a small sleip/hurricane fleet as reinforcements. 
At this point of the fight, jimmy's carriers got through the last few % hp on the kraken, killing the main target of the entire operation. Cheers erupted on comms for a second, But then we kept on fighting. 
20 more minutes of just clearing the subcaps that were left ensued where we were consistently outtrading them really hard, and after that with only the hostile capitals left we completely stabilized, and we slowly grinded through the hostile capital grid, with the help of our fortizar (lmao), being all quite pumped that we had managed to pull this off

REFLECTIONS

I think this was for most people involved the best fight they'd ever participated in hands down. it certainly was for me and for the rest of ops team that was there.
First and foremost, our ops team is fucking amazing, @Kappa Pride @Jimmy Michaels @Phi Feynman @loroseco_krossand @bountyofben_django were incredible here. Jimmy's plan with the bait carriers, and the way he handled them togheter with phi after that hands down won us the fight, I dont know what I would have done without kappa alternating the calling with me, Both calling and anchoring in these fights is just not doable, especially in muninns, and kappa did an amazing job alternating the calling/anchoring with me. Also loro, who organized the entire logistical part of this with help from BA. without him we wouldnt even have had the tfis to fight with, and did an amazing job manning the fortizar and helping with the general planning of the fight, and bounty for just being all around helpfull. We couldnt have done it without ya, you guys did amazing
Then our allies:
 Hawks , Hole Control and the various smaller wh corporations in our fleet, The incredible dedication from their leadership and linemembers to fully support us in this op, their help in planning, and a lot of their skilled members helping out with all aspects of this eviction/fight was critical in making this happen.
Inner Hell, and their russian allies, for being absolute chads. say what you want, but they're the least risk averse group I know, and they have probably the most skilled fc that I've ever had the pleasure to fight with or against. the way they  turned flying those 10mn lokis into almost an art is incredible to watch. Their leadership is also a bunch of really cool dudes, always willing to help out, very no bullshit, very nice to work with.
War and Wormhole, for being a bunch of legends, just warping in their 60 tempests with 4 guardians when we asked them to, knowing full well they would probably feed every single one of them, but willing to take down as much as possible with them. Love those guys, mad respect.
and frat/cones & friends, our only kspace batphones that showed up. Cones actually helped secure the loot grid once we got out of the fight, and then helped with mainly looting capitals and stuff while most of our boys went to bed, burned out from this fight, and were really honest about the loot they gave back to us (100b+), and frat were just all around helpfull, and not too angry when we pds'd their entire fleet. sorry guys!

and last but most definitely not least, our own members.
you're all chads, and to me the fact you trusted us enough to dedicate this much time and effort into this eviciton, stayed up deep into a sunday night to make a last stand when things looked their worst, makes me a little bit emotional. There is no group in all of eve I'd rather be with, and its an honor to fly with you guys. none of this would be possible without you guys.


BR
https://br.evetools.org/br/5e65cfa09d1944001718baa9

This is the most accurate one I could find, the other ones are fucked by us shooting ships that dropped from the forti
MEDIA
I only have one vod right now, I will update this thread as I get more linked to me
Muninn/Tfi POV 
 
And I would like to add one last thing.
Cowards never win

Hail, mighty alliance!
 
I represent a tiny corporation Victorum Out Mortis living in J170845 system.
In recent days your presence has become unavoidable with all-seeing scouts and logoff fleets, so we are facing the choice of leaving wh-space in nullsec.
I have heard you offer rent for some corporations. 
So I thought that if we could pay a reasonable rent we could become citizens of your mighty empire.
 
Sincerely, Ettox 1.

NOVA AAR:  Pete FC (HK perspective)
 
Hey guys I'm here to shed some light from our perspective, for those of you that are interested. Majority of you do not care for our actions or our "Renter Empire". Feel free to complain in the comments below. You are going to complain how we are cowards for flying Petes or evil people ruining w-space, feel free to voice your opinions (We enjoy hearing them )! I do not speak for QEX/LZHKS/IXTAB/Hole Control /Spetraliz IIZ/Odin's Call, this is only a opinion of the FC and OPS director of Hard K(n)ocks.
 
Gonna start of by reminding everyone Eve is a "Sandbox" Massively Multiplayer Online video game.

It seems that everyone thinks there is rules or an honor code that everyone one has agreed to follow, which is simply not the case. At the end of the day it's about blowing up each others spaceships.
 
Other entertaining attributes of Eve is Politics, Espionage, Stealing, and being an Asshole and intentionally pissing people off to give your self a good laugh. Not many other MMOs facilitate an environment to allow the player to wield such power and create a name for himself to be famous or infamous.
 
I say all that to remind everyone there are no rules. You can push whatever kind of e-honor and rules on other people but if you don't have the military strength to enforce them they are meaningless words to other people.
 
Let's clear up a few things before we talk about the Nova Deployment.
Hard Knocks has an alliance [HKRAB] of 25 corporations. In HK there are 92 "Mains" if you look at the size of the alliance (588 members) divide it by 92 that is 6. So a pseudo average for every 1 pilot in HK each person has 5 alts. That really doesn't paint an accurate picture of the reality of it. Some people only have 1 account most have 2-3. And most leadership has 8-12 accounts. So in order to finance these accounts we unfortunately have to PVE. So to separate our main wormhole of "Rage" from this PVE, so we can focus on killing caps and pissing people off and having fun, we have created an alliance to house alt corporations. Why do we use alt corps? You're going to say because we don't want the PvE losses on your killboard, that might be true but the real reason is game mechanics. For each group of 1-5 people farming ISK in these WHs they need their own set of director level POS roles for security and POS set up, they need their own sets of bookmarks to operate, ect. So these corporations in HKRAB are not "renters", they are small groups of mains on their alts doing organized PvE at the highest efficiency (isk/hr) in Eve. It takes a lot of accounts and ISK and effort to set up and maintain these alt corps but it is not a burden on Hard Knocks because it is handled separately by the members. If a ping for a fleet goes out and people are on their alts bearing, they get finished with their current site, warp the caps to the POS and log out, and login to accounts in Rage for PVP.
 
Sounds like a pretty good system that we've organized for ourselves right? Sure it's greedy, but that's Eve, everyone wants ISK to buy toys and blow shit up. Instead what you have in other WH corporations is a daily struggle for leadership to facilitate PvE for their members. By running home sites (PvE in home system) they are locking down their home WH to not allow PvP for anyone that lives in their system while they spend 1-3 hours running their sites. This constant grind and effort that burns out leadership and FC's and content creators because they have to herd cats for PVE. I think that's what separates HK from other WH corps, and contributes to our success. There are plenty of unhappy people looking from the outside and see what we have built, and they fabricate from their imagination of why we would need this "Empire". Some think RMT, some think renters, whatever it is they think, they are disgusted with it.
 
So finally let's talk about this past weekend.
I woke up Friday late in the day and while lying in bed I checked my phone and saw all this stuff on reddit about QEX invading Nova. Literally the first I had heard of it. Sure I knew QEX was seeding dreads and at some point QEX wanted to evict them but no date was given from Max. Everyone was waiting for me to decide if HK was going to deploy and help QEX. We waited out Friday to see what would happen. If QEX could handle it we wouldn't go, if they were greatly outnumbered and asked for our help we would go. After seeing the insane support on reddit and not to mention a frig hole for anyone at any time to get pilots into Nova, It looked like it was going to be a big public festival of everyone and their grandmother showing up.
 
So Hell Ya, why would we want to miss out and being the bad guys and bringing a fleet to slay the pubbies? Sounded like fun to me. We chose to fly nullified sniper rail tengus Known as PETES. We had had success defending against the "Krab Uprising" when they invaded QEX's home of Polaris (c6 Magnatar). The Pete is a perfect ship in a magnater, where damage is double and targeting range is half. It is agile enough and if FC'd and executed correctly it can fight outnumbered or from far enough away.
 
Just like the Brave side some people came to us and said "Hey we would like to be on your side, We have been on the pubbie shit show side before, we want to be the bad guys and be on the organized side". It wasn't really a grudge against Dropbears or if they cared to see them being evicted, it was for some PvP content and what looked to be a massive event.
 
Friday night USTZ HK facilitated Rage rolling (chain collapsing our static wh) with only a fleet of about 30 (Some Petes, some scouts). We rolled for 3 hours and decided to let our dudes sleep. We would plan to form US dudes and EU dudes at 1200, which is 1 hour after DT (RUSTZ). At that point The Russians would attempt to take hole control and scan us a route in. I think they caught and killed a Moros rolling a null connection? And then took static hole control. They scanned us a chain and we got in like 30-40 Petes. Over the next couple hours our members were waking up seeing the pings and getting to Nova as fast as they could while we had hole control.
 
While we were using the static chain off of Nova, Brave was taking advantage of the un-closable Frigate wormhole, using it to stream in pilots that were being told "Come in an interceptor and we will hand you a combat ship." With the public availability and access to their fleet and TeamSpeak server, this is the time we started spying with alts in their fleet and ears on their comms. Eventually we directly continuously streamed their TeamSpeak into Hard K(n)ocks TeamSpeak, so all of our sides leadership could have live ears on what they were telling the 450 people on their TeamSpeak. Don't worry we recorded it all.
 
The best part is everyone was asking for the POS passwords and the Brave leadership was telling it to them over comms. "mushrooms","1", "speedfast" were some of the passwords we used to steal unpiloted floating ships. In total we stole 6 dreads (3 Moros 3 Pheonix)

, 1 archon that was SD'd in their face inside their pos (it got bumped out and whored on before SD), 1 Nidhoggur, 1 Bhaalgorn and a couple other T3 cruisers and dictors. This chaos and lack of security was infuriating people on Nova comms, and lowered morale.
 
I think this lack of organization and not being able to manage 400 - 500 people is what crippled the defense of Nova. Who would have thought that having overwhelming numbers would be a disadvantage? From the time QEX/SIIZ took hole control, no clear plan or decisions were announced to the crowd of redditors, BRAVE, and wormholers that had come to help, until they announced they would hand out ships at 00:00. So from 12:00 to 00:00, 12 hours of "Get into Nova and sit in the POS and be ready at any moment for some HUGE fight that will happen. People were ready to fight for Dropbears,¦ Ready all day long,¦ Sitting,¦ Waiting."
 
We knew we could use this to our advantage. We told our fleet to idle logged-in in the POS and go to sleep and alarm clock for a later fleet. So we left 50-70 people showing in the POS while only 10-15 were awake.  This entire time Brave never attempted to take hole control of the static. Our pilots rested and while the other side grew tired.
 
We formed at 16:45 to kill 2 small towers
 
We formed at 00:45 to kill 2 more towers around 01:00. We were looking at Brave to drop the hammer and keep us off their towers. But they didn't form.
At 03:15 Brave engaged a GOON Harpy fleet on the static. It was the first signs of life from them

We were not planning on forming until 06:15, but we sent out a ping and formed and kill some BRAVE as the retreated to their POS. After we stood down and set our guy back to sleep.
 
At this point Brave leadership said roll and crit all the holes no more people in or out. It was Late USTZ when the Russians are sleeping and our euros are sleeping.  Why not take hole control ship in a doctrine to counter the petes? Or invite someone willing to counter-pete the petes ? Or use the power of the static to get a nice route for even more reinforcements instead of make them go to Cobalt edge through a frig hole? It literally blew our minds while we listened to their comms. In that moment they could have saved their home. We knew our best strategy was Timezone warfare. Give our pilots 4 hour naps in between fleets and let BRAVE fester in their POS waiting for a fight.
 
Next fleet was 06:15 when the majority of the towers would start to come out.  Brave showed no signs of an FC that would lead them to saving the POS's. QEX/SIIZ put a fleet of t3's on the tower as well as our Petes and finally the Swarm was coming to kill us. We capitalized on listening to their comms and every time someone would say "someone is boating out of the POS" or "I forgot to change the POS password I'm stuck outside the shields", our scouts would give us a warp in for EZ kills.
 
The Brave fleet attempted to hold down the QEX/SIIZ fleet 4-5 times on different POS's. With 400-500 people how was this impossible? There was only 50-60 Russians in T3's. Suicide 20-30 dictors while the main fleet lands?
 
From 06:15 to 13:00 I was awake and FC'ing Petes. It really was a hell of a lot of fun. Our comms discipline was great. In the heat of it we were executing well, on Channel Command we were setting up warp ins and talking strategy. And toward the end it got more casual and we were telling jokes and having a good time. I can't imagine how many times I told people to Align and nearly fail-warped us to our deaths.  It is a lot of stress holding your finger on the button to warp while FC'ing and calling primaries and getting the next warp-in set up. I definitely can't say I did alone. Braxus, Muhadin, Josh, Jerzii all my probers and interceptor pilots. Thanks to all the Leadership and Spec Ops and Spies of the other corps for feeding me Intel. Thanks to Teh Replika for translating with MaxDEL, and of course big thanks to QEX/ Spetraliz IIZ / other RUS for creating the content. Thanks to Hole Control, Ixtab., Lazerhawks, Odin's Call for fleeting up with me, hope it was fun.
 
After 13:00 we extracted Bob blessed us with this amazing chain with our home systems connected.

If you're still pitchfork-carrying mad after reading a glimpse from our side then that's great. Do something about it and create content for us all!
 
TL;DR
I talked about my Eve Philosophy and HK empire If you got bored with that and stopped reading I talked about the fight half way through, go check that out.

"I think this lack of organization and not being able to manage 400 - 500 people is what crippled the defense of Nova. Who would have thought that having overwhelming numbers would be a disadvantage"
 
I can't really blame Jim and Dropbears, they had really tough shoes to fill. Sorry for the long sleepless weekend. Hope I can still call you a friend Jim!
 
Other than that we killed ships, we stole ships, we recorded everything! Wait for a Jerzii Kockegg Video and look at the pictures. Be less mad and go shoot things with your ship.

Battle Report

http://evf-eve.com/services/brcat/?s=1002487&b=6678019&e=1530&t=uwqqyeyiaaaOaqaafaj&o=1&r=1