Aperture Harmonics moved into J105934, better known as Nova, on January 1st, 2010. We moved from our previous home, named Exodus, into a C6 Magnetar in the hopes that living in the biggest, toughest, least forgiving wormhole space would hone our skills and that we could become the top wormhole space corporation.

A few months after moving in, we did it. We evicted our top competition, CCRES, and were widely considered the top wormhole space entity. We got in a couple of small fights with Rooks and Kings, and they had so much fun losing to us, they made us an awesome recruitment video.

In 2011, things started to change, and not for the better. We expected other wormhole entities to stand up and challenge us directly, but instead we saw the rise of wormhole “coalitions”. W-space fleets went from 10 to 20 to 100 and now even to 200+ pilots. AHARM faced a difficult choice. We could either grow our corp/alliance in order to try to compete with the larger and larger fleet sizes, or we could ally ourselves with other w-space groups, and become a part of a system that was starting to look a lot more like the nullsec political system many of us fled to w-space to escape. To many people, even many of the people within AHARM, those appeared to be the only two options, but we, as always, don’t like to do things the obvious way. If we weren’t going to change AHARM to suit the status quo in C6/C5 wormhole space, we decided instead to change where we hunt.

A brief logistical interlude

As those of you who have lived in w-space for a while know, you accumulate a lot of stuff in your wormhole. Once we decided to move, the first step was to figure out how much stuff we had. The answer was, frankly, staggering. After 3 and a half years in Nova, we had over 120,000,000 m3 of items, including POS mods. We had nearly 3,000 ships (not counting shuttles and newbie ships), and over 100 capitals. We had some 50 POSes to take down as well. Based on the last time we moved, we thought the process would take as long as 2 months. Instead, we did it all in just 3 weeks. The entire corp pitched in, and fleets of Iteron V’s (thanks CCP for making the industrial skill requirement changes!) poured out of every highsec exit we found. Capitals were quickly evacuated to nullsec and lowsec, and moved to a new staging system. To track our progress, we built a web page using the EVE API full of charts and stats about what needed to be moved. Here is a screenshot of one of the charts:

A New Home

Of course, while most of the corp was moving out, several of our officers were looking for a new home. We have a couple of different systems picked out, and once we are settled in, we will talk more about why we chose the place we chose. Of course, before we can move in, the people who are living there need some help moving out…