Does anyone know if any keepstars have been successfully defended from a massive/major assault?
I’ve nothing to do with any keepstars, it just peaks my interest. Does defending a keep star have an inherent disadvantage due to sheer numbers of players in fleets attacking hitting the dps cap easily?
I’m sure there has been successful defenses of a keepstar.
For your second point; No, attacking a keepstar is not easy. You have to remember that these structures are going to be the only place to store titans and supers, so you can expect them to be well armed ( let’s not forget that they also have a DD fitted). Not only does attacking/defending require you to field massive amount of assets, it also requires one to plan ahead of time.
To put it in simple terms; People call in/take days off for these things and for good reason. The amount of players/assests on the field leads to crushing amounts of tidi that it takes hours or even all day to grind just one timer. And that’s just one timer, you got to do it three times feilding the same or even more assets to take it down.
Not only that, with the amount of supers/titans on grid there is a huge risk of third parties dropping in order to draw their share of blood on ether side.
Another element to keepstar fights is that they’re generally TiDi’d up. It’s true for any citadel but you generally only see it for keeps.
When TiDi comes into play, you’re required to meet real-time DPS requirements, whilst in TiDi. It has the effect of increasing the number of players applying DPS by 10x
(you shoot 10x slower, so you need 10x more people).
As for defending keepstars, yes, absolutely it happens. Most recent I think was a TEST keepstar successfully defended against a northern offensive (the second time at least, lol).
Interesting, It just seems like there are far more death stories than surviving stories which might lead to a few questions of why.
The fact stories about losses are more interesting must have something to do with it. Unless it was a close or unusual fight, the fact some group failed to explode a Keepstar isn’t interesting. And many people who fail to explode a Keepstar never even make it to the grid.
Keepstars have 16 000+ kills and only 22 losses on zKill(https://zkillboard.com/ship/35834/). Obviously some of that is intrinsic to how the station works, but they definitely seem to get their share of kills.
Well. The one in DW- was undefended(20 ceptors).
The nature of the engagement means that when you go in, you go ALL in. You drop 150 titans, you drop 300 supers, you drop all the faxes in new eden. You’ve got 3-5 subcap support fleets. You’ve got dread bombs ready to drop on bounced supercaps.
At that point, the keepstar itself is irrelevant… it’s a question of whether the attacker’s fleet can kill the defender’s fleet. And attackers don’t attack unless they think they can win. When the stakes are as high as “our entire coalition’s supercapital fleet”, they make very sure they can win. The UALX loss that I mentioned was an extremely costly loss for the Northern coalition in a myriad of different ways.
My favourite is when cloaky ships warp to cynos at 100km, not realizing that puts them at zero on the keepstar. All of a sudden they’re much less cloaky and much more explody.
Here is one successful defensive.
Unfortunately they used a mechanic using fighters and jammers to cause more stress to the node and allow more time for the keepstar to repair.
Did not know that. Nice one.
Honestly… I don’t call that a successful defense. That’s like rigging an election and then saying you won.
Even UALX, the fight only ended because the node literally just gave out when the goon supers jumped in. I’m sure it would have been a bloodbath had the node held up… but instead, it ended up being the end of the fight. The NC. super fleet which had literally burned across the universe (a 5 ■■■■■■■ hour trip btw… god damn that sucked) and one jump out we were told we were heading back home.
I honestly don’t expect we’ll ever see a “million dollar battle”. The node will always limit us… and while that is disappointing, I don’t fault CCP for that; there’s no other MMO in the world that does what Eve does. We have small-scale battles almost weekly that exceed the scope of fights that become stuff of legend in other MMOs.
When the Imperium anchored a keepstar in 6RCQ-V it was attacked on the anchoring timer - so without citadel defenses - by the northern forces. However, the north chickened out from using their super-capital forces. They made progress on the hull hitpoints/timer, but after a number of hours of TiDi they calculated they were loosing ships too fast and therefore disengaged.
I remember that fight too. That was a pretty fun one at the start. That said, we didn’t chicken out, we decided not to feed lol. Can’t fault anyone for not feeding 
I don’t recall any statements from the NC/PL high command on why they didn’t commit titans and supers on that battle. Perhaps they thought it wasn’t important enough to bring in their super fleet, planning a long-term defense behind cynojammers.
(That brings back memories of my first experience with nullsec sov warfare, the original Max campaign by BoB; a month of that cured me from nullsec for a number of years. Server performance has improved since that time, but AoE titan doomsdays were a bad design then and now.)
Well, I’m just a line member, but take it from someone who was there from the start to the end. We didn’t jump in because the node crashed. Ironically, it saved us from getting hellcamped like PL did. I had a place in the fight, first in a sub and then in the supercap fleet while it burned down. It was made all the worse by the fact that we couldn’t take any regional gates as we had no real escort.
I’m not privy to the tactic that they were planning on using but my guess was we were going to either counter-drop the goon fleet and trade, or drop on the TEST super fleet and overwhelm it to make them irrelevant for the rest of the war. Either way, we were staged and ready to jump in. My subcap toon was floating around in a Cerb, with the node dead, halfway through a reload cycle on RLMLs (■■■■■■■ hell those take a long time to reload at 90% TiDi)
It wasn’t dropping connections, it was literally in full zombie mode.
All this time, and they still haven’t come up with a better solution? I fought in the goon battles long ago. 3 hrs to jump in 45 mins of waiting for a button to react on my NYX…actually one of the reasons I quit the game.
Guess I should be happy CCP ransomed all my assets back to me in lowsec…
What solution would you recommend? Technology has limits. TiDi allows the fight to proceed slowly and (more) reliabily. It’s painful, but better than nothing.
There wasn’t a node death in 6RCQ-V. I spend the fight sitting in a couple of faxes in jump range, but there was never a need for us to go in.
As far as I recall Imperium forces arrived early in the system, with titans setting up on the anchoring keepstar. The north had decided on using drone boats - especially a large PH Gila/VNI fleet - to DPS the keepstar while burning away at high speed. (I think replaying a similar battle earlier that same month where Test or FRT destroyed an anchoring Fortizar using drone boats, details vague.) Imperium deployed fighters to catch the 100MN AB fit cruisers. That certainly slowed down the node a lot.
I can imagine the attacking commanders fearing node-death if they jumped in for a full battle, which would result in the keepstar completing the anchoring process.
Ah well, we got to fight the big keepstar sieges a bit later.
So much giggity right there.
No, I was talking about UALX there. 6RC, I’m not sure what happened either. I’m a line member, so I just deploy where I’m told to deploy. Show up to shoot things. Life’s good!
Tidi or not, it’s still a great opportunity to use the big toys 
