HERO And PL Clash, PL Wrecks House

As PL and HERO continue to beat each other's heads in, the war just got much more serious. As the timer came out, HERO formed up almost 500 pilots in various ships. At first planning to go with their go-to doctrine of mixed DPS, Ewar, and support fleet, HERO was quickly caught on their back foot by PL.  Who had opted to bring in a "wrecking ball" fleet of mostly Nyx, Aeons, Archons. and mixed subcap support, putting the total PL numbers at around 100 pilots.  Local peaked at over 1000 during the heaviest fighting, as more people piled in.  Pushing TiDi to a peak of 7%.


Panic quickly set in as HERO leadership scrambled to respond to the rapidly deteriorating situation.  They waffled between strategies for a few crucial minutes, debating on how to deal with the massive amount of DPS from PL.  A decision was made to reship most of the fleet into DPS ships of any usable type.  A lot of cormorants, and other newbro friendly doctrine ships were reformed into a new fleet.  HERO Ishtars and bomber wings remained to harass the PL forces on the station while the majority of the fleet set about racing Pandemic Legion to down their SBUs before the station was put into armor reinforcement.

Despite HERO reforming in an extremely fast and effective manner, they were really behind and would struggle to keep up with PL's DPS.

The DPS race was lost by HERO within a few minutes.  They then redeployed to try and extract some revenge on PL.  An ishtar fleet went to Pl staging in LGK to put a POS into reinforce, while the majority of HERO scrambled to hold the supers down with all manner of suicide tackle and bubbles.  Dozens of HERO Atrons died trying to anchor Mobile Warp Disruptors on the Pandemic Legion Supers.

PL of course responded as expected, taking on the incoming conflagration of newbros without fail.  Ultimately being able to extract their fleet with less than 1 Billion ISK in losses.  This was made worse as many attempts were made by HERO to use bombers to inflict damage on Pl while also repairing the station services destroyed by PL.  Although the damage done was overall minimal.

The loss of the timer means that HERO is now full into defensive mode.  A torrent of speculation has flooded HERO comms and communications platforms like Reddit.  With the obvious undercurrent of overreaction by line members.  The leadership did make the call to to order an overall evacuation of valuable assets from GE-.  The coalition decided to leave some of it's various doctrine fits and a  plethora of T1 ships behind to allow them to contest the next few timers in the area.  And due to the ever-present legion of spies within BNI and other HERO groups, within minutes multiple fleets had all of the gates and the station itself hell camped. 

This panic resulted in some stupid decisions by HERO, lack of preparedness and organization was apparent as FCs scrambled to organize evac fleets while dealing with the camps.  At one point, a BNI pilot lost over 9 Billion ISK in skillbooks to a PL Mach fleet. These skillbooks allegedly belonged to the HERO Dojo, as part of their newbro free skills program.

From the main fight, an estimated 13 Billion ISK was lost, almost all of it being lost by HERO.

As the losses sank in, HERO was subject to even more internal drama.

During the fighting, HERO member corp Apathy LLC. had apparently been kicked by HERO leadership.  The cause of this is as of yet unknown.  As no official HERO response has materialized.  HERO FC Travis Keikira, along with several other supercap pilots for HERO went with Apathy.  You can however read the words of HERO FC cyberking11 on the matter here.  The effect this will have remains unclear, but with the chaos of the evacuation of GE-8JV, it's only going to get worse for the embattled newbros of BNI/HERO.

Travis himself posted on the BNI subreddit with the following:

Made an alt. Somebody archive this before it gets deleted. A group of us had a proposed change that would benefit Brave and help it continue to grow. Leadership accused us of throwing a coup and purged us on spot without warning. After arguing with Lychton a few days ago we thought it would be safe to have a back up plan just in case we were to get purged (which we inevitably did).
We meant no harm to Brave and only wanted to help get Brave on track and back to its roots. Instead we were purged.
I wish the members the best of luck in the future. So many of you I talked to everyday and you will be missed. I wont be far away! See you on grid! 7o
There is of course more, and it can be found here.