The big announcement on Saturday was that the Imperium was going to invade the region of Insmother, held by Pandemic Horde and its allies.  Move ops began immediately after the State of the Goonion and I was in the first set of fleets out of UALX for the war because I early on in my null sec journey I was left behind after missing the first move, so now I am always on the first fleet if I can manage it.

But I needn’t of worried.  As it turned out our staging system wasn’t even ready yet.  Part of what we were doing last Saturday was flying cover so GSOL could drop a Keepstar in our eventual destination.  0SHT-A in Curse was as far as we went that day.

I left one subcap there, but when “do it yourself” capital move ops started… the cynos are set up and running in a fleet so you just join with your capital and jump when you’re ready then dock up… I jump cloned back to UALX and packed up my Apostle’s hangar with a selection of doctrine ships and made the jumps that got me to Curse.

I left enough space in my hangar to pick up the ship I had flown out there initially, so when the Keepstar was ready… its death having been prematurely reported… I was able to log in and jump to that.

However, where we were wasn’t Insmother at all, but the system N3-JBX Scalding Pass, in a corner of the region with a lot of PanFam space around us.

Scalding Pass on arrival at our staging system

Hostiles around us included Pandemic Legion (-10.0), Northern Coalition (NC), Phoenix Coalition (-PHX-), and, of course, Pandemic Horde (REKTD), all part of the greater PanFam coalition.

The first thing on the agenda was apparently to clear out that lot, along with the structures that went with them.  During the first few days there were some fight and the occasional screw up, like when somebody decided to use caps to reinforce structures out of jump range of the staging Keepstar, but almost all of that happened during EUTZ while I was working.  By the time I was able to log in, ops were generally winding down.  The best I could manage was logging in to watch a fleet bridge off for another engagement.

But Wednesday saw the first big USTZ op I was able to log in for.  Kicking off at 00:30 UTC, we piled in to three fleets ready to take on PanFam as a set of sovereignty timers were coming up.  If PanFam sought to contest them, we were ready.

But PanFam did not seek to contest the systems.  They had two fleets spun up and sitting on Fortizar as it came out of its armor timer.  We didn’t poke their Fortizar and they left our entosis pilots alone, leading to some predictable results.

Sovereignty changes in Scalding Pass going our way

That left the corner of Scalding Pass where we were staged looking like this.

The neighborhood after the big night

During the couple of hours that all of that took our fleet never left N3-JBX.  But we were not idle the entire time.  As it turned out there was a hostile POS in the system owned by Mohist Alliance.  We went and reinforced that then blew up a few of the modules.

Some day these will no longer exist… but not today

Yes, it is 2025 and we’re still doing POS shoots.  Fortunately command has given up and the doctrine Basilisk now comes standard with a Garde II sentry drone, so I was able to deploy that and get on a few cheap kills.

This is how logi gets on kill mails… there will be no other method

In warping over there a Vulture ship model ended up merging with my Basilisk, so the whole time we were at the shoot my ship had another ship stuck to it.

A Vulture stuck in my Basilisk

The strange thing was, the Vulture always kept the same orientation relative to the sun, so as I orbited the logi anchor the Vulture model would slowly rotate.  I have three screen shots with the Vulture in a different orientation relative to my hull in each.  A new Legion feature?

Anyway, we shot the POS, bounced around the system a bit, and mostly just hung out until all the space between us and Insmother was taken.  The question is, where will we go next?

I suspect that we’ll be into Insmother proper next, and there is a set of systems in that region that are conveniently within capital jump distance of  N3-JBX.

Where can you go from N3-JBX?

I expect we’ll be headed to one of those systems.  But that is just my guess as a line member.

After that fleet I did managed to get into one op that ran out and helped blow up an Ansiblex and a Metenox Moon Drill, but those were pretty much targets of opportunity.  Somebody was already shooting them when we happened by, so we joined in.  So it goes in null sec.