It has been a busy time in Imperium space.
There is a Jabber command Imperium pilots can use to display how many fleet participation credits, PAPs, you have earned during the current month and over the last 30, 60, and 90 days.
I stand at 33 PAPs, which isn’t a ton compared to some people… I have heard counts beyond 80 for the month… but is a lot for me. My 90 day total is 57 at the moment and there was a deployment during that time, so having a dozen counts as a pretty active month for me.
Granted, that doesn’t mean I went on 33 fleets of multi-hour duration. There were a couple where a fast form ping went up and I got into fleet only to have it stand down due the threat having passed. And I somehow managed to be in fleet at the exact right moment for a capital move op. It was just a log in, undock, jump to the cyno, then log out level of effort, maybe five minutes maximum. And on possibly the longest fleet op for me so far, when we flew out to D4KU-5 to support The Initiative and cover a couple of timers with them, we actually ended up with three PAPs because Asher gave us two for a long, dull fleet op, but somebody else captured a PAP for us as well.
A thousand of us kept an eye on the Hophib gate
Still, even with that, I have been out and seen my share of action. I only regret passing on the fleet that flew one jump and destroyed yet another Pandemic Horde Cormorant fleet. (The kill board pegs the cost of a Corm at about 15 million, but apparently the PH line members are paying 35 million each for them at their staging in Hophib. Their main FC seems a bit testy if you bring this up.)
And PAP links do not cover the time I have spent out on my own doing things, from moving ship to chasing entosis alerts, to roaming around in hostile space and ringing the entosis alarm for them now and again. (That will get its own post at some point due to my making some non-fatal but amusing errors at the start.)
Out returning the favor
So there has been plenty to do, fleets running at all hours of the day, and fights have been very common. There has been enough going on that I have pretty much only played EVE Online since the war started.
That said, looking at the big picture, not a lot has happened. The Mittani was complaining on The Meta Show on Saturday that he hasn’t had a lot to do so far in the war. I imagine this is in part because the attackers really didn’t start on the war until July 5th while we had been getting ready for the attack for a couple of weeks before hand.
The biggest incursion into our space has been the TEST capture of the ihub in XZ-SKZ, which is the gateway system from Stain into Period Basis, which I posted about last week.
Where the ihub was
Our attempt to take it back failed the first time, and they eventually managed to drop a POS tower in the system. That would allow them to get a titan in there to bridge people around and give them more mobility in our space.
Dreads landed too late to stop the stront delivery
However, to be used for that the POS would have to survive for a while. That one died after the reinforce, as did the next one they dropped.
There has also been an ongoing pitched battle up in Fountain between PandaFam and The Initiative over the Taurus constellation, which is the way in to the region from their staging in Hophib. The ihubs there have been reinforced once more, the way they were a week ago.
Reusing this picture
But, as I wrote last week as well, it is easy to entosis troll and reinforce things or trigger response fleets, but it is work to follow through, to make it stick. And you have to go after the ihubs. That is what signifies ownership, what allows you to deploy things like Ansiblex jump gates. Brave has been making a big deal about taking a territorial control unit, a TCU, here and there.
A TCU taken in Querious
But, since Fozzie Sov became a thing, the TCU is just a flag. It has no function. You need the ihub. So they no more own that system than we own XZ-SKZ down in Period Basis. The TCU doesn’t do anything.
There have been daily clashes of fleets, wins and losses on both sides, but the big guns have yet to come out. Capitals haven’t clashed yet, titans haven’t been unleashed yet, Keepstars haven’t been threatened. Instead, forces are still building up around the various invasion routes where camps have set up on either side of regional gates to keep the enemy fleets from breaking through and running amok.
Bubbles on the regional gates
That doesn’t stop hostiles from getting in. It is still hazardous to travel solo in anything that can’t get past a warp interdiction bubble. A group has set up shop repeatedly in 1DQ1-A, our home system, camping the gates leading off the the active fronts and collecting an ongoing harvest of ships ignoring the intel channel and warping to the gate.
Here, in our home system
All the wrecks and little corpses of those who were podded.
Of course, I cannot be too hard on them as I lost my first ship of the war there as well. I had eyes on the gate and the camp had warped off, no doubt to get a juicy target on one of the other gates. But before I could warp and finish jumping through, their Sabre returned with some tackle and I was caught just on the edge of the bubble. One more wreck… but no corpse. My pod got away.
I was impatient and paid the price. So it goes. At least it wasn’t a pricey ship.
And so goes the war so far for me at least. Nothing huge has happened yet, but it keeps me busy. And wars like this always start slowly. It takes a while to establish a foothold in hostile space. Things only speed up when one side stops showing up.
Addendum: INN has a broader review of the first week of the war.
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