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Eleventh Hour Defence for N3

December 3, 2013

The last few days have seen RUS/CFC blocks fail by hours and sometimes minutes to capture systems in their latest offensive. After the defeats detailed in my previous two articles the Russians decided to hit the systems of XVV and DY- near the N3 staging systems of GXK and I-N.

These two systems saw RUS/CFC blocks forming up huge fleets out of their prime time with many Russians alarm clocking for the chance to stick it to N3. The attacks on these systems appeared to go well and N3 was forced to stand down twice due to overwhelming subcapital numbers from RUS/CFC. Without a station to safely position their slowcats it seemed N3 was not willing to defend these systems.

With IHUBs and TCUs on-lining and RUS/CFC blocks claiming victory N3 hit back with a clutch defence forming up 114 capital ships including 44 Nyx and 28 Aeons to destroy the on-lining RUS sovereignty structures. With N3 anchoring their own TCU it appears they considered a counter attack likely and formed up a 166 man fleet of predominately Slowcat Archons to sit on the onlining TCU in DY- daring CFC to engage. The CFC chose to attack the undefended G15Z ihub then stood down despite having around 650 subcapitals formed into fleets apparently unwilling to engage the outnumbered N3 slowcat fleet and not wanting to escalate without the support of RUS block.

G15Z would become a flashpoint early in the morning of Dec 2nd as N3 attempted to clear RUS/CFC sov structures. Over 70dreads were destroyed by N3PL for the loss of a Pandemic Legion Avatar and an N3 Nyx and Hel. Despite the heavy losses on both sides N3 were successful again in defending the system at the last minute.

The Mittani was quick to display his mission accomplished banner banking on the minor victory of denying N3 the use of these systems for use in their jumpbridge network which is largely unused for strategic operations due to N3 titans located in the nearby staging systems of GXK and I-N. The Mittani pinged the following message to his loyal followers:

 Message: VICTORY: This N3 bridge map is now pretty out of date – http://i.imgur.com/BlEctHJ.jpg?1 – because XVV, DY-P7, and now G15Z are snapped in the last 24 hours.

The obvious question on everyones lips is what does this latest bout of spaceship violence tell us about how the conflict is going. Short term it is likely CFC/RUS will struggle to escalate fights for the next few days as their allies Black Legion suffered the majority of the dread losses and have a historically poor SRP program. Recent evemails show individual Black Legion pilots are having to go to empire to find replacement dreads at market prices and have these moved down to 0.0 however the bill for these hulls is being footed by the alliance.

From: muhadin
Sent: 2013-12-02 21:09:00
To: (mailing list)

I will be doing a move op for wherever you buy a new dread at in reasonable locations.

0400 MOVE OP from ANYWHERE you bought a new dread to SENDAYA

If you haven’t bought a new dread yet you should get one soon, i may do 1 or 2 more of these move ops.

Note: Also don’t overpay if contract prices on hulls are high, no more than 2.5b for nag hull.

This will likely cause a short delay over more direct reimbursement methods such as those used by Pandemic Legion to reimburse bushy2 who was spotted in a new Avatar less than 12 hours after his loss.

In the long term the outcome of this war is still unclear, although N3 have made a good play over these systems they have been consistently outnumbered on recent timers so it remains to be seen if they can consistently push their capital and supercapital advantage and turn the defence of these early pushes into a victory.