The ping came through on Saturday afternoon, just past 15:30 my time. I saw it a few minutes after it had been sent out and I almost just let it pass. I was feeling a bit off, I had just gotten up from a nap, and I hadn’t quite shook off the grogginess from that.
But the ping was from The Llama, who is high on my rankings of fleet commanders, and promised shiny kill mails, possibly even a super capital. All I had to do was log in, get in a Flycatcher, get in fleet, and get on coms. How hard could it be?
Did I even have a Flycatcher in my hangar? I logged in to find that I did. It is one of the common homeland defense doctrines, put together in part to try to solve the “Goons can’t tackle” problem by giving most of the fleet the ability to launch a warp interdiction bubble. That there is now a “Goons bubbling their own fleet” problem was a logical consequence, but you work with the material you have.
On voice coms they were still sorting out boosts and were asking for more main line ships, so I didn’t think about flying logi. That was a good thing as where we were headed the mission was mostly to collect kill mails.
We undocked and headed out, having been given a first destination to which to free burn. We were quickly out of our own space and into the southern end of Etherium Reach, where the locals enjoy a quiet lifestyle of gate camps and drag bubbles to help waylay solo travelers.
Flycatchers landing on a gate as we travel
We were pushing 150 Flycatchers with logi and links through their space, so they warped off and left us alone, though we still get dragged by some of their deployed warp bubbles.
There is a whole art and style to that particular tactic and the locals have honed their skills. This was enhanced by our own comic attempts to deal with things, where somebody tried to boosh a bubble off, only to place it in an even more annoying location, after which somebody bubbled the fleet.
I missed that because I was stuck a gate back, having reflexively shot the first drag bubble we ran into before the FC said not too. Well, once you’ve started you might as well finish. At that point I was at least on a kill mail. Op success, kill board green! My goal every month is to get on at least one kill mail, and while I had one in the bag already, a backup is nice.
Once we got ourselves sorted and past the last bubble, we were into low sec, where there are no bubbles allowed. That seems like an odd place to drive a fleet of 150 interdictors, hulls which specialize in deploying warp interdiction bubbles. The Llama later explained/opined that showing up in such ships would make other groups underestimate us. Having a pile of well tanks T2 destroyers that can put warheads on foreheads out to 100km while moving at around 2.4km a second did end up feeling like a good choice. We ended up losing around 15, which wasn’t bad for the environment we ended up flying through.
But that comes in a bit, first we had to get to the destination, which ended up being Amamake, a low sec system of some renown.
It is my understanding that there was some sort of event planned for the system that we were coming to join in on, but I’m taking a month’s break from Reddit due to the overwhelming amount of bad takes that seem to have shown up lately. And not just in r/eve, which is a haven of bad takes. The three core World of Warcraft subreddits are literally at war with each other, some of the other areas I follow have gone full negativeland, and even r/mmorpg, a cesspool on a good day, seems to be plumbing new depths of bad take research. If it wasn’t for the No Man’s Sky subreddit, I’d say burn it all down.
Anyway, it turns out r/eve is also the only place to get any real information about events in game, so what is a capsuleer supposed to do? Read the game forums? Spare me, I’d rather go to Reddit.
Okay, I guess it was in the Friday Community Beat post. But I hadn’t read that at the time. In fact, I only checked that after I wrote all of the above, so was completely uniformed. The tease to get people to show up was:
Our corp and others will be gathering in Amamake around 22:30 EVE time on 9/26/26 and when we are ready, we will be hitting grid somewhere within the system with battleships, a few caps and other fun things! Word on the streets is that Warlock Industries will be conjuring up a Nyx, and allegedly other really cool people are eyeballing their toys as well! The hope is for everyone to just brawl, slug it out and overall have a good time, I will wave my fist very angrily at you if you kite out all fight!
So we arrived in Amamake at almost exactly 23:00 UTC to find about 1,500 people in system and time dilation down at 10%, which is about enough to make a null sec player feel fully at home.
Welcome to Amamake
And it was a good 10% tidi too, just on the threshold so it would rise up to 15% or even 20% during the peak, so the game was moving slow but in a way that gave me time to “look out the window,” as I put it, and take screen shots while keeping up with targets and aligns. 20% is pretty much ideal for logi as it gives them plenty of time to respond to requests for reps. You can dual box logi in 20% tidi and not break a sweat. Or I should say that even *I* can do so. There are a lot of people much better at multi-boxing than I am.
I wasn’t dual boxing though, I was along to shoot things. However, when we warped in it seemed like we might be on a short trip as we landed in the midst of some Stormbringers, the EDENCOM cruiser that excels at AOE attacks.
Stormbringers at 12 o’clock high
A fair number of those could have made things go bad for us. There were only about a dozen of them and they didn’t seem keen to press their attack. They could have quite possibly been keen to just tag as many hulls as they could to pad their own kill mail count. There was a lot of that going around.
We pulled distance from them and headed towards where things seemed to be happening, where there were blobs of ships, including capital ships, milling about and shooting each other.
Flycatchers with the battle in the distance
In the middle of that was the super capital that the fleet ping promised, a Nyx supercarrier taking fire from all side, the center of the brawl. That was what brought everybody onto the field as Warlock Industries, throwing a birthday bash and brawl, to tempt us all.
Nyx under fire
We rolled in, shooting at a few things along the way, got in our shots on the Nyx, which exploded not too long afterwards showing nearly 800 pilots on the kill mail.
We then went to work shooting our null sec peers as The Initiative and Winter Coalition both showed up in force. The Imperium also followed us up with small fleets of Sacrileges along with Sigma Grindset in Omen Navy Issues (who look like they took heavy losses), and Brave in Exequror Navy Issues.
Our Flycatchers scooting around the battlefield
So we spent time shooting our old friends/foes, with The Llama steering us this way and that to pick off notable names of interest. This got us in trouble at one point and The Llama lost his ship and had to warp us off, then to the Keepstar (which is open to all) in order to re-ship. By this point some of the Euros were starting to fade, so The Llama had some volunteers offering up ships to replace his loss.
I used that respite to feed the cats, then we were back at it.
Warlock Industries then put a Sarathiel on grid, the recently added Angel Cartel dreadnought, which was blown up in due time.
Saratheil smart bombing on grid
There was also another faction dread, a Vehement, on grid for a bit, piloted by CrackerC, who appeared to be just throwing it in there to add to the spice of the brawl. That too was blown up.
The Vehement brawling
CrackerC then showed up in an Avatar, and a titan on the field got everybody motivated and more dreads dropped in on the show.
Reinforcements arrive
That Avatar started taking a pounding right away. But CrackerC did not show up just to be a target. That Avatar fought back and put down some dreads while it was alive… and it stayed alive for quite a stretch.
The Avatar on grid
We flew past that titan at least three times to tag it to get on the kill mail as we engaged other targets.
The titan was the highlight of the event. Warlock Industries put some other toys on grid as well, but once somebody has thrown a titan into the pot it is tough to get excited about another faction dread I suppose.
Overall the battle report I am looking at put the losses at 630 billion ISK, which is a respectable amount of carnage for a Saturday evening.
Battle Report Header
It is divided into three parts, with the Imperium groups on the left, other null sec groups on the right, and everybody else in the middle.
Once the titan blew up, with over a thousand pilots on the kill mail, things were about over for us. We had been out for nearly three hours and, while we achieved the goal of padding our kill totals we were done. The Llama parked us at the Keepstar and said if we wanted to get back home we could join one of the other fleets that had come out.
I managed to get on 90 kills, which is a lot for me. Back on my 20 years in numbers post there were whole years where I barely passed 200 kill mails. Those 90 kill mails were also enough to drop my sec status from 5.0 to 1.2. Not low enough to be an issue, but I might want to go rat a bit.
I docked up and called it an evening. While it is only 20 gates back to Insmother, it was past dinner time and I was hungry. So I docked up and called it a day.
Flycatcher docked up
I had jumped in for what I figured might be a short, one-way run and ended up in a serious brawl.
Now I have a Flycatched docked up in Amamake. I’ll probably just take it to Amarr, part it out, sell the pieces, and buy a new one back in Insmother. Or maybe I’ll see if I can sneak it back late some evening. Just moving ships around can be an adventure on its own.
Addendum: Turns out Sunday night was quiet enough to get home without any drama at all, though I should really go back a bookmark perches for the gates along that route. There were still drag bubbles left over from the day’s gate camps.