The Last Keepstar in Tribute Falls as We Look for More Targets

Another Northern Coalition Keepstar was destroyed as I slept.

The Keepstar in SH1-6P, formerly the PanFam staging citadel to defend Tribute, was destroyed at 09:45 UTC, which was about a quarter to three in the morning for me.

Keepstar Kill Mail

The Keepstar was gunned and got some kills, including a dreadnought and a carrier.  But, as with the Keepstar in P3EN-E, the rigs pulled in advance to minimized the value listed on the loss at ZKillboard.  The destruction was seen as inevitable by both sides.

Even at that hour of the day more than 1,000 pilots were on the kill mail.  I suppose it helped that the coordination team pinged about the op every hour on the hour, doing a count down to the op.

That was the last Keepstar in Tribute and, while I haven’t done a survey of the region, it feels like we are running out of targets there at this point.  The last I check the war tracking thread in the forums, which lists out every structure kill and charts progress on ihub destruction, it did not seem like there was much left in the region.  Certainly the operational tempo of the deployment has slackened greatly in the last few days.  As late as last Thursday I was able to catch a couple ops every evening.  Over the weekend that seemed to drop off dramatically.

There are still things to do.  Vale of the Silent may still have targets for us, though we quickly get beyond two super jumps from our staging as we drive into that region, which makes things awkward.

And there is the cleansing of the structures of PanFam front and/or ally Mogul Financial.  Several of their structures in Tribute have been destroyed already and the coalition has declared war on them so as to be able to hit their structures in low and high sec space.

But after that I am not sure where we will head.  It is possible that we will get the order for a huge move op home in the next week or two, so we can resumed mining and ratting and chasing interlopers in the manner to which we have become accustomed.  For me that will mean going back to SIG/Squad ops out in the east somewhere.

Or maybe GSOL will drop a Keepstar in some place crazy like Y5J-EU, from which we can burn the far side of Vale of the Silent, some of Geminate, and be able to jump to the system that has that gate to The Kalevala Expanse.  That doesn’t seem likely.  It would certainly stretch our logistics.  But it could happen I suppose.

If I were betting money on it though, I would guess we will be headed home in a couple of weeks.