I jumped into comms and asked around about how to help. What ended up being the plan was to stage in Thera while scanners in the hole tried to find our hisec static. We then tried to go in groups to sneak more people in with shuttles and then they'd reship once inside. This was a fairly decent plan but it cost us scanners which kinda soured the value in the execution. So much of this process was waiting around and hoping for a good chance. My group made it all the way to 1 jump out of the hisec system and then they close the connection and it was back to Thera to wait for another opportunity. We did this for hours on end. Always these guys were quick to close the hole. It was solid hole control. There is a lot spin and justification being put out there about why this eviction happened, but from personal experience: no one evicts a C2 wormhole for money. The amount of effort these guys put in to make this happen couldn't be worth any amount of ISK. You certainly couldn't pay me to put in that much effort for a C2.
All that waiting made me realize that if given a chance I would do more to help. I didn't sleep much that night (I didn't sleep more than 10ish hours through this whole thing). The next day I started just doing things without really asking or being told to. It wasn't like I was trying to go rogue or defy a chain of command, but just that the clock was ticking and we could sit on our hands debating what to do or we could do something. Fortunately there were others of a similar mind and we set up in a C2 C2/L with a simple POS and began rage rolling the C2. I led the travel fleet there. I taught the new players how to input a POS password and we all made it inside the force field on the first try (no bouncers). Yes, I'm that good at that bit. Foxholers showed up and tried to harass us, but it wasn't anything serious. I suspect they were mostly surprised to see us there. Tolerin or Professor Academiac pointed out that what we'd normally do in situations of "hurry up and wait" is that we'd teach classes. I thought that was a marvelous idea... So I taught four or five classes and two of them were improvised using slides from multiple presentations: Wormhole Mechanics, Wormhole Rolling 101, Fleets, Scouting, and I think there was one other but I don't remember what it was. My voice was hurting at this point so I had to stop. I drank so much tea to try to recover my voice that the US is now facing a national tea shortage and they're digging up tea leaves from the Boston harbor just meet demand.
At some point a roller got rolled out. It was bound to happen. Despite everything, it happens to us all once and a while. All it takes is for one person to forget to turn on their module, someone else jumps before their MWD has fully cycled off, or something like that. Battleship rolling is such a crapshoot. A discussion was had amongst myself and a small group of people who were taking initiative plus the people who were rolling and would now have to roll inefficiently if we continued. We were told there was another plan that had a slightly higher chance of succeeding and we needed to decide if we keep rage rolling or fold the fleet and wait until we could execute this other plan. We decided that we should probably go with the plan that has a higher chance of succeeding. I personally didn't want to see anyone burn out before the shooting started, myself included.
The next day I was determined to do even more. When Arps put out the ping asking for help getting another travel fleet organized, I jumped on it. There was no way in hell I was going to just sit around waiting. I was going to help make things happen. By this point most of the people interested in helping defend WHC had already learned the basics of finding and getting to Thera so all I had to do was link to the bookmark folder and put a step by step guide in the MOTD in case anyone needed a refresher. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 characters staged in Thera. Our plan this time was to scout out the C3 static and hope that our friends in the hole could distract the opposing force long enough to let our reinforcements get in.
I felt so bad for the fleet. I got them hyped to go and then it was another 20 minutes before we undocked. It gave me a greater appreciation for why strat ops seem to be a lot of sitting in structure waiting to undock. We had to coordinate so many moving parts: getting the location of the C3 with our scouts, mapping the route to get there, planning for what to do once we got inside, etc etc etc. It was all necessary, but I know how frustrating and anxiety-inducing it had to been for some of the folks just sitting in shuttles waiting for the undock. We had a couple false starts and I think the first couple tries were for the hisec connection and then we switched to the C3. Eventually we reached a point where our best option was a 26j route through low and nullsec to get a hole that would take us directly into the C3. We burned through hisec like bats out of hell. When we got to lowsec I was bouncing the fleet from gate to planet to gate just like I had taught them to do in my Intro to Safe Travelling class. When we reached the gate to the nullsec stretch I foolishly thought we could get away with just burning gate to gate since we were in shuttles. As it turns out there were smart bombing Machariels on the gate (what a throwback choice for a smarbombing ship). All but four of our shuttles were destroyed. One of my alts was one of the ones that survived and I made a quick safe and had the survivors warp to my alt and we kept a rolling safe until the fleet could catch up to them. I may have said some not Uni Comms things when I realized how badly I had messed up.
Handing out shuttles took forever. I think some people had decided that when we arrived back at Thera it was time to take a bio or get more of their favorite beverage. It was like pulling teeth and it wasn't their fault. We wouldn't have had to distribute shuttles if I had just followed my first instinct which was to bounce before going to the out gate. The second time I didn't take any chances. Mercifully, our connection from Thera skipped the troublesome smartbombers and we made our way bouncing from gates to celestials and then to the out gates. We jumped into the C3 and warped to the hole, jumped, and then I warped us to a safe so we could head to the fort. Their doorstopper did close the hole but not before we got 30-something pilots in.
The fight itself was a essentially a foregone conclusion. With our stratops doctrine ships MIA and a large number of personal ships either insurance frauded or just outright destroyed (for efficiency), we were flying from a grab bag of assorted ships that were leftovers. Again, there is spin and justification out there for people to read that says the missing ships thing is a smokescreen because they ended up destroying a whole fleet's worth of ships we could have crushed them with... It's not that simple. EUNI is a learning corp with a majority of low skill players and players for whom PVP is not their primary content. Even if we had the hulls for a solid fleet, we probably didn't have the fits necessary to accommodate needs of players who can't fly with T2 guns or are over PG on this and cap out when they turn on the MWD. The uni has strat ops doctrines specifically to address this issue and the fact that they were gone meant we had to fly whatever people could find.
I flew a number of ships and all of them were inadequate for the fleet we were facing. I don't mean to say they were bad ships, but at one point I was given a ratting Praxis. I handed that one back and took a Keres. At some point we were no longer receiving handouts but instead warping to a can with an assortment of ships. I tried to pick ones I thought would annoy the enemy, but unfortunately a Blackbird just doesn't have a high chance of success against a Guardian with a pilot who may or may not have had Grails in.
After feeding several ships in an attempt to delay the inevitable, I was podded out. There was a moment where I couldn't believe it. After that moment had passed I could feel my whole body starting to relax as the tension that had built up over the past few days was starting to unfurl. The exhaustion hit me like a freight train and I wasn't sure if I was going to pass out or stress cry.
While it is sad that WHC is gone for the time being, I feel kinda bad for the people who evicted us. I pity them like a viper who misjudges a strike and tags itself. These pilots were obviously incredibly talented and they wasted it on evicting us. There had to be juicier targets than WHC. Our fort had been flipped not more than six months ago and I had personally helped move out excess assets.
I'm glad it's over now and we can start dreaming of WHC 2.0. The future is far more exciting than the firestorm that was this past weekend.
