Two Weeks into the Great Tenerifis Migration – Taking the Regional Gate

For those just joining, Goonswarm Federation, a 48,000 capsuleer strong null sec alliance, is moving from its home in Delve to Tenerifis and regions east, which might be the largest peacetime logistical operation in the history of New Eden.  I have seen so many freighters, jump freighters, Rorquals, and other haulers on the move it boggles the mind that there are so many ships.  Anyway, the details behind the move announcement are in a past post. (If you want the story in a Japanese comic book format, somebody has you covered and you can find Part 1 and Part 2 at the respective links.)

After the announcement… and complaints and recriminations from a few of our foes… the first week of the move was spent consolidating everything at the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A while I was impatient and in a panic by turns as to how I was going to move everything.  Mostly covered here, though I got up to some side things I’ll try to write about later.  The usual bad idea adventure thing.

The second week after the announcement seemed to be focused on getting everybody from the Keepstart in 1DQ1-A to the Keepstar in 49-U6U, the last stop in Querious before the regional gate into Catch.  The regional gate, the choke point where everything has to gate or go way around, dozens of jumps the other way in order to get past, was declared red because people jumping through on their own were getting popped by opportunistic gate camps.

There were plenty of people still in Delve trying to grab loners and strays, but the gate between 49-U6U in Querious and 4-07MU in Catch was a magnet for hostiles.

So the plan was to get us all ready to go in 49-U6U then bust through together with covering fleets clearing the way.  All week long there were safe cyno fleets and bridging titans available to get ships to 49-.  I got my two remaining Delve capitals, loaded with as many ships as they could carry in their maintenance bays, to the system and then flew individual expensive ships and anything I didn’t want to repackage and send via one of the shipping services.

This exercise of moving things got me to repackage almost everything in the end.  I spent a good 2 billion ISK on rewards for courier contracts to ship things to UALX, Jita, Amarr (which is cheaper and seemed more likely to get done than the Jita contracts, two of which are still waiting) so I wouldn’t have to fly or haul ships myself. (Some Tengu hulls are up for sale in Amarr still.)

Granted, looking at my transactions, I ended up selling more than 3 billion ISK worth of stuff on the market myself or via a market alt, so cash wise I am not hurting.  But I know at the far end, in UALX I will end up buying a lot of expensive rigs and probably more than a few modules that I sent to Jita instead of our new staging.

And then I threw what was left towards 49-U6U, and then got out my alliance alts and got them sorted and moving forward as well.  I have a lot of stuff in motion and I barely represent even the tiniest glimpse of a sliver of what is being moved.  The Monthly Economic Report for October is going to be worth examining because the value of all of that stuff moving out of Delve, for example, will be reflected.

All those move ops over the week culminated yesterday in the big move, the jump between the two systems.  The Saturday 19:00 UTC fireside was a brief update about how we were going to move forward through the region gate, then fleets were posted and everybody who could piled on into the game.

It was pretty busy Saturday in EVE Online, with peak concurrent hitting 36,015 capsuleers in the game, a total we haven’t reached in a while.  Now, I am not saying that was all because of our move op, but when we go into 49-U6U we pushed past the 4K mark.

The number peaked past the 4,200 mark in the main system, plus an easy 1,200 or more capsuleers in 1DQ1-A, 4-07MU, UALX, and other points along the trail that was planned for the day.  That 36K peak concurrent hit at 19:18 UTC, as we were all piling in after the fireside, which meant about 1 player in 8 in the game was somehow connected to or affected by this operation.

However, there were troubles right away.  As you can see above, time dilation was already pegged to 10% and we weren’t even really in motion yet.  Leadership had asked CCP to map the system nodes to accommodate this move op, but for some reason they put 1DQ1-A and 49-U6U on the same node together, which were the two peak systems as we started.  Angry Mustache posted a meme about this to Reddit with an explainer in the comments.

Later 1DQ was mapped to a different node, but leadership had to get on coms and ask people to log off if they were not in specific groups that were slated to move first.

The groups asked to stay were freighters and Rorquals, who would be the first go take the gate, and covering fleets, which included super carriers on the Keepstar, titans on the gate, as well as a fleet of Rokhs and a fleet of Harpies.  Not being in the former move group, I logged out two of my characters and put the third in a Harpy and joined the covering fleet.  I then undocked and got on the gate to watch the parade begin.

Leadership had a plan to control the chaos.  They put a few heavy interdictor cruisers on the Keepstar with their bubbles up.

The bubbles were there to prevent people from warping, the acts as a sort of traffic control so they could put the breaks on the move if something happened or slow down the flow if the server started lagging or disconnecting people.  On the main undock in front there were actually left and right bubbles that somebody said would alternate, letting people warp in smaller packs, though looking at the video I don’t think that ever happened.  But they clearly turned traffic on and off at various times.  The bubbles on top were to keep antsy super pilots from going early or from getting warped off if they disconnected.

With all of this in place and the cover fleets watching, the first bubble went down and capitals started warping to the gate.  They let both lower bubbles down so it was a freight train of capitals landing on the regional gate.

Time dilation, which had eased up after more than a thousand people logged off in the system, began to hit hard again as all those ships transitioned to the far side of the connection.

That went on for well over an hour.  I have screen shots with time stamps well past 20:00 UTC with a continuous stream of freighters, Rorquals, and some other capitals that should have held back but people get in a rush or don’t follow the instructions.

Some of them made multiple round trips they had so much to haul, so it was a while before other capitals were allowed to start joining the stream.  And then the stream of ships, which had only slackened a bit, was revved back up again.

When the clearance for other capitals was given I logged in my capital alt and sent him through the gate in my old Archon, carrying all I could stuff into it.  He got through the gate and docked up at the Keepstar on the other side.  I had set the 49-U6U Keepstar as his home station, so I could just self-destruct him to send him back for another run.

But before he went again I swapped characters around, put him in a Harpy, logged out the other character… who got on a couple of kill mails, the first in over a year… and got Wilhelm out to push my Ninazu through the gate to the other side.

Then, around 22:00, or nearly three hours into the op, which started at 19:00, the word went out that it was the turn of the supers.  The bubbles went up on the main undock and down on the upper area where supers undock on a Keepstar and off they went.

Somebody caught a video of the supers being freed to warp off and posted it to Reddit.

Another player put together a nice, sped up view of the gate in 49-U6U with all the capitals landing and jumping through.

Eventually we hit a point where we were clear to gate subcaps and I docked up and started pushing those through, as I had more to move than my capitals could carry.  That was undock, gate, dock up, leave ship, self destruct, appear back at the start, board the next ship, then undock to do it again.

I didn’t have a lot of subcaps to move, but a few battleships and battlecruisers that wouldn’t all fit into my capitals in a single return trip.  That was done pretty quickly, at which point we were under a thousand capsuleers in either system.  Things wound down as the initial rush of people eager to get themselves across the region gate tapered off.

There were still people moving from 1DQ1-A, so safe cyno and bridging fleets went up to move people forward to 49-U6U.  Wilhelm still had… still has… a few ships to move forward, so I had my main and each alt move one forward then fly it through the regional gate.  What is now left back in 1DQ are things that can safely go on their own.

Meanwhile, while our foes didn’t strongly contest this move op… while active in small groups, they haven’t really done much besides try to pick off stragglers and easy marks… they did send some bombers and interceptors out to once again try to pick off targets of opportunity.

In the cover fleet we were not completely idle and just watching the ships go by.  We chased off some bombers and saved a Rorqual that somehow got caught on another gate in 49-U6U.

Some interceptors were running around and we chased them and managed to catch a few in dictor bubbles before the rest flew off looking for easier targets.

Speaking of interdictors and their bubbles, a wily Sabre pilot managed to put up a bubble behind the Keepstar in 4-07MU close enough in to act as a drag bubble.  There is a whole drag effect of interdictor bubbles that will pull ships that land close enough into them, and this pulled some capitals past the Keepstar and into open space where they were vulnerable.

The Harpy fleet rolled up and chased off the interdictor and shepherded the caps, but somebody had the idea to put a heavy interdictor on the undock on front of the Keepstar to basically catch all warping ships within range to dock up to prevent this routine

I went over to DOTLAN later in the evening, around 4:00 UTC of the next day, game time, to see what sort of stats the two systems put up for the move op.  There were a lot of jumps into and out of those two systems.

More than 40K jumps in a 24 hour period is a lot of jumps.  For comparison Jita, which is easily the busiest system in New Eden and has people coming and going all hours, such that CCP always runs it on its own node, had 58K jumps in the same 24 hours.  Amarr, the second trade hub of New Eden, had about 27K.

And all of that was just yesterday’s fleet ops around the regional gate.  There were moves getting to the point where ships could jump into those systems during the day.  There were more last night in Delve as KarmaFleet assembled all of its goods.   And there will be more today for sure and some more in the coming week.  We’ll be moving people from Delve through that gate for a while.

On the far side of the gate, however, things get a bit easier.  There is not another similar situation that would require people to take a gate.  It will be all capital jumps or bridges to cynos on Keepstars where you can land, dock up, let your timer run down, then undock and move on to the next location.  I’ll be able to run up and back the chain a few extra times and get everything to our new home easily enough.

Granted, I still have shipping contracts waiting to be picked up.  I might have to go back to 1DQ and deal with those again.  And I have a few small ships there that can make their way on their own.  But, for me at least, the big effort, the crossing of the regional gate into Catch, is done for most everything I want to carry forward.

So all of that yesterday was mostly just to get people through one regional gate.

Now to wait for those cyno fleets to start so I can move further east.