Losing 600 Billion ISK on Your Own Cyno Beacon

I have to laugh at us in the Imperium.  The past weekend’s big story was the huge, hours long time dilation Keepstar battle in M-OEE8 that had over 4,400 people in system at one time and where an estimated 266 billion ISK in ships were destroyed.  That was Sunday.

And then on Monday the Imperium lost ~600 billion ISK in ships destroyed in its own staging system on its cyno beacon, including a Revenant super carrier, the second one we’ve lost in a week. (The first one.)  Remember when losing a Revenant was a rare and newsworthy event?

Sir Edmund’s Revenant on the field in happier times

I was at work when all of this went down, and I haven’t seen anybody try to sum things up in a single post anywhere yet, but the story on comms seemed to run liked this:

-There was a known hot dropper in the system watching the cyno beacon (a POS module that allows jump drive capital ships to jump to it, which makes it an obvious spot to watch) waiting for some unsuspecting capital to jump in, at which point he would light a cyno and his buddies would drop in and kill it.

-Knowing this, somebody decided to bait the hot dropper with an empty industrial of some sort.  I saw a jump freighter mentioned, but am not sure if that was true or not.

-The camper took the bait and cyno’d in his team.

-We responded with a huge overkill force including titan pilots looking for kills.

-Pandemic Legion, which had bought a pile of dreads that TEST left behind after Progodlegend’s  ill fated “let’s attack Delve” campaign earlier this year, dropped the whole lot, with some support (e.g. faxes and tackle Rorquals), on the fight.

While PL lost their entire force, which was expected, they managed to take out 3 titans, 4 super carriers, 2 carriers, a fax machine, and some small stuff including a number of fighter squadrons, which count as kills.  That left a battle report which summed up as:

D-WF70 – Dec. 5, 2016

My summary is probably off.  There was something about how the forces were positioned that helped out PL, but nobody has written up yet that goes through the battle in detail.  Reddit is just full of well earned smugness at the moment.  I’ll update this with links should somebody break the situation down.

But the net result is that the Imperium lost a lot of ISK in the form of supers yesterday.  We would own the whole “most valuable kills in the last seven days” banner on ZKill if it hadn’t been for Wolverine007Miner’s Viator.  Meanwhile, most of the initial hot droppers got away.

So that was a moment worth noting.

The Mittani has been saying that since Ascension and the update to Rorquals, we have been mining the shit out of Delve, an assertion supported by the November economic report, which shows over 2 trillion ISK in value having been mined out of the region.  The next closest region was The Forge, in high sec and close to Jita, which saw 1.35 trillion ISK in mining.

With all those minerals, and the new engineering complexes, which let you queue up many super caps for production, it seems like super proliferation is going to be a worse issue than ever.  I am sure we will be adding to the problem.