The Battle For Heydieles - June 2014

Heydieles system is one of a few battleground systems in the Caldari - Gallente warzone that becomes the site of fierce fighting as both sides try to control it. Its one of the best systems in the warzone in Essence as it straddles a crossroads of four different low sec pipes [1], has all the services including cloning in its stations, has good stations for cynos, only two jumps from contiguous high sec, lots of nearby pirate corps, large system for decent plexing and combat, and lots of moons for starbases. Its lacking in number of asteroid belts in the Kronos age for sure, but as a base of operations for PvP it is ideal.

It has been our base of operations twice in the past but we've been unable to effectively hold on to it as it never ranked as high as other Gallente strongholds like Nennamailia, Nisuwa, or Vlillirier so we our coverage in all timezones suffered. However Aideron Robotics has been regrouping and building up in next door Fliet and made that system into a "southern" stronghold for the militia and other corporations and held it against Caldari Militia assaults for the past six months. We've had some attempts against Heydieles and traded the system back and forth with the Caldari, and this past week Gallente Militia command decided it was time once again to take control of this strategic system.

We started plexing the system last weekend to warm the Caldari deplexers up and start to wear them down, with constant pressure building all week to an expected push this coming weekend. But the Caldari defenders proved unable to keep up to the mounting pressure, or decided to strategically withdraw, and by Thursday night our fleets found Heyd entering the 90% contested mark so we opted to make the push and flip the system. I logged in last night for an hour and joined a fleet as an Atron tackler and while we saw a few pirate and war target fleets coming by for fights, there was no resistance to our plexing efforts. At 0322 hrs the system flipped to Gallente control.

I was quite happy to be part of 14 killmails for the hour I was there speeding around barely in control of my 6-7 km/sec Atron. Need some serious practice in that little ship.

Congrats to all the Gal Mil pilots who made this happen!

[1] - Through Abune to Black Rise, through Fliet to The Citadel, through Indregulle to Verge Vendor, and through Old Man Star to the rest of Essence.