Friday night saw the biggest fight I’ve ever participated in, for the destruction of the Yokosuka Fortizar and Tatara in J141740, with upwards of 200 pilots participating.

Evicted by Spectre Fleet and BLOPSEC

Yokosuka Inc. has been around for about 3 years, having found a home in J141740 in July 2016. I met Mod Yokosuka in the Linux channel. He has become a good friend over the years and we started off with a modest Astrahus named Baby Arctic Seal. With a few other Astrahus’es we added manufacturing and refining capacity, later replaced by Raitarus when CCP added the industrial citadels. We had to evict some abandoned structures, but that wasn’t a big deal.

Yokosuka was primarily an industrial and recruiting corp. The C4 Pulsar we lived in (with C2 and C3 static connections) always has a short route to k-space, and easy access to C2 and C3 sites for newer players. It also has perfect PI and can produce all PI materials. In the beginning Mod Yokosuka did a survey of systems and chose two C4 Pulsars with these properties. For a month we scanned and scanned, and even reached out to Wingspan to find one of these holes. Eventually, J141740 had a direct connection to Thera, and we made our move.

Prior to that I spent a little time in Signal Cartel, which I found to be…childish. Their rules against PvP go against the very nature of eve, and I found it to be just silly. I was there when they started their Rescue Cache program, and participated in some exercises in Thera to see whether people could actually find the cans. But the idea itself was pretty stupid, because people rarely have a probe launcher and not probes, and if they need a launcher, they also need a mobile depot, which you can’t put in a can. For years I’d blow up their cans in my hole, and put myself on some list so they’d stop doing that in my hole. A few years ago, CCP made a change that would automatically recall your probes when you left a system, making it almost impossible to lose your probes. I didn’t particularly enjoy relic hunting and anyway, when I met Mod I was eager to try something else.

Now, J141740 is not a particularly desirable hole, most people would say. CCP likes armor more than shields, and I dream of shield versions of the Nestor and Leshak. Most wormhole corps fly armor for a reason. But for whatever reason, I like shields, and I kept going in that direction. Maybe I’m just a masochist. The C4 Pulsar bonuses are substantial, and I built defense plans around those bonuses. But, the ISK is crap, especially for higher skilled players (which I am, having played EVE since 2006). There’s a lot more ISK to be made by running C5 and C6 sites, and most people would prefer to live in one of those or have a static to one. But another reason we chose a C4 is that you can’t bring capital ships in, which makes home defense somewhat easier, and we had noobs to protect.

For years, wormholes had almost no ore. We’d get an ore site maybe once every two weeks, but it was not enough to maintain any kind of production. So we focused on PI, and between 3 accounts, I managed about 4b ISK/month and built citadels in our Astrahus and later Raitaru for profit. The corp made money with a market module on the buy/sell spread for P1 PI, which I would grind into P4. The ore situation changed with the introduction of the Athanor and moon mining, and suddenly we had enough ore for a serious capital ship production line. Over time, I built 3 carriers, 4 dreads, 2 Rorquals, and a Minokawa, all with ore mined in the hole, in addition to the Fortizar, Tatara, and 6 smaller citadels.

As with any corp, over time, people came and went. Some moved up to higher class wormholes, others went to null, and others stopped playing for various reasons. Real Life intervenes. But this means we had to be constantly recruiting. We would regularly spin up recruiting corps in highsec. Usually in ice mining systems to supply fuel for our citadels. Finanar was a favorite of ours, which seems now to have been taken over by some weird pig-based cult. Invariably, such recruiting corps would come under a wardec from one or another highsec pirate corp after about a month. This generally caused new players to freak the fuck out. They’d YOLO themselves onto a gate in a mining ship, and get quickly taken out. At this point, most would quit the game. We never fought these wars because, well, highsec wars are stupid, and if you actually try to fight, the pirates will just run. They’re not looking for an even fight, they’re looking for easy prey. I could always get around highsec without a problem, and as every wormholer knows, wardecs are irrelevant to us.

But when the wardecs eventually came, we had another option: come to our wormhole! This isn’t actually a noob corp, it’s actually an alt corp of a very nice wormhole with other opportunities, and away from the war! CCP has a very serious player retention problem, and this is how it happens. When these wardecs came, we’d lose half or more of the recruits in the noob corp. But the rest came to the wormhole, and we made very many good friends. Eventually the wardec would drop, because none of us were in highsec at all, we’d teach them the MWD+cloak trick and travel fits, and the pirates would get no kills. Denying kills is the best way to deal with pirates IMHO — fighting them is just…not interesting. They’ll run away quicker than you can say “undock!” and it’s a waste of effort to even try.

Eve is a numbers game. He who shows up with more pilots will basically win. Now, this kind of sucks. 1000 vs 1000 fleets and TiDi just make me want to claw my eyes out, which is why despite playing for 13 years, I’ve spent little time in null. Small gangs in WH space is where it’s at. However Yokosuka never had numbers. At best we’d have 10–15 humans at a time in the corp. Our recruitment efforts were time consuming, and would often result in spies causing drama. In the waning year or so, I lost the motivation to spin up yet another recruiting corp to bump up our numbers. In the end, Yokosuka only had 2 players logging on regularly, myself and MATADOR, who is spanish speaking. Now, I took spanish in school and can sort-of manage basic communication in corp chat, assisted by Google Translate, but voice comms were a challenge for us. But I try…I lived overseas for years (I’m American) but never really became decent at any foreign languages, though I can order food in many of them. ¿Puedo tener una nave espacial con papas fritas?

Over the years, Yokosuka resisted several invasion attempts. I’m personally kind of shit at PvP and honestly don’t like it very much, though I think 122b in kills on our killboard is nothing to laugh at, we’ve always ignored our kill ratio and just looked for fun. I have stress problems anyway and while some people love the thrill of a good kill, it sends my heart rate through the roof, and makes me feel physically ill. I had another problem between maintaining control of the hole and doing PvP. I simply couldn’t afford to have one of my mains podded out of the hole, because we’d lose hole control and intel. So owning J141740 made me further reluctant to engage in PvP. I took on the role of overseer. I’d place my toons on wormholes to watch for traffic, and could efficiently direct others to the fight. But as our numbers dwindled over time, there was no one else to send into the fight.

We resisted invasion attempts primarily through smart hole control and intel rather than having a red killboard. We usually just didn’t have the numbers. After a POS was once dropped in our system, we crashed out a fleet of rattlesnakes, leaving only their POS hauler in our system. Some of those exact Rattlesnakes were used to fight our latest invaders, Dead Heaven Syndicate. In the first battle with Dead Heaven Syndicate, we crashed out their entire combat fleet, allowing all our citadels to repair to full after the initial reinforcement. In another invasion, we basically bored Wingspan to death. They didn’t have the ability to take our hole, and we couldn’t kill 10 stealth bombers who only showed up to shoot at citadels, and warp off when targeted — at that time we needed moar Sabre pilots and combat probes. Eventually we decided to transfer their citadel to P I R A T and blow it up together. We were competent at defense and hole control, though not by having a green killboard.

Within our fist year in J141740, we recruited some bad doodz, who decided that taking over our hole would be more interesting than flying with us. Worse, one departing member sold them carriers. At the end of 2016 these guys decided to spend their Canadian welfare checks on hiring Holesale Operations to destroy our first Fortizar.

Now, this was our first experience with wormhole defense and was, to put it mildly, an absolutely fucking miserable experience. We were waking up in the middle of the night, just to have fights. It was extremely difficult to call allies at someone else’s weird timer. Time zone tanking is a thing. But fight we did, and lose. Holesale did a good job. But they also fucked off after it was over and we retained the hole, in part due to some smart behind-the-scenes negotiation by our founder Mod. But after it was all over, Mod wanted none of it anymore. This wasn’t fun, and I don’t blame him for quitting eve. “Eve is full of asholes” he would say. We’ve remained very good friends and still talk on Discord a lot.

So since mid 2018 I’ve been managing J141740 almost solo. It became my personal farm hole. I added a Tatara, Athanors, and Rorquals. In recent months, I made the decision to stop playing eve. It just causes me a lot of stress that I don’t need, consumes too much time, and my health has suffered. So I committed to leaving the hole at the end of September, which corresponds to some other Real Life stuffs. But what to do with this wormhole with all this stuff in it? If I’m going to go out, let’s at least go out with a bang. So I started building capitals. We already had a couple carriers and Rorqs, but I built a bunch of Phoenix’s too for handing out to friends, made cheap HAW fits, and was in the middle of building another fleet of Naglfar’s when an invasion from nullsec came.

In mid August, I woke up one morning to discover that ALL our structures had been reinforced overnight, and a dickstar POS and Raitaru dropped in the system. Dead Heaven Syndicate had decided to evict me. Now I have no idea who these people are. I convo’ed many of them, to no response. I got ahold of their diplo and asked “why?” and his only response was “content, tbh”. It was not until this weekend after they destroyed our Fortizar that they finally had the decency to talk to me. Looking at killboards, they’re a ~350 toon nullsec alliance who seem to be in a coalition with DARKNESS. Had they ever had a conversation with me, I’d have offered to sell them the hole, with all my caps. I was on my way out the door anyway. For weeks I was pretty frustrated because I didn’t know why they did this, beyond “content”. I thought they thought this was going to be some kind of Goonswarm proxy war or something, because I do have a couple friends in goons. But it wasn’t. This was an invasion of wormhole space by nullseccers, which was finally fully confirmed at the end of the fight by private conversations with the attackers.

Ok so they want to fight. I’ll fight. What the hell else am I going to do with these caps? It was my plan anyway to go out with a bang, and now I had an attacker.

The first few fights didn’t go well for them. Dead Heaven Syndicate flew a Loki/Tengu fleet with Loki/Tengu boost+logi. This is a fit I discovered a long time ago and always wanted to use…I later used something similar of my own creation to help reinforce their citadels. Just one of these was enough logi to help a fleet of Rattlesnakes tank the smaller citadels. Because Dead Heaven Syndicate wouldn’t undock and fight. Anyway, in the fights in the following weeks, Dead Heaven lost quite a few ships on our Fortizar and Tatara. They just couldn’t handle the large citadel’s weapons and fighters. Multiple times the Fortizar and Tatara were reinforced when I was at work or sleeping, and then un-reinforced when I was on for the armor timer, but our smaller structures were reinforced to hull. They couldn’t defend themselves and I didn’t want to batphone for a small citadel armor timer.

We easily destroyed their POS after a week or so. They had fitted it with a bunch of ECM mods, but forgot to turn them on. So it only looked like a dickstar. We declined to tell them this little fact. Note the small number of pilots on this killmail…most of the time it was me and one or two other friends reinforcing their structures. We just didn’t have the numbers, but we were retaining control anyway. Dead Heaven Syndicate was shit at hole control, logistics, and undocking when facing a fleet with half their numbers. But over they course of these 3 weeks, they became slightly better at it, and started copying some of my ships and tactics. With 4 characters I could rage roll and one-shot holes, and did so many times to lock them out or bring in reinforcements, because I had eyes on them at all times, and knew when they weren’t paying attention.

Eventually the hull timers came for the smaller structures. I tried to gather as many friends as I could, and five of us faced off on our Astrahus, Baby Arctic Seal. As this was our first Astrahus and had been around for 3 years, it had a ton of loot from players who stopped playing. (But, nothing of mine! :-P ) That day I pinged @everyone on our Discord telling them that Baby Arctic Seal was likely to be destroyed that night, and they should get their stuff out (or log in and help shoot back). Up to this point I had reinforced all their structures and killed a lot of them on the Fortizar and Tatara with just a few friends. But pinging @everyone got a the attention of an old corpmate Johabias Haginen, now in A Class Apart, and he helped rally troops.

Two of my Goonswarm friends joined, because they were interested in taking over the hole after I left, and I needed capital pilots. The larger narrative here is that nullsec is looking at wormhole space because of the blackout, including Goonswarm. We actually had three doctrines fitted and ready to undock. I handed FC responsibility to one of my Goonswarm friends, since I was multi-boxing, manning the citadels, and monitoring exits on 2 other alts, and really can’t FC and do all this multi-tasking at the same time. The hostile fleet began attacking the Astrahus with their usual loki+tengu fleet, which was the first timer that day. Our FC called for us to undock the capitals. “Don’t undock the capitals” I said…but I had abdicated FC, and wasn’t going to argue. Having a good chain of command is important, you don’t want to get stuck in-fighting. You want to be space-fighting. So we undocked the caps.

T he larger narrative here is that nullsec is looking at wormhole space because of the blackout.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, once we dropped a carrier, 2x Phoenix’s, a Minokawa and a few battleships, the attacking fleet warped off. Most of the time, Dead Heaven Syndicate just didn’t engage and ran away from the fight. Multiple times I reinforced their citadels with just 2 humans, while 10 docked pilots stared at us from the window of their citadel. We commenced to stare at the 15-minute repair timer on our Astrahus.

Then Dead Heaven Syndicate did something that surprised and dismayed me. They called Spectre Fleet and BLOPSEC. “CAPS CAPS CAPS!!!” they undoubtedly shouted to them. And who would turn that down? The Goonswarm capital pilots were an additional motivator, especially for BLOPSEC. Now, I’ve always had a high opinion of Spectre Fleet and have flown on a few of their fleets. But this was a low blow. Calling an NPSI fleet to do your dirty work is just cheap. Dead Heaven was clearly losing. They couldn’t take control and they knew it. They had already lost their POS and all of our structures were about to be repaired to full in the face of a substantial capital fleet, and there’s no way in hell they could have killed my fleet of caps. But it had been clear for weeks that they weren’t in it for a fair fight.

Spectre Fleet and BLOPSEC brought in about 100 Kikimoras. Ugh. There was little we could do but watch everything die. The caps were in siege and couldn’t warp away. I had forgotten my blue pill. Oh well, it would have only delayed the inevitable and made the fight even more long and annoying.

My defense doctrine was based around the fact that a Pulsar has a penalty to sig radius. After the destruction of our first Fortizar by about 25 Rattlesnakes, target painters and anti-capship missles were the way to go. I could take out battleships like no one’s business. With a couple citadel target painters you can make a battleship have a 3–4km sig radius. We had cheap Vigils for the newer players to help. Add to that a few HAW Phoenix’es, and I was ready for anything.

…except Frigates. My little plan had one huge hole in it, and it was frigates. But who the hell could field the 100 frigates necessary to take out a Fortizar? Only an NPSI or nullsec fleet. This was something I had never seen in WH space, and hadn’t planned for. Wormholers prefer small gang fights, and 100 Kikimoras is not a small gang. It’s an annoying beeswarm that sends your client FPS to zero and makes you want to claw your eyes out and is the reason I’ve stayed in wormhole space and out of nullsec. CCP: your client is CPU bound, it’s a problem. No one likes potato mode, and the client crashes if you try to switch to potato mode mid-battle.

I always knew frigates were a hole in our defense plans, but the only counter to 100 frigates is 100 frigates of your own, and I just didn’t have the numbers. You can’t fit citadels to be good at killing both battleships and frigates. You have to choose one, and honestly, the citadel weapons are complete shit at killing frigates anyway. So I went for a battleship killing Fortizar, because that seemed to be the most likely thing I would face, and Castle Bravo performed admirably in that respect.

So I made the decision to prepare for a fight I could potentially win, knowing that a frig fleet would be our downfall. But if an attacker brought 100 pilots, you’re basically going to lose no matter what they bring. Our plan was intentionally asymmetric, and gave me an advantage even with lower numbers, for certain kinds of fights. I always thought it would be a fleet of Jackdaws or Svipuls that would take me out. But then CCP introduced the Kikimora. 100 pilots in one battle in wormhole space is a rarity, and basically only happens if you really piss someone off. I wasn’t pissing anyone off and largely kept to myself. Yokosuka was on everyone’s map. All the PvP corps ran into us regularly, and for whatever reason, chose to leave us alone.

The day was lost, and our Astrahus and both Raitarus, were killed. Emboldened by their success, Dead Heaven Syndicate dropped a Fortizar that night. The battle might have been lost, but the war was not over, and the next day we destroyed their Raitaru and anchoring Fortizar. I guess their batphone wasn’t working that day. But maintaining control of a wormhole where your only tool is a batphone to a NPSI group just ain’t gonna work — that was a dirty trick that would only work once, right? No. Spectre Fleet came back a total of three times. One of those times I successfully rolled them out and prevented them from coming.

This is deeply disturbing and indicates to me that Spectre Fleet is not truly a neutral NPSI group. Coming back to the same objective 3 times is not Space Bushido, it’s actively participating in an eviction, with full knowledge that you’re doing it. Either Maded Rift is a pawn, or the pilots in his fleets are pawns of his objectives. NPSI groups should be considered to be free mercenaries when they can be used this way. In real war, there’s no such thing as NPSI. They’re called mercenaries. This implies a power struggle over who is going to control these mercenaries, and whose objectives they will take and whose they will decline.

Warfare in eve is moving in two directions: (1) don’t own structures, because they can’t be defended, and (2) the first two reinforcements are easy, and you can call a merc NPSI fleet for the hull timer. Consequently, don’t own structures. You have no hope of defending. Because, defending is not “content” that an NPSI fleet will be interested in. Many highsec corps have moved in this direction already.

Through the course of the battle, we encountered many other wormhole corps just by happenstance. With the exception of a former corp member in A Class Apart who rallied the troops there and Hole Control, whom I contacted directly, all other corps on our side of the killmails in J141740 were people I didn’t know before the invasion by nullsec.

See when you have timers in wormhole space, CCP has a special algorithm which directs incoming wormholes (K162’s) to your system. The day a structure was in hull, we’d get several connections to competent PvP groups. This is how I encountered all the other groups who helped on my side, including Singularity Syndicate and Chain Smoking. When they understood that this was a nullsec invasion of wormhole space, they were suddenly very interested in helping. In one case POS Party got a connection to J141740 just as I had an Athanor in hull. Now who’s going to turn down that kill, eh? I tried to contact some people I knew in POS Party during the fight but they weren’t online. So POS Party killed it, and I manned the weaksauce guns of the Athanor. I convo’ed them, we had a friendly conversation and a gf in local at the end. I wasn’t prepared with enough friends online and in the hole at that moment to repel their fleet, and Dead Heaven Syndicate never engages in real fights, and I knew this was just an opportunistic kill for POS Party. Better to have a fun fight for them and be friendly with a competent potential ally in fighting the nullsec invasion of wormhole space. I didn’t plan serious defense for the Athanors, because they’re not worth that much and they were empty except for fittings. They’re just moon miners…already replaced. But they helped me build my capitals.

At this point I should probably explain Space Bushido. This is an informal “way of the warrior” in wormhole space. Wormhole pvp groups will seek out targets by scanning their holes, and when one is found, they’ll rally whomever is online and attack. Now, neither side knows how this is going to end. This is not a strategic operation. This is just fun “content” for both sides. Sometimes you warp into a trap with 10 cloaked Proteus’ and get your ass handed to you. Other times you do the ass handing. At the end, both parties respect their fellow warriors and type “gf” in local (“good fight”) roll the hole, and go on their way.

The invasion of J141740 was not a Bushido fight. It was a strategic operation by a 350-man nullsec corp. Never did the attackers put a “gf” in local. In fact they were very disciplined in never talking in local, and in fact never talking to me at all. Many, many convo’s went unanswered, and when I asked their diplo “why”, his only response was, “content, basically”. This is how I knew early on that this was a strategic operation that I was likely to lose, and not just content for someone. But I wasn’t going to go down without a fight, and for the first couple weeks, I was able to maintain hole control, and repeatedly crashed their fleets out of the hole, reinforced their structures, and prevented them from finding entrances.

There’s a logical opposite to Space Bushido, which I’ll call “Salt, Tears, and Content”. It consists of finding a weaker enemy, killing them, and then taking glee at them raging in local, while running like a scared child from real fights. Frankly I don’t respect these kind of players. Taking pleasure at causing harm to someone else is not okay. My strategy has always been to fuck over these kind of players by blueballing them. But Eve is full of assholes, and this play style is a huge part of Eve’s player retention problem. Because these kinds of players run from real fights is why I never engaged pirates in highsec and played a strategy of denying kills, which, frankly, worked well. I far prefer Space Bushido and honorable fights.

Now that the battles are largely over, I’ve actually had more conversations with the attackers, and learned that in fact, nullsec going dark is hitting nullsec corps hard, and this was indeed a strategic operation to move into wormhole space. Buying J141740 from me was apparently discussed, but rejected, because killing is more fun. I can understand that. But it was a horrible 3-week slog for me.

Wormhole corps take notice. Nullsec is moving to wormhole space, and they are not honorable warriors looking for a duel. Nullsec corps go for strategic operations, control of space, and huge 100+ man fights. In our final Fortizar fight, the ping went out to quite a few wormhole groups, but most declined, looking at the 100-man Kikimora fleet that we expected to come and saying “no thanks”. Small gang is where it’s at.

This particular hole will most of the time have a connection directly to nullsec and highsec, and these guys aren’t afraid to cheat on Space Bushido and call a NPSI fleet. When you run into J141740 or another hole controlled by an obviously nullsec alliance, Space Bushido is off the table, there won’t be any “gf” in local, and you will have to have a more strategic operation. You need to immediately take control of and crash their statics before engaging, and I recommend a strategy of reinforcing structures instead of trying for an honorable tete-a-tete on a wormhole. It seems they will largely not engage you and will stay docked up and let you reinforce their structures, if they can’t batphone for help. If you can’t stay for the next timer, CCP will probably give them an “interesting” connection to another wormhole corp when the timer comes up.

I think nullsec corps will prefer C4 space with statics to C1-C3 systems, and will build caps there, as C5 and C6 systems do not have statics to nullsec or k-space. Now that moon mining is a thing, they will have no problems getting enough minerals for capital production. Wormhole space warriors will have to get good at killing caps with subcaps in C4 space. In J141740 I reccomend Bhaalgorns with Rattlesnakes for DPS, or their cruiser equivalents, Cruror’s Curse’s, and Gila’s. Most nullsec groups operate shield doctrines AFAIK, so Pulsars are going to be popular for them. Systems with self-contained citadel production due to perfect planets, like J141740 are going to be popular.

The change to nullsec with local going dark means that it’s almost impossible to control who is present, and who could be blopsing you. It seems nullsecers couldn’t be bothered to put alts on gates to watch for cyno alts coming in, hitting d-scan, or watching their probe window for new sigs. CCP’s change to cyno mechanics means it’s going to be easier to identify ships coming in carrying a cyno. But you never know when someone has logged off in your system with a cyno, or when someone just popped out a wormhole with a cyno and sees something juicy on d-scan. It takes a few minutes for a new sig to show up and the attacker has a few minute lead.

So using wormholes to drop on nullsec is about to become even more popular. The ability to close wormholes and inability to cyno makes wormhole space much more defensible than nullsec, as my successes above indicate, and I think the exodus from nullsec will continue. Those who don’t ragequit from nullsec groups due to the blackout will move to wormhole space. But this exodus means that there won’t be any targets in nullsec either. After a bit of time, there will be so many caps in C4 space that it’s going to be nearly impossible to evict these nullsec refugees, so if wormhole corps want to act, they had better start reinforcing structures now, before capital production takes off in force. If you’ve got an E175, T405, X877, Y683, or Z457, Rage Rolling for Rorq’s is about to become a thing. RRRage my friends.

A few shout outs to old friends and new who helped. Koneko Gishi who returned to Eve just in time to see all his shit blown up from our Astrahus. Mod Yokosuka who returned just for this anyway while raging all the time about how much he hates Eve. Fc Jovan Sleeper420 and MATADOR Loutte for actually showing up despite a shit internet connection, and being patient with our language differences. Shakar Hamalia for always being there. Anton Skylark, Whitehair Annages, and eKuivocal for being willing to fly and lose my YOLO caps with me. Cyrus Kurush for getting rolled out and wandering into our Raitaru kill. New friend teddy Gybc who skillfully and competently FC’d our final Fortizar fight and got 10b ISK in Kikimora kills, and recorded it for your viewing pleasure above. CaLdArIaN AdMiRaL and Grous Rivera for sticking around in the hole to fight another day. And of course all the folks from Chain Smoking, A Class Apart, and Hole Control who took part. My gratitude is endless. Apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten here. There were more than 50 people on our side in the end, and I know I’ve forgotten a few.

For gloating from the other side, see the #fleet-debrief in the Spectre Fleet Discord from Chayse Ramsay and this debrief from Spectre Fleet FC and willing pawn Maded Rift. (It’s a public Discord, you might need to click this invite first) Also this pretty great video of our shit going boom from Samara.

o7