There in J115404 the Keepstar was waiting for us. The trip into the hole on Saturday was going to pay off.
Fort Knocks over a planet
The Keepstar called Fort Knocks had been initially reinforced by the Initiative. The whole venture was the culmination of about a year’s planning and logistics and it was came to its culmination last night. The Initiative had jumped into J115405, the wormhole system colloquially known as “Rage,” taken over the static hole into the system, and reinforced the Keepstar named “Fort Knocks” last week.
Fort Knocks, as noted over at PC Gamer, was the first Keepstar to be brought online in New Eden. That article will also tell you a bit about Hard Knocks, the alliance that built it.
As noted, once the Initiative launched their plan, bringing out their pre-positioned assets and taking over access to the hole, the Imperium was invited along to participate, and Asher brought the Reavers into the hole on Saturday.
Sunday saw the armor timer for Fort Knocks come and go uncontested. Hard Knocks gunned the structure, hurling bombs, running the PDS to shake off drones, and zapping those who dared stray too close with the doomsday. But they didn’t undock a fleet or otherwise put a serious attempt into defense, nor did allies or other wormholers come to help them.
There is a legend that wormholers will band together in the face of outsiders, k-space dwellers, coming in to attack them. But, then again, Hard Knocks has played the role of wormhole tyrant in the past, so perhaps that sense of unity did not apply to them.
Instead, Hard Knocks looked to be preparing for the end largely by shifting some assets about and by undocking and self-destructing capital ships to collect the insurance before the end.
Not that they were not beyond some hijinks. Putting capital ships on the undock and self-destructing them was an ongoing temptation for those besieging the system to warp in and take a shot in order to get on the kill mail. And then the doomsday would fire from the Keepstar and some unfortunate would get to “ride the lightning” for their trouble.
Even Asher lost his Monitor FC ship when he warped our fleet over to a Moros stuck in a bubble after somebody in fleet reported it as being far enough off the Keepstar to be safe. It was not and Asher got to ride the lightning as well.
That, in a wormhole, is a pretty big pain in the ass. At least he did not lose his capsule as well, because then you’re in your clone in normal space. There is no jump cloning to wormholes. Still, even with a capsule left you pretty much have to fly into the hole the ship you plan to use, as wormhole space isn’t just another system in New Eden. You can’t just get a ship and fly back. You have to find the right hole, or series of holes, to go through to get there. Fortunately, somebody lent him a ship and he was able to arrange to get another one sent in, likely via an alt, so he was back in a Monitor by last night.
Anyway, come last night we were pinged to log on at about 01:00 UTC, or 5pm my local time. We were forming up for the final timer. We got into fleet and sorted ourselves out as usual, undocking to hang off the Raitaru and survey the system. There was about a half an hour left to go before the big event. Wrecks of capital ships were still lingering on the undock of the Keepstar.
Capital wrecks on the undock
But before that there was a Hard Knocks Sotiyo that had been reinforced. We flew off to do the armor timer, anchoring up on Asher to hang about avoiding the defenses as we shot the structure.
Cruising around the Sotiyo
We had enough firepower to stop the timer, but not enough to hit the damage cap on the structure, so we were still shooting it when the Keepstar timer hit. But the Initiative was already on the job and stopped the clock there right away.
Timer paused at Fort Knocks
As expected, the Initiative was out with the structure killing Raven doctrine, a mass of cruise missile spewing battleships trolling at long range and being jumped every so often to avoid bombs.
The Raven blob commeth
They have pretty much perfected this doctrine and have killed structures in the face of titan support without capital ships to back them up. They shoot and then they scoot as the blob gets booshed along.
The jump effect forming before the fleet
They also had a fleet of torpedo bombers out as well taking shots at the Keepstar, giving enough well handled firepower that the result was never in doubt. Without a fleet of their own, Hard Knocks could annoy the attackers, unshipping some, sending others back to K-space if they got podded, but could not stop them.
We finished up reffing the Sotiyo and then set on a Raitaru and watched as the circling fleet chewed away at the structure of the Keepstar. The more damage the citadel received, the more the lights in the hangars, and even the Hard Knocks logo, dimmed and flickered. A nice effect by CCP.
As the end of the structure grew near, Asher warped us in at 30km to get in some hits so we could get on the kill mail. However, we were in and out too quickly for my light drones to get in a hit. I had a sentry drone in my cargo bay for just this situation, but had forgotten to swap it out, making this this third Keepstar kill mail this year I failed to get on because I was in the logi wing. There was no time to go back as the structure soon began to brew up.
Keepstar Coming Apart
My alt, cloaked up in an Astero 40km off the Keepstar did have a Bouncer sentry drone in his bay, so I was able to launch that and get in some hits, so at least he got on the kill mail in time.
The kill mail is here, and over a thousand people managed to get on it.
And then there was the big boom as the Keepstar blew up, leaving a huge wreck behind.
The remains of the first Keepstar
But that wasn’t all that was left behind. In normal space, all the stuff in an Upwell structure goes into what is called “asset safety” and is delivered to the nearest low sec station 30 days later, where it can be retrieved for a fee. This was CCP’s response to years of null sec outposts changing hands, locking people out of their homes and leaving all of their stuff stranded.
In wormhole space however there is no asset safety. Instead, Upwell structures are giant loot pinatas, and the oldest Keepstar in the game might have been the biggest and richest loot pinata of them all. When it blew up all of the items people left in hangars was spewed out into space, forming a ball of loot consisting of almost 2,000 hangar containers.
The loot ball with tags on
Each one of those little yellow tags contains what was left in somebody’s hangar. Each of them is a present in space, waiting to be opened.
A hangar container floating about
Some of those containers held great wealth. There were dreadnoughts with 10 billion ISK fits. Huge piles of PI materials. Officer modules. Freighters. Blockade runners and Deep Space Transports. And there was combat ships galore.
There were also cap boosters. Somebody wryly seeded many people’s hangars with a single 3200 cap booster, the equivalent of getting coal in your stocking at Christmas.
And so a frenzy of looting began.
Because this was their operation, based on all of their planning and hard work, the Initiative was given exclusive access for the first 30 minutes after the Keepstar blew up. But there was so much loot on the field, and it kept showing up for quite some time as CCP’s code processed through the hangar of each and every capsuleer who ever left anything in that Keepstar… and some who didn’t, because you can “deliver” things to people in Upwell structures now, which is how Doomchincilla ended up losing so many ships during this event despite being nowhere in the vicinity so far as I know… that there was still a huge pile to sort through when we were given the all clear to join in.
The PL killboard sullied with all those frigates
The code even went a little wonky, throwing out containers around the other Keepstar that were flagged as belonging to LAWN.
What followed can only be described as a sacking of a Keepstar as people filtered through cans, ejecting ships to fly around, grabbing items, and blowing things up they couldn’t carry off. It was such a crazy event that I would be in favor of foregoing asset safety in null sec if this could be a regular spectacle after every structure kill.
That might get too crazy in normal space where every random outsider could try and show up to claim some loot, leading to even bigger numbers straining nodes during such fights. In wormhole space the crowd is fairly well constrained.
Of course, we were also all stuck there in wormhole space. You could grab huge items and haul them off to a local structure, but actually getting stuff out of the system was another matter indeed. A couple of people in Reavers managed to grab dreadnoughts. Ratknight1 was the first, picking up a Moros out of a can. He flew it to the friendly Fortizar, insured it, then undocked it to self-destruct in order to collect the insurance.
Ratknight1’s Moros exploding
I was in time to help out with that, so at least I got on one kill mail this month. That is all I ask, just to prove I’m still around and playing.
As time went on people went from grabbing all they could to blowing up everything in sight. A gaggle of Praxis battleships was disgorged from one can close by me, but as I closed in with my pod I couldn’t board any of them as they were all locked up and being shot.
My alt managed to jump into an Ishtar and fly it off, taking out some time to shoot Ratknight1 as well, then docked it up to go out again. He got a Hound stealth bomber next, allowing him to zip about to check cans… though it was only an afterburner fit, so maybe “zip” isn’t the right word. But when it became clear that we had reached the time of just blowing stuff up, he just joined in to shoot things.
The pillaging looked set to carry on for quite some time still, but I tired of it once it turned to blowing things up. I docked back up, leaving the two ships I snagged to inspect later. I’ll see if there is anything worth stripping off of them then likely insure them and blow them up.
Even as I was logging off there was an Imperium fleet up to get people back to Delve. But Reavers are hanging around for a bit. There are still structures to blow up in J115405, like that Sotiyo that is coming out soon, and the other Keepstar looming across the way. Where there are structures to shoot, Reavers will be there.
Other coverage of the event:
