9UY4-H, Providence – A massive fight took place in Providence at around 18:00 EVE time today over an infrastructure hub in the area reinforced by Rekking Crew (RC). More than 2,000 capsuleers from all over the galaxy converged on the system, spiking time dilation to 10% as the opening blows were thrown. Representing the attacking side of this conflict were Rekking Crew (consisting of The Rogue Consortium, Purple Helmeted Warriors and Honorable Third Party, among others)** in Machariels with force auxiliary triage support on grid. PanFam answered their call and brought a mass of Muninns between Pandemic Horde and Northern Coalition with other special guests from the coalition. Defending was Provibloc (consisting of groups such as Curatores Veritatis Alliance, Apocalypse Now, Sev3rance, among others)** with their own fleet of Machariels. Answering their call was Legacy, bringing a full Muninn fleet with a side fleet of Jackdaws/Talwars as well as a Test Alliance Retribution fleet, a Goonswarm Federation Jackdaw fleet, and a Cerberus fleet from Siberian Squads.
According to Brave Collective fleet commander, SandrinAD, the fight went like this:
[The] Fight started with all the Legacy affiliated fleets sitting at pings on a gate grid and Provi warped their machs into the bubbles starting the fight. Voltron’s primary targets most of the fight were the Panfam Muninn fleets first bringing the NC/PL fleet below critical mass before clearing the logi of the Horde fleet […]. After losing most of our logi and a fair number of Muninns we called to offline and re-online the cyno jammer in system giving us a window to light cynos. We used this opportunity to bridge in reinforcements and a Mino of our own to cover our missing logi. With [seconds] left TEST dropped ~10 Dreadnaughts to start killing the hostile triage but they held strong throughout the remainder of the fight.
SandrinAD, Brave Collective
Another perspective of the fight from Vas Deferens01 of Dreadbomb. is posted on the r/EVE subreddit. It recounts a slightly different story, detailing Legacy’s use of ProviBloc’s Machariel fleet as a bullet sponge to absorb fire from hostile fleets while they skirted around to shoot the heavy assault cruiser fleets on grid. He explains, rather vividly, that “Legacy realized they were losing way too much to dudes they outnumbers so […] the only remedy was to keep piling in anything with a pulse.”
At the time of writing, battle reports have not updated to be equivalent so we are presented with two reports that paint similar pictures. One from zKillboard, showing 2,191 capsuleers involved with 60.9 billion ISK lost for the attackers vs. 91.2 billion ISK lost for the defenders. While another battle report from Fleetcom shows only 1,720 players engaging but 85.1 billion ISK lost for the attackers with 92.4 billion ISK lost for the defenders. In this regard, either report could be accurate but it is best to continue checking for updates as time goes on and killmails populate accordingly. The infrastructure hub was won by the defenders.
** Both groups have members unlisted that were not listed to save space.