While the majority of Eve has been preparing for the next expansion with bated breath, behind the scenes in wormhole space, fights have been brewing. With a group like Adhocracy, a longstanding figure of the wormhole community laid low in a campaign called “Carthage”, this past weekend marked a brutal brawl between No Holes Barred and a variety of enemies, which saw a veritable slaughter of caps as NoHo worked to defend their system, named “Polaris”.
Over the past few weeks, No Holes Barred had held suspicions of hostiles moving capitals into their wormhole, with the disappearance of wormholes at inopportune times, and directional scans that showed dreads on long range occasionally, but could not fully pin their suspicions down. Yet, on Friday at approximitely 04:16 server time, the veil was lifted, revealing that the groups E X P L O S I O N, Lazerhawks, and Hard Knocks as well had built up a sizable capital presence inside of the hole without NoHo realizing it, and began to lay siege to the entire system. The size of their forces was around a hundred and twenty five subcaps, with the primary purpose of maintaining of hole control, and eighteen capitals as well, mostly dreads and the like.
NoHo, who had barely fourteen people on at the time, chose to draw first blood by using Tornados to quickly pop a hostile Tengu before getting down to business, evacuating assets out of the POSes into external containers over the course of a few hours. Within seven hours, they had completed their initial goal of safeguarding their assets, during which, the hostile forces had been working steadily on reinforcing the dozens of POSes that had locked down the moons in the system. Also during this time, the dread group had split into two entities to better coordinate and reinforce the POSes around system while sixty of the subcaps maintained hole control. The NoHo capital and subcapital group under the command of Faye Fantastic and Sibasomos, sensing an opportunity, made the decision to utilize buffer fit dreadnaughts and go in to engage the targets.
No Holes Barred warped their capitals into the hostile fleet at one of the planets, engaging the dreadnaughts on land; the subcapitals of Hard Knocks and E X P L O S I O N attempted to return and engage the NoHo forces, supported by allies in Exit Strategy.., but were stopped bubbles which put them 110km off of their trapped dreads. Hostile forces attempted to send their other capitals in to support their trapped ones, but by the time they and the subcapitals made it down to where the first half of the cap fleet was, they were dead, leading to a wholesale slaughter of a lot of the remaining Hard Knocks and E X P L O S I ON ships.
While No Holes Barred secured the engagement handily, they don’t seem to harbor much animosity against the attempted evictors, expressing enjoyment for the goodfights that they had as well as mentioning that there would always “be rivalry” between the groups involved. Others, however, on Eve-ru. were less enthused, and angrily wrote posts about the fight that they participated in.
The final tally for kills in the fight shows NoHo killing over a hundred hostiles, including nine dreadnaughts and two carriers, and burning nearly a hundred and forty billion isk while losing a mere tenth of that figure.
Much thanks to Xtrah for his interview, Faye Fantastic and Sibasomos for engaging and providing content, and props for etheris who FC’d during a relatively weak US timezone two nights in a row for 7+ hours each as a part of the defense. Final thanks to Baku Saissore for his assistance in translating Russian for the image in this article.
