Three Weeks into the Great Tenerifis Migration – Move Ops! Move Ops! Move Ops!

You would think that after last week’s gigantic crossing of the regional gate move op that we would be well into the denouement of this move across regions… and you would be wrong.  So very wrong.

Sure, Hilmar is out there agitating on X.com for another Guinness World Record based on all the ships and jumps that happened last weekend (I forget where I saw this and I am not linking to X.com any more, so just trust me on this… I mean, it is totally in character for him to ignore EVE in general and null sec in particular until he can claim some upside before going back to his crypto fantasies), but for an alliance that has sat in Delve for most of a decade and that has around 48K characters in it, there is a lot to move.

So while myself and some others who had crossed the regional gap during that long Saturday event were all eager to get going and get our stuff moving towards, we were kindly asked to put a sock in it and wait while a series of additional move ops were spun up to keep getting people from Delve to 49-U6U, then through the regional gate to 4-07MU.

Somebody asked elsewhere about what this regional gate is and why it is a thing in our move.  Didn’t I just go around it on my own little adventure last week?  So I am going to go down that rabbit hole for a bit… but I have visuals!

History:  Back when EVE Online was first a thing and was fresh and new, there were not long range gates between regions in null sec.  They were viewed as pockets, often with a single point of entry.  This made them easy to defend and there was, as noted, often one way in to a region or group of regions.  CCP realized the error of their ways and later added gates that made long jumps between null sec regions.

In the lore these are “smuggler gates” that were being used by… well, smugglers I guess… that were then discovered by the empire authorities and hooked up to the main network.  This is why they have a different gate model than the the empire gates.

The most direct, fewest gates route from our old home in 1DQ1-A and our new Tenerifis staging point at UALX-3 is through one of these gates; the one linking 49-U6U and 4-07MU.

You can see other regional gate connections in that image, but the one highlighted in green is the direct route.

That distance is further than most capitals can jump these days.  (When I bought my Archon back in 2012 it could jump 12ly, then came Phoebe and the jump nerfs now it is 6ly… though it was 5ly for quite a while before CCP relented a little.)

To go around that gate… well, the route my black ops battleship adventure took was this.

That is 8 jumps, not too far out of the way, somewhat safe… though I did land in Provi twice… because my black ops can jump 8ly.

For my carrier or force auxiliaries, limited to 6ly, that number goes up to 12 jumps.

That is mostly safe… though two stops still have me hanging out in the middle of systems in Providence as a tempting target for the locals with a cyno that shows up on everybody’s overview (the covert cyno black ops uses does not) inviting investigation and other potential trouble.

And when you get to the now very expensive super carriers and titans, limited to 5ly in range, the path goes to 15 jumps.

That actually looks a bit safer than the capital route, until you remember that supers cannot dock up in stations.  They need a Keepstar to be safe, otherwise they are in space and vulnerable.  That is bad for what are now very expensive hulls. (Super carriers hulls were 20 billion ISK at the peak of the economic boom, but are more like 50 billion ISK these days.)

The only jump capable ships who can jump the gap for a direct path are jump freighters and Rorquals, which can go 10ly.  So those fleets have been going directly to UALX all this time.

As such, the plan was to first take the alliance from 1DQ1-A to 49-U6U, an easy two jump trip.

Then, when people had piled up and were ready to go, to do a covering operation allowing people to safely take the regional gate into 4-07MU.

From there it was another four jumps to get to our new home in UALX-3.

On both sides of the regional gate the way points are systems with Keepstars, so everybody can dock up and everybody is kept as safe as possible.  For ships not capable of jump drive travel, bridging titans were to be made available.  This let a huge number of normal freighters make the trip in relative safety.

And, as it turns out, there was a side bonus to safety, which was less jumps because it turns out that when one of the biggest organizations in New Eden picks up and moves even six jumps over, the fuel needed to power all those jumps is… a lot.   So now there is a jump fuel crisis and shortage as we soak up all the isotopes we can find to keep things moving eastward.

Now is a good time to be an ice miner I bet.

Anyway, that was the general plan and route, and for the first half of last week there was continued focus on getting people from 1DQ to 49-U6U, with occasional cover ops to move groups through to 4-07MU.  There were also occasional pings about people making the regional gate jump on their own and getting blown up.  Hostiles kept camping the regional gate whenever they could because the prizes coming through were worth the effort.

Having moved pretty much everything through the regional gate during the big push the week before, I joined up with a few cover fleets to help out as I waited for the move forward to UALX.

That was easy as most people had their ships on one side of the regional gate or the other, so it was a quick join and then an hour of sitting on the gate while capitals, industrials, and other ships passed through.

Then, come Thursday, move ops started going between 4-07MU and UALX.  These were of the “do it yourself” variety where there was a cyno on each of the Keepstars along the route so you could join up, jump, then leave fleet while you waited for your timer to run down.

That was my kind of op.  The first one spun up during EU time but, as I work from home and my home computer is basically a 90 degree turn from my work computer, I was able to join up, make a jump, then leave fleet as my jump timer counted down.

Jump fatigue, also a thing introduced as part of the Phoebe updates linked above, has been toned down in the last decade.  Once you were able to essentially wreck a character with months of blue timer.  Now the red jump timer is capped at ~30 minutes while the blue fatigue timer is capped at 5 hours.  The bigger the blue timer when you jump, the longer the red timer will be after the jump.

That was fine.  I could leave things sit for a long stretch before turning around to join the fleet, undock, and jump again.  I moved my Ninazu, Apostle, and Archon the four jumps to UALX.

Then I got back in the fleet and ran the Archon back to 4-07MU to pick up more ships as the gates between those two locations were regularly camped, so that it was pretty risky to go on your own.

I also sent some of the ships down the line using the titan bridges provided, though that was a bit more hands on that just jumping your own capital.  You have to pay attention to when the bridge goes up and which direction it is going, as they were bridging people both ways.

Then I sent my other black ops battleship, a Redeemer, down the line of cynos, though messed up because I had an alt in a Purifier to conduit jump, then realized that the Redeemer didn’t have the bridging module fit.  Ooops.  Flustered, I sent my alt gating to catch up, which is where I ended up getting that screen shot above.

By Friday afternoon I had most everything moved to UALX… which was then awkward because cover fleets were still being formed back around the regional gate and getting there to join in was not always viable with the route being camped.

Then came the Saturday fireside.  We were doing one last big cover op from places besides UALX… once we satisfied honor by defending the Sov Hub in 1DQ… and then all ops thenceforth would be from UALX.  It was to be our official home going forward.

Move ops will continue for weeks, if not months.  But they won’t be as common or constant.  This past week was all about move ops.  Now we need to settle into our space and get used to what is going on there.

This week I probably as many capital jumps as I have done on almost all previous move ops since the retreat to Delve back in 2016.

All my stuff has been moved though… all my stuff from Delve at least.  Looking at my assets list I still have some stuff in Curse left over for long ago deployments, including a Ferox with seven guns fit.  The Ferox hasn’t had seven turret mounts for a while.

But that is just another side adventure for later.  My need to be on move ops has been satisfied.  All my courier contracts have been delivered… including one that had a 14 day timer that didn’t get picked up until it was down to 12 hours left.

We live in Tenerifis now… Tenerifis, Impass, Catch, and Immensea.  Those are places I’ve been, but never a place I’ve called home.  My journey around the clock face of New Eden continues.  Will I eventually live in the Dronelands?