The View From Delve as YC123 Draws Towards an End

YC123, the 123rd year since the Youli Conference, which marked the founding of CONCORD and the establishment of the current status quo of the empires of New Eden, opened with null sec space locked in a titanic war.  The second day of the year saw one of the biggest battles ever witnessed in the star cluster as the system of M2-XFE again became the place where many titans were destroyed.

That battle was at the end of a crescendo of spectacular, trillion ISK clashes in Delve that set world records.  October of YC122 saw thousands of ships destroyed and trillions of ISK vaporized in the vacuum of virtual space.

To put those ISK amounts into some context, using a scale I saw somebody using to make a very dumb political point, a million seconds ago was less than two weeks in the past, a billion seconds ago George H. W. Bush was still president of the United States, and a trillion seconds adds up to over 30K years, which would put us back in the late stone age when Fred Flintstone worked in a stone quarry and attended meetings of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo.

So a trillion ISK is kind of a lot, and to commit that much ISK in assets across multiple battles takes some stamina.

The from late April of this year until the beginning of August, just three months back now, the Imperium holdings in Delve were just the O-EIMK constellation.

O-EIMK Constellation from late April forward

That was the great stalemate, where the might of the Imperium, focused in such a small area proved to be more than PAPI could manage.  There was a lot of talk about being contained and the threat of blockading the constellation by camping the NPC stations in Delve, but the will of PAPI as a coalition wasn’t up to the task.  Only Legacy Coalition had real skin in the game, having committed themselves to live in Imperium space.

On August 2nd, at the start of week 57 of the war, PAPI made one last attack on the Imperium stronghold, then started unanchoring structures even before the fighting was done.  By the end of week 57 of the war all of the ihubs in Delve were back in Imperium hands and the clean up of PAPI structures was well under way.

The war cost a lot in ISK, but there were other casualties.  The online user count suffered, especially towards the was entered its second summer.

Over the timeline of the war

While the PCU recovered as both sides reoriented themselves, it remains below where it was before the war started.  Some put blame on CCP and their economic starvation plan for that.  But a lot of us are also tired out after more than a year of war.

And now, in Delve, normalcy has returned.

The view from Delve

After many months of having content on our doorstep, of minor clashes happening multiple times daily just a gate or two away, it is kind of quiet.  People rat.  People mine.  Somebody in a Rorqual gets tackled about once a day and Delve 911 lights up.  The intel channels are active and some of the usual suspects from before the war appear now and then.

I went on an op last week, the first op I had been on in over a month, that was set to blow up a Fortizar in Cloud Ring.  As I got into fleet and the FC asked us to set our destination to J5A-IX I groaned a bit and the thought of that journey.  But once I adjusted my route settings to include friendly Ansiblexes, which is a hugely underrated feature in my opinion, it was just seven gates away.

A seriously excellent feature

The Eye of Terror Mk. IV was setup and in business, its Ansiblex highway ready to take me from Cloud Ring down to Period Basis or across Querious and into Catch, the last being a new outpost for the coalition since the war.

New Eden with Imperium space highlighted in red

It isn’t all peace and crabbing.  The combat pilots who still crave action are out with the various SIGs and squads making sure the rest of null sec, the bloc formerly known as PAPI, remembers that we’re still around and looking for revenge.  Meanwhile, our enemies have fragmented somewhat.  They have reset some of their blue standings and some of their own frictions are coming to the surface.

War will come again to null sec.  But for right now Delve is a pretty quiet place.

Also, as an aside, I made that “The View from 1DQ1-A” image with the intent of making a New Eden version of the famous (to those of us of the right age) cover from the New Yorker, View of the World from 9th Avenue.  However, my limited artistic skills haven’t gotten me very far.