Defending Spoopy - a personal perspective

(Written by Andres Talas)

I logged in to find desperate pings - Spoopy was being evicted from their home wormhole of Mu by Hole Control, and they needed help. They had ships in the hole, but they needed pilots to fly them. A reinforcement fleet was being organised in AUTZ, my home timezone, and it was expected it was going to be the hottest of hot insertions - nullified interceptors or shuttles, thank you, as nothing else was going to survive. We'd be told the desto system when the fleet was formed.

Spoopy Newbies are a wormhole corporation within Brave. They've been in wormholes since 2016, during which time Brave has been bouncing between lowsec, faction warfare and nullsec. This is important, as one of the defining features of wormhole politics is that wormhole space will unify to throw out 'nullseccers'. But bits of Brave have been in wormholes since Patriot got lost during a wormhole daytrip in 2013 and decided to stay, and in this whole time Brave has been in and out of Null, and giving good fights all that time … so from the point of view of the wormhole community as a whole, Brave kind of gets an exception to this.

I don't know much about Hole Control. I know they are a wormhole group, and they are pretty good, so they've probably got a limited number of pilots, but will have a lot of blingy and expensive ships. They had apparently managed to reinforce Spoopy's stuff, and had managed to establish their own base in the hole.

It was all going to come down to hole control. If Brave could keep a door to Mu open, we could feed in enough pilots and enough ships to overwhelm them. If we couldn't, then Spoopy was going to be homeless, and everything they had in that hole was going to be lost, because wormholes don't do asset safety.

In my view, this first few days was the critical part of the battle - by the actions of heroic Spoopy pilots and FCs in the hole, and the willingness of Brave pilots to stop whatever they were doing and jump up to forty jumps into probable death, we managed to leak a few people an hour into the hole.

That doesn't seem like it matters, but at the start of the invasion, on about the 20th, Spoopy was outnumbered about 60:20, and were unable to prevent Hole Control from establishing their own structures in the hole. By 1900 on the 23rd, Brave was able to put 120 people into a fleet engagement, and dispute hole control at all times, which meant more reinforcements could come in. That battle on the 20th saw Brave mostly in cheap caracals, omens and hurricanes, but the price for Hole Control and friends was eight Guardians, and in a wormhole you can't replace losses quickly and easily.

And it was important we could bring people and ships in, because Spoopy was unable to prevent Hole Control from taking down their fort's shield and armor timers. The hull timer was on the 24th, and if that fight was lost then things would get tricky.

But by now, enough people had been leaked in that we had hole control - we could keep a wormhole open for our reinforcements. As a deliberate decision, Spoopy did not seek reinforcements from any of Brave's allies in nullsec. They were going to stand with what Brave could bring, or they were going to fall with what Brave could bring. Hole Control had called for reinforcements, with Kybernauts Clade coming in from Pochven with about fifty pilots. Wormhole space, on the other hand, let Hole Control's fight be Hole Control's fight. Spoopy had also been able to anchor more structures during this period, so although Hole Control managed to destroy an Azbel, it was still a case of if Brave maintained enough hole control that we could bring in more reinforcements, then we could keep the fight going in future timers with greater and greater resources.

That hammer came down on the 24th, at the Fort's final timer.

This time, Brave wasn't in Hurricanes, Caracals and Omens.

For the final fight on the Fortizar, Hole Control and their friends from Pochven brought Zarmadzs, Ikitursas and Proteus, plus Guardian logi.

Shattered's reinforcement fleet was as blingy - Brave's Leshaks, Vargurs, Paladins, Golems and Bhaalgorns put as much isk on the field as Hole Control and their friends did.

Numbers were relatively even, with eve-kill counting 204 for Brave and 154 for Hole Control and friends.

In the opinion of Hole Control, our Fleet Command also did a better job than theirs. This is an element of their report, posted on Reddit.

"Though due to good warp-ins from the enemy fleet and webs on our main anchor, brave was able to eliminate most of our logi wing and our Orthruses were getting harassed by a group of long range marauders targeting our tournament nerds, who were manually piloting and pretending this was a tournament scrim.

While our logi wing was being pressured hard without the ability to reship them, we had to switch strategies. We started kiting harder and instead of fighting the Brave fleet we decided to kite around it and just try to grind the Fortizar down. Keep defensive bubbles between our fleet and Brave in order for them to not get warp-ins on top of our fleet, while trying to focus the Fortizar, which was shooting and bombing the sentries that our Ishtar wing had deployed to keep the timer paused.

But in the end, Brave FC managed to find a good angle to get another good warp-in on top of the remains of our fleet and thus the hope of destroying the Fortizar was crushed." After this defeat, where Hole Control and Kybernauts Clade managed to not destroy the Fortizar while achieving 18.6% efficiency against Brave, Hole Control asked for terms. We permitted them to evacuate their ships, with what loot they could carry.

They agreed to not attack any Spoopy structures for six months.

By the efforts of the Brave pilots who trickled in over days in ones and twos, by the week long efforts of Spoopy's pilots and FCs holding that door open, and by the big hammer of Brave's main fleet so well wielded by Shattered, Mu held.