Big fights are no exception to Eve, as alliances clash and die for control of sovereignty and the future of their organizations. Yet, beyond the supercap fights of nullsec, and capital escalations of lowsec, exists wormhole space, a place where groups will spend weeks seeding a target’s home system with capitals during the off hours, slowly and carefully biding their time before committing themselves to an eviction attempt to push the target out of their home system. Such fights, predominately as a form of vengeance or for a show of power, have become increasingly common, as the death tolls only grow higher and higher.
The cycle of events leading up to Hard Knocks inc. invading the home of Band of Magnus is a long one. Hard Knocks, veterans of wormhole pvp and well known for their almost mechanical nature in hunting down cap targets (an estimated 900+ dreads and carriers), had tried to fight Band of Magnus multiple times on different occasions, only to be blueballed and denied content. Irked by this, and seeking some good fights, Hard Knocks undertook an eviction process, seeding the home system of Band of Magnus with many capitals and preparing. Initially attempting to catch them while they were running sites, the home system of J144420 had a particularly bad amount of random luck, generating few sites and little action that Hard Knocks could jump upon. Hard Knocks then elected to push Band of Magnus out and possibly get a large fight on their hands.
According to Hard Knocks member NoobMan, who posted the BR on reddit:
This operation started as a love child between Turd Destroyer and Dajokr. They did most of the work keeping round the clock eyes on them and seeding dreads. We initially wanted to jump them running sites but with unlucky spawn rates they did not Krab all week.
So we hit them at a certain time when the pos timers would come out in EU-US TZ crossover. Which just so happened to be when they were sleeping. With only 10 POS’s to Rf it took our 15 Dread about 3 hours to get the job done and get logged back off. At the peak of our strength Hard Knocks had 115 in fleet on the first night moving in to our 3 day vacation home. That included the 18 cap pilots our orcas and freighters and DST and dozen scan alts. Probably about a 75 man combat fleet. At this point QEX was only aware of the situation and not directly involved. They were on standby if we needed them.
From the beginning we wanted a 1v1. Fighting in their home with an unknown amount of caps and maximum fleet size, gave them an interesting advantage. We tried to seed the appropriate amount of dreads and triage to make it an even playing field. Even though our initial fleet was a record size for HK, as an FC you will never know who can be available at any give time and when it is critical. Now back up to after Dt had finished on the final day, the targets Band of Magnus had been self destructing hundreds of ships. What hasn’t been said yet was we left the static Wormhole bubbled but undeffended the majority of the 3days. We only held hole control to facilitate rolling the hole for routes for late comers. But for the first 2 days the targets did nothing but unfit ships and self destruct. Not once did they attempt to take hole control on Static. We intentionally showed a smaller fleet and few dreads as we could to intice them to fight.
With the POS timers coming out in the next 2-3 hours other groups were actively rolling. NOHO started rolling and was instantly scouted. Ixtab had been rolling for almost 6 hours. When a new sig appeared in Target, Ixtab came pouring in. From what we scouted about 35 to 40, along with some from Hole Control. When they rolled in HK did not have a fleet logged in but with some rage pinging our fleet swelled to around 60, no caps including 3 sets of links and plenty of scouts.
Ixtab warped to a POS and logged off. After what felt like 30 mins of back n forth on Channel Commander the decision was made to call in Quantum Explosion. So we rolled a few holes and found a route for them about 13 jumps. The decision was made because NOHO was undoubtedly rolling to crash the party. Our watch list and scouts showed nearly 70 online for NOHO (some one said 100 idk) . So with QEX 6 jumps out, Ixtab and Band of Magnus start warping to our subcap fleet perched 250km above the WH and the fight began.
Most of the T3s landed 20km off us. So we went to work. Our EWAR and fast switches won us the T3 fight the majority of the fight. It wasn’t until the 5 or 6 triage carriers landed (initially out of range thanks to defensive bubbles) that the hostile fleet started catching Reps. When they dropped caps our dreads logged in, they scattered at safe spots throughout the system. When our dreads landed it was a complete fist fight. Dreads on both sides are melting. They did a great job of neuting out our dreads with their 6 or so bhaals. We were running out of dreads and we still had their triage carriers to deal with. But with our 15 or 20 neut legions we melted through the triage 1 by 1. After that we went for bhaals and by that time just distance downing T3s.
From a HK PoV our Logi and ewar did reallly well. My target calling was decent I got a little flustered mid fight when everything was catching reps. Turd was calling dread primes and did pretty well with 7 bil dreads popping all around him.[About] 30 mins after the fight NOHO rolled in and we had to deal with that. With the superbowl approaching and multiple POS’s coming out of Rf, I decided to deny them a fight and had my fleet jump the hole both ways with prop mod on to crit the hole. We lost 2 ships in the process.
Yatta yatta… This post is getting long. Big props to Ixtab for White Knighting and showing in force to help BoM fight. It turned out pretty even numbers wise.
Hk recovered around 30 bil just from the battlefield and around 40 to 50 bil the last I heard from tower loot. QEX also received a ballpark estimate of 20 to 30 bil in salvaged mods.
Hell of a fight! A big thanks to all my leadership and Spec Ops team.
The losses sustained by both sides ere staggering to say the least. On the side of Hard Knocks and Quantum Explosion, the bulk of the 76.7 billion in losses came from 13 dreadnaughts, valued at 73.1 billion isk. Band of Magnus, Ixtab, and Hole Control lost an estimated 123 billion isk of their own, including 13 dreadnaughts and 5 carriers and 25 strategic cruisers. Reportedly, Band of Magnus also elected to self destruct a huge amount of ships inside their POS over the course of a 12 hour period, worth an estimated 65 billion isk on their own, after stripping off modules. A Stratios, purportedly carrying a huge amount of them, was shot down and destroyed. Put together, this places the losses of Band of Magnus and their allies at some 200 billion isk, one of the largest amounts lost in a wormhole fight to this date. Full battle report here.
Credit to NoobMan for his battlereport and to Ayeson for his clarification of things.
