DRF vs NC: First hours

As mentioned in my previous post, Rebellion alliance (-R-), based primarily in Geminate, was disbanded shortly before downtime today and their space was immediately set upon by drone lands (DRF) forces. Reports indicate that large areas of geminate not controlled by -R- were SBUd.

Combat started immediately after downtime. Three of the six vulnerable stations in geminate were taken by DRF even before friendlies arrived on the scene. Hostiles are reported to have numbered 600 with around 100 supercapitals, much more than we could muster in the middle of the night with no warning.

Similar to the stella polaris sov loss during max 2 our goal here will be to take control of the area and kill TCU which are being onlined. If TCU can be killed before they online, the stations can be immediately retaken by friendlies and friendly TCU anchored; if the enemy TCU anchor we will have to go through the stations' reinforcement cycles to retake them. The enemy will set them to come out in their prime time, which for the mostly EU/US northern coalition is the middle of the night and early morning.

The early hours consisted of subcapital skirmishes, in QKTR (17b killed, 13b lost) and M-M (35b killed, 3b lost). The M-M battle apparently destroyed the bulk of the hostile support, and culminated in a node crash.

As this was going on cyno chains were being run from fountain to tribute, and around 1630 we finally formed a capital fleet and moved to a staging system in the area of operation. Numbers were weak at first, but slowly climbed until we had a full fleet of capitals and supers.

As of now capitals are on standby, support have killed one TCU and are working on others. I'm on different comms of course, but there has been no news of continued resistance after the fight in M-M. Hostiles have about 40 supercapitals standing by right now, down from 65 reported earlier and 100 at the start of the situation. At the moment this is shaping up to be more of a stella polaris situation where we recover all the sov, rather than a major disaster.

We now know that the rebellion disband was coordinated with the DRF deployment, and there is a question as to whether the deployment was because of the disband. If so, it is uncertain as to whether they will pursue a campaign against systems which have sov.