What are the 10 largest null-sec blocks out there?
At first I thought this was easy, just go check up information on the alliances. Boom, nubmer one is Goonswam Federation, with 32K members and 147 sovereignty (not sure why sovereignty is in three colors on dotland while the bar graph for members has one color, but whatever).
Hang on, aren’t these blocks made of multiple entities? Like how The Bastion is a member of the Imperium too and Snuffed Out once was. And I read an article about World War Bee Two how PAPI outnumbered the Imperium 3.1 to 1.
OK so number was PAPI and now whoever is the largest member of what used to be PAPI is the biggest?
Well, I don’t think so. When I mean a null block, I meant a long term coalition. PAPI was made with an expiration date in mind. I assume the goal was to remove all of the Imperium’s Sovereignty, destroy all Keepstars (preventing Imperial supers from having a docking place for any attempts to retake O-EMIK,LSC-4P, or SPNZ-Z ) replace them with TEST structures, and blow up at least 1/4 of their supers or at least strand them in space so that when they login they’re doomed. At least I assume that was the goal, since various goals of the war mentioned to various gaming media made no sense, so I tried to infer from their actions something achievable they might have been going for. Seems like destroying supers and sovereignty structures was a goal and TEST also had hopes of occupation.
But while many people consider PAPI a former null block, I don’t really consider it the case. First of all, it doesn’t exist anymore, so the answer to “what’s the largest nullsec block” can’t be PAPI. But if I was a player a year ago and someone answered that, I would still consider they misinterpreted what I was asking for because PAPI had an expiration date in mind.
Whatever PAPI’s ultimate goals were, the members were not planning to stay in a coalition indefinably. They were going to achieve some goal, and then go their separate ways. For those reasons, I don’t think it was ever the largest nullsec block simply because I don’t think it was ever one entity and they never intended to stay as one entity.
Contrast this to The Bastion, Goodswarm Federation and Snuffed Out’s participation in the Imperium. Goonswarm Federation and Bastion intend to stick together indefinitely. Snuffed Out joined because something they liked in low sec became infrequent and they didn’t see that changing anytime in the forseeable future. True, they did leave Snuffed Out Departs The Imperium - INN but at the time it joined, there wasn’t a “we do stuff together, we get it done, then we go our separate ways” and more “what we used to have fun with became rare and we don’t think it’s coming back.” When what they liked doing became common again either due to patches or some developments in low sec, Snuffed Out did what they wanted to do. In short, there wasn’t an expiration date to their cooperation in mind when it joined even if they would later go their separate ways.
So the answer for the largest is the Imperium right? PAPI was never the largest nullsec block under what I was thinking and the Imperium has Goonswarm Fedeation inside it. But wait, doesn’t Fraternity have members outside the main alliance but part of the coalition? So maybe that’s the answer? But unlike cooperation lists where I can look up a corporation and it tells me how many members are there or how I can look at a system and see the sovereignty, there isn’t an in-game way to tell how these groups are related to each other. This is probably by design since if I could, that would essentially mean I’d be able to look at a corp and see whoever they set to blue. But while knowing what a corp does for its standings is something I cannot see, there are things are public knowledge like how The Bastion is part of the Imperium. I imagine that for the larger blocks, people know what corps are associated with Fratenrity, TEST, PanFam, Literally Triggered and so on.
So given that, what are the biggest 10 null sec blocks?