Moving this over here because it’s a massive tangent off of the purpose of that thread. It was just gonna be an offhand comment, but then I started explaining what I meant by the second sentence after the quote, and well… here we are. Feel free to ignore it, but it’s information that’s there if people are curious, I guess?
One has nothing to do with the other. The current fighting in nullsec is just the latest iteration of null politics. This one was set up two years ago at the end of the 14 Month War. Or, really, a year earlier, at the beginning of the war.
Four years ago, TEST and the Legacy Coalition began a war against Fraternity with the intention of securing space for Legion of xXDeathXx, who’d been evicted from their long-held territory in the north. Legacy didn’t want to commit to the kind of risk the offensive would take, and FRT didn’t need an offensive, since they were, you know, the people getting attacked.
So the war basically stalemated for like 8 months. Vily turned to the Mittani for assistance with the war, but the Imperium, at the time, was dealing with issues in Pure Blind, Fade, and Cloud Ring… and frankly, Mittens and Noraus got along better than Mittens and Vily did, at that point. So he said no.
In response, Progodlegend and Vily cut a deal with PanFam and FRT to end the ‘war’ against FRT and join forces in a megacoalition calling itself ‘PAPI’ (PanFam + TEST Alliance Please Ignore). Their goal: a war of ‘extinction’ (to use Vily’s words) against Goonswarm1.
BRAVE’s obligations as a member of the Legacy Coalition dragged them into it, even though, BRAVE’s top leadership didn’t want anything to do with the war. Their FC cadre, on the other hand, wanted what null FCs always want: senseless slaughter for kicks. This kicked off 14 months of (from the perspective of BRAVE’s non-FC leadership and much of their line, by the accounts I heard) BRAVE basically being made TEST’s whipping post. Whenever anything didn’t go right, BRAVE got blamed. BRAVE FCs ran PAPI fleets with BRAVE pilots in the ships, while simultaneously BRAVE got blamed for never showing up.
So when the war ended in, shall we say, not-PAPI’s favor, BRAVE, under the leadership of Dunk Dinkle, issued a public statement withdrawing from the Legacy Coalition and declaring that they were vacating their space in order to move someplace where they could get away from the politics of null and get back to trying to live their best Brave Newbies life.
They went to Pure Blind… which, at the time, was kind of wide open, with small groups living there, like We Form V0LTA. And for a while, everyone was happy with that.
Then FRT decided they wanted more space they could rent out. So they decided to move on Pure Blind. And they ordered their minions asked their friends in the greatly-reduced TEST Alliance Please Ignore if they wouldn’t mind getting the hell off FRT’s couch in Omist and going to Pure Blind to help with the war effort2.
That was last year. FRT, and Horde, after basically being fought to a standstill by BRAVE and V0LTA/BL0B, finally decided to commit their supercapital fleets to the punishing people for not meekly accepting the dominance of feudal landlords. Which, near as I can tell, is when BRAVE reached out to the new folks in charge of the Imperium and said ‘Do you wanna kill some keepstars?’
The PanFam/FRT main staging Keepstar in X47 comes out of its hull reinforcement in about 16h, I think, with another FRT Keep in Y-1918 in Branch coming out 2 hours after that.
Feel free to go watch the fireworks. Ignore the number of people dying, if you can. Just, you know, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking the null blocs give a damn about anything the Empires are doing.
There is no emergence of anything in HS/LS that is at all connected with the wars of Null.
1. FRT’s involvement in the war was performative at best, and they pretty much left early except for when PAPI basically screamed for max numbers for days ahead of time. Which, you know, was fine with Imperium leadership… after all, it’s what Mittens and Noraus agreed on when things started. Seems the only people who didn’t know FRT didn’t really care about the war… were Vily and Piggles. I’m not going to say that TEST got played from the start, because obviously, PanFam deeply wanted to see the Imperium destroyed, but… yeah, right from the start everyone but TEST knew that no matter which side won, TEST was going to lose. Either PAPI would win, at which point TEST, who were footing most of the bill, would find themselves fallen on next, or PAPI would lose, and Goons would have their traditional utter lack of sympathy for the brain-dead idiots who tried to stab them in the back.
2. There’s a reason most of TEST’s people from 3 years ago are in Horde, FRT, or scattered to the winds, these days. After 8 months of laying siege to a single constellation, PAPI leadership, fronted by PGL, promised everyone ‘give me 2 more weeks, and this is over’. They announced a massively expensive new Tengu doctrine (imported largely by the very people who were telling people to fly them!) to break the siege, and began the prep for their ‘final push’…
Which consisted of BlOpsing a tengu-fleet into the obvious back-end of the constellation where Initiative was waiting (BECAUSE IT WAS SO DAMNED OBVIOUS) and the covert-fitted Tengus died in the process of trying to refit for combat. At the same time, they fed close to a thousand Muninns into the spinning blades of 2 supercarrier fleets’ worth of fighters on the gate into the Imperium’s staging system. And before the fight was over, without so much as telling anyone else he was doing it, Progodlegend, architect of the war, importer of Tengus, mastermind who thought ‘hey, we can keep using blaster harpies against fighters even though all we do is die’… started unanchoring all of PAPI’s staging and extraction keepstars. All of them. Then, when they’d been forced to admit the ‘2 week’ thing was a scam to sell Tengus to line members(?!?!? Who does that crap?!?), Vily and PGL both step down and leave TEST leaderless WHILE EXTRACTING FROM A WAR THEY’VE JUST CHOSEN TO LOSE.
Seriously, anyone who ever follows either one of those guys again deserves to lose everything, I don’t care if they’re just standing behind them in a queue.