While most of r/Eve was busy arguing about Amamake and the Imperium going home, a much bigger fight was brewing in nullsec. On the evening of 8 November, a moon timer in G-M4I8, in Pure Blind, escalated into one of the largest battles of the week.
It started with a small gang
The story comes from a pilot flying with WE FORM V0LTA, who wrote it up on r/Eve in "How 1 bhaalgorn escalated to a 500b brawl, zkill guide to jumping in your titan". His group had bashed a Metanox moon drill on Friday to see whether TEST would show up for the timer, and TEST did, with a Sleipnir fleet against V0LTA's Ishtar drones.
According to him, TEST answered the pressure on his Bhaalgorn by cynoing in four Hel/Haw-class dreadnoughts to kill it. The ship died at 20:41 EVE time (killmail, about 2.08 billion ISK in total). From there the fight snowballed: the TEST fleet commander reportedly jumped his titan in instead of using a bridge, Snuffed Out landed on grid with a large dreadnought force, and The Initiative., Goonswarm, Fraternity and Northern Coalition. all ended up on the field. This is one pilot's account, so the details of who escalated first are his version.
The numbers
We rebuilt the fight on capsuleers.app for G-M4I8 between 20:00 and 23:30 UTC. The full battle report is here.
In total there are 676 killmails, 1,413 pilots and 855 billion ISK destroyed. That is well above the "500b" in the original title.
Goonswarm side (The Initiative., Goonswarm Federation, Snuffed Out, WE FORM V0LTA, D-sync.): 929 pilots, 494 kills, 283 losses, about 465.7 billion ISK destroyed and 83.4 billion lost.
TEST side (TEST Alliance Please Ignore, Fraternity., Northern Coalition., Solyaris Chtonium and others): 484 pilots, 375 kills, 382 losses, about 389.7 billion ISK destroyed and 399.8 billion lost.
The pilot count is lopsided, but the TEST side lost almost exactly as many ships as it killed, which fits the story of a fight that started small and was decided by the capital escalation.
What r/Eve is saying
The fight landed in a week that was already tense for TEST and its neighbours. A post about FNUFF's first fleet after rejoining the Imperium claims the Imperium's lowsec deployment ended right after BIGAB and TEST structures in the area were destroyed; that is the opinion of the poster and is not confirmed. Earlier this week we covered the 1.4 trillion ISK dreadnought brawl in MTO2-2 and the Goonswarm exit from lowsec.
Fractured Skies goes live on 10 November, so these dreadnought fights are among the last big ones before the new expansion lands.
Sources
Capsuleers.app killboard: Bhaalgorn loss in G-M4I8
Battle report: capsuleers.app
